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I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

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Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#71
All of the smack talk about AWS rings true in my experience. The documentation is terrible and incomplete.

That said… there's one MASSIVE reason I trust AWS over GCP.

Google has a knack for killing products/services. Even when they seem to be popular. You don't know if a service will exist next week. But you took the time to invest in the ecosystem and get to know the offering…

But Google does what Google does, and off to the pile it goes.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud Functions, Cloud Tasks and Cloud SQL Postgres are fantastic too. Very low cost that scales with you and essentially zero lockin.

Has Cloud Functions solved their logging issues yet? Last I checked, the lifetime of the function was bound to the lifetime of the request. So you have to fully flush your logs to their log ingress service before you respond to a request, otherwise GCP will suspend the function and eat your logs. Originally, this resulted in me having - to my surprise - very few logs coming from my functions. Once I discovered what w…

I built a service with a few functions (golang based) that ran just fine for over a year with no log flushing issues.

I did actually have an issue where it was logging two blank lines, which was annoying. It definitely wasn't coming from my code and it got fixed at one point, then reappeared later on. I gave up trying to resolve it.

That said, their logging system is fantastic. I found it really easy to deal with.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's support is the worst. 5 minutes later, the "technical writing manager on GCP", makes a helpful comment on this thread.

Well, AIUI "reach the front page of HN" was always the only cited way of getting any help with a Google problem, so in that way this is a derivative of that scenario

Also I never see this mentioned but just for anyone who isn’t clear…

Google do actually offer great support, I pay like $30 a month for it and I can speak with real engineers who give super detailed answers.

It’s just not free. But the paid offering is great in my experience.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#75
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a fairly simple setup AWS automates a lot of things. If I just want an EC2 instance and a database, the VPC already exists and there is now even a button on an RDS that says something like "connect to ec2" which sets up the security groups on both for you. However the argument against using GCP has already been stated in this thread multiple times. - Will it exist in 3-5 years. Google has a reputation for a reaso…

Nailed it. When we've had problems with AWS, I could drop our rep an email and be on a conference call with the engineers who run the service a day later. That not for a giant account, either. They'd also periodically reach out to offer free consulting services that would cut our monthly bill. They were upfront about the motivation: they wanted us to integrate more of their services. The upside for us was that we cou…

Interesting.

A previous client was all-in on GCP. They were not a huge operation and in fact were slowly migrating on-prem stuff to it. GCP support was pretty good. The account manager was always on point and whenever we needed we could have an actual engineer or two on a call with us to troubleshoot stuff and give us advice and general support.

Of course, for less urgent and less severe issues it would generally be done over the course of a couple days to a week in support ticket messages / email but that was perfectly fine.

I've been back to using AWS for a little while now and I miss how much simpler it is to set up things in GCP. Even IAM which I remember bitching about so much during those days, now I just miss how much simpler it was and I didn't realise.

Also if you need Kubernetes, no other offering compares to GKE.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#76
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's support is the worst. 5 minutes later, the "technical writing manager on GCP", makes a helpful comment on this thread.

Well, AIUI "reach the front page of HN" was always the only cited way of getting any help with a Google problem, so in that way this is a derivative of that scenario

Yea, that's not true at all of GCP... you're just propagating a myth.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#77
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Google Cloud Run is my go-to for all my side projects, and AWS doesn't have anything equivalent. Never saw any reason to use AWS for that reason as Google has everything else I'd need. And if I just want a cheap VPS, would prefer to use something cheaper like Linode or Digital Ocean.

In my experience of using both, AWS AppRunner is as good as Cloud Run except you can’t scale AppRunner down to 0 instances so it has an ongoing cost.

It basically doesn't have the main thing that makes Cloud Run so valuable.

Speaking more generally, it seems AWS is allergic to creating products that scale to zero nowadays.

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#78

My biggest challenge with GCP is that I'm still not convinced Google cares that much about this division. They acquired Looker, fired the customer service staff, and then set it out to crumble. Looker used to be LOVED by its customers but now they were forced to make their semantic layer work with Tableau. Also, I'm still not convinced Google cares about divisions that aren't linked to advertising. Google Search, Gma…

I used to work in GCP. They are definitely committed to it. Search, Android, Google Cloud, YouTube - definitely committed. It's the random little things they build too many of and hence close down. They never really understood branding. Slapping Google on everything doesn't help, it hurts. Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that.

> They are definitely committed to it.

Google on Stadia:

October 2019 - "It is a long term view that Google is taking"

November 2020 - "roadmap of about 400 games in development right now from 200 developers [...] 2023 is really kind of where we’re aiming our sights"

February 2021 - "building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business [...] remain committed to Stadia as a platform"

September 2021 - "gaming is an incredibly important vertical at Google"

November 2021 - "eager to continue working on bringing the best games and new features to our community of players so that we can help build a bright future for cloud gaming"

February 2022 - "we are still focused on bringing great games to Stadia in 2022 [...] more feature goodness coming to Stadia too - stuff we can’t talk about just yet"

September 2022 - "You might have seen one last game arrive on Stadia today. It's a humble :heart: thanks :heart: for playing from our team."

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/30/23378757/google-stadia-co...

Bonus comment from Google regarding Inbox:

"With respect to the upcoming Gmail announcement, there are no changes to Inbox by Gmail. It remains a great product for users with specific workflows and one in which we test innovative features for email."

Re: I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

#79
post #22

My two cents, GCP has a few excellent gems which are better than pretty much any competing cloud offering: - Cloud Run. Best way to deploy containers hands down. All of the benefits of a serverless/containerized workload with all the ease of a traditional VPS deployment. Extremely cheap (pay $0 for side projects with little traffic). - BigQuery. Very easy to use with immense power without having to deal with the deta…

bigquery is a joy to use! I really don't hate the editor in the browser either.
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