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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)

#101

Post by ajross »

nologic01 wrote: post #64

would GCP (or AWS for that matter) survive on their own? What does the relation with the parent company provide and what does it demand in return? From a business model perspective both these two entities are an aberration in how far they are from their corporate umbrella. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc are more natural players in this domain but DigitalOcean shows you don't need to be bigtech to carve a niche.

GCP, AWS and Azure are all, for sure, 100%, big revenue centers for their corporate overlords. Cloud is where you go to make money, not lose it. It's the "enterprise" of the modern world. The only problem with it from a business perspective is that it's increasingly commoditized and so everyone can only compete on price these days. So margins will trend to zero over the decades, but these will always be profitable.

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

#102

Post by lima »

preommr wrote: post #82

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers. Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million. Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use q…

I have talked to Google representatives when I had an issue with my personal gmail.com account through Google One. It was fine and they fixed it.

Likewise, as a GCP customer, I've always had a real account rep and support I could talk to.

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

#103

Post by Shakahs »

GCP has some nice things but AWS is simply more reliable.

The GCP outage [1] in April is a great example. A fire in europe-west9-a "zone" took down the entire europe-west9 "region" (because this entire "region" is actually housed in a single datacenter), which then caused a global GCP console/API outage because GCP's single global control plane couldn't reach europe-west9.

The fact that a zonal issue escalated to a regional and then global outage shows that GCP is not serious about limiting blast radius and all their talk of independent regional/zonal infrastructure is marketing fluff.

In comparison, AWS AZs can be up to 60 miles apart, share no physical infrastructure, and every region hosts its own API/console/control plane.

Also, Nitro. AWS has essentially eliminated the performance overhead of virtualization with Nitro, and years later GCP still has no equivalent so GCP customers still have to pay for that overhead.

1: https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/dS9ps52MUnxQfyDGPf...

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

#104

Post by ajross »

DoctorOW wrote: post #95
ajross wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No interest on engaging on the core issues of trust, except to say my standard bit: HN is a site predicated on the whole idea of embracing risk . Except with this one particular vendor who everyone loves to distrust. Maybe... it's not about risk at all?

Generally the phrase is "High risk, high reward." This would be considered a relatively low reward.

Nonetheless the chances of a median HN poster's employer being shived by a rogue Angel or dying to a founder feud are vastly (like, vastly vastly) higher than having Google drop one of their dependencies. And I guess I'd expect the discourse to reflect that. But instead it's the boring tech giant (yes, also my employer, though I work nowhere near cloud) who everyone seems to think is the existential threat? Like I said, I don't think this is about risk at all.

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

#105

Post by pyrophane »

We use GCP at my current company and I've used AWS a lot in the past.

Managing IAM users and roles on GCP is much more pleasant than AWS, and if you happen to use Google Workspace for you org, it approaches (as an infra engineer) the sublime.

GCP projects are a really intuitive way to isolate resources that you don't want to be able to talk to each other by default.

GKE has been very reliable.

BigQuery got expensive faster than I was expecting, but it works and integrates well with GCP IAM and makes managing access to datasets easy.

On the less positive side, support is lackluster, and GA doesn't necessarily mean what you want it to mean.

Edit: Almost forgot! Again, if you use Google Workspace, then IAP is fantastic.

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

#106

Post by inopinatus »

ajross wrote: post #90
preommr wrote: post #82

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers. Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million. Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use q…

No interest on engaging on the core issues of trust, except to say my standard bit: HN is a site predicated on the whole idea of embracing risk . Except with this one particular vendor who everyone loves to distrust. Maybe... it's not about risk at all?

There’s a stark difference between risk that is predicated on your own wits and risk that is mediated entirely through a capricious and aloof supplier with a bit of a reputation for the rug-pull.

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

#107

Post by gkbrk »

seanthemon wrote: post #55
Eridrus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what odds are you willing to make a bet on this? Do you think there's a 20% chance it's gone in 5 years? Do you think it's 5%? Do you think it's 30%? People keep saying things will be shut down and I think they should put their money where their mouth is.

What an oddly aggressive comment - perhaps the problem isn't prediction but extrapolation of past experiences with Google, would you not agree that it gives you a sliver of worry that they may cut the service off? You seem very intense about Google's offering, maybe you feel attacked by the points made in the thread, but the way you're approaching this discussion is very strange.

Eridrus used to work at Google. Not sure if it would be good to disclose before aggressively asking people to bet on the lifespan of Google products, I certainly would err on the side of disclosing.

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

#108

Post by bastardoperator »

preommr wrote: post #82

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers. Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million. Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use q…

I concur. Google doesn't seem to believe in a tangible customer service methodology at all. They go out of their way to remove human interaction at seemingly every level. I don't know if it's a legal strategy or what, but it gives me bad vibes too.

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

#109

Post by fhoffa »

latchkey wrote: post #57
skadamat wrote: post #13

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…

> Will GCP be around in 5 years? I honestly am not sure. AppEngine is going on, checks notes, 15 years now.

AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago.

Since you're checking notes, please check out all the AE service deprecation notes.

Disclosure: I worked for Google for ~10 years, and I fought internally many of those deprecation decisions. I did not succeed.

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

#110

Post by mvdtnz »

Alupis wrote: post #96
mvdtnz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Microsoft and nVidia (and I think Sony? not sure) are continuing to run their cloud gaming services as we speak.

The market is tiny (relatively) for all of these players. Motley Fool estimates the entire cloud gaming industry is ~$2.5B in total revenue for 2023. Many of the current services are likely running at a loss, hoping for the hype-train to get people into it. The reality is, most people wanting to play AAA titles either have a console, or a gaming computer already The cross-section of people with a 10 year old macbook,…

I'm sorry what does any of this have to do with Google's lies with regards to their commitment to cloud gaming? All gaming platforms run at a loss in their early days.

> The cross-section of people with a 10 year old macbook, that want to play the latest AAA title, have expensive high-bandwidth internet, and are willing to pay ~$30+ a month is just not that large.

This is frankly an idiotic summary of what you believe to be the cloud gaming addressable market.

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