Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

nandovillalba.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 409 posts

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

#161

Post by patwolf »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
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 think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

I used to share that sentiment about GCP until they shut down a service I was using (Cloud IoT). Now I try to avoid GCP even though I really do like a lot of their products more than AWS.

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

#162

Post by ShamelessC »

Alupis wrote: post #150
zinekeller wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are forced to sell it by their contracts with ICANN - this is not a decision that they have done voluntarily. If they can legally shut down Domains they would have done it. Sure, in any other contexts, selling Stadia customers to Microsoft or Nvidia (for example) would be a voluntary decision, however they are barred from just shutting down this one. They can even shut down Gmail or YouTube with no legal repercu…

Present evidence it was forced vs. shut-down or stop spreading a made up rumor.

I’m not seeing why you’re being down voted. Indeed, the point being made (that Google would simply aborted all their domains if it weren’t for ICANN) is strange.

Of course they’re likely to not outright get rid of them thanks to ICANN. They could have however just given them away rather than selling them off. I feel like there’s some precedent there too? Maybe from Wordpress?

In any case, they weren’t forced to sell them. They had other options including _not_ shutting down. But even if they did merely give them to another company or sell them, people would have the chance to move their domain to another provider.

Really I just don’t get what point is trying to be made. Google shut down domains in every good faith interpretation of the phrase “shut down”. All the ICANN argument does is try to conflate “shut down” with “going against ICANN rules” but no one was ever suggesting that.

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

#163

Post by makeitdouble »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
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 think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

> I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP.

Parent did point to Workspace where they also didn't get customer service.

To lay it first: GCP has excelent support if you're in the right bucket. For instance startup support programs will have dedicated engineers, sometimes on site, ready to meet and answer questions.

You'll also get that at the higher tiers (around where you start to negociate rebates in echange for usage volumes) with recurring slots with a support engineer to discuss your issues and growth inside the services.

But outside of the blessed situations, if you're just a mere paying user/business there will probably close to nothing for you.

And yes, education/corporate targeted products also get killed. Last month Jamboard's name was etched into its tombstone, along with Google Domains and so many others.

Even within GCP many products will get merged with more or less changes to adapt to. Stardriver becoming a different service with an unsearchable name comes to mind. Or the GA4 transition with the breaking changes.

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

#164

Post by poink »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
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 think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

It's not just "free" customer products. See: Pixel Pass being canceled right before it was supposed to pay off with a phone upgrade. Those people paid significant amounts of money.

I don't think GCP is going to shut down as a whole, but that doesn't mean I'd trust Google to keep any specific service I might depend on up and running.

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

#165

Post by mvdtnz »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #125
mvdtnz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Yup, hence the "Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that" and/or "random little things".

Google very clearly stated in no uncertain terms that Stadia was a real product that they were committed to for the long term. Stating, after the fact, that it was "actually" an "experiment" or a "random little thing" is not just dismissive - it's pure revisionist history.

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

#166

Post by rfrey »

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?

This is a deeply weird take IMO. Nobody "embraces risk" because they have a risk fetish. You take on risk because you believe you can be paid for it, and perhaps you are better equipped to mitigate the risk than the people paying you to take it.

There is no payoff for using a Google product versus one of the competitors, so a rational person would not accept the risk that Google pulls the plug on a product, or some contractor gets banned by Google and gets your whole account frozen, etc. There's no upside. It's not even gambling because there's no "win" possible - it's more like shooting an arrow straight up into the air and hoping it doesn't land on your head.

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

#167

Post by ctvo »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #48

Technology isn't a weakness with Google... never was. Most of their stuff is top-notch technology-wise. The problems are from a business-angle and being their customer. Meaning, even if you're a F500 company you are an insignificant gnat on the windshield of the gigantic G-machine that makes its money elsewhere. Now, I don't believe think they'd actually shut GCP down. Cloud is just too damn strategic in a post Y2k w…

> Technology isn't a weakness with Google... never was. Most of their stuff is top-notch technology-wise. The problems are from a business-angle and being their customer.

There's very little technologically impressive with GCP. It's the same products from all three vendors with few exceptions.

What's a clear weakness with GCP is Google's lack of seriousness as operators. Regions in the same data center, outages that take down a whole region for 3+ days. It's not good.

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

#168

Post by cameronh90 »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
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 think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

> conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP.

* Google Domains

* Google Cloud IoT Core

* Jamboard

Also they increased Google Maps pricing by like 10x at one point, and they increased Cloud Storage prices pretty substantially last year too. Price increases can be just as impactful as killing a product. I don't think AWS has ever increased any prices or shut down any service (though quite a few are essentially zombies - SimpleDB, OpsWorks).

Then on the consumer side, Google have killed quite a few paid products. One that bit me was they shut down Google Cloud Print which killed the ability for me to print to my (cheap) printer from my phone. Besides that, there was Nest Secure, Stadia, etc. etc.

Google's reputation problem isn't just coming from their free consumer apps.

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

#170

Post by bjord »

To me, GCP does seem easier to use, but I've recently had some instances where I had externally-hosted services (Zaps) make calls to my cloud functions there and inexplicably fail, with no logs whatsoever. While I was trying to figure out what went wrong, I found some other people online who said that their Google rep had mentioned "service instability" or something of the sort to them. Thinking that must've been the case, I went to reach out to GCP support (as nothing was mentioned on their outages page), only to find that it costs $30 / month to get help with anything other than issues with billing (and their pricing page threatens to ban you from support access entirely if you are caught buying it and canceling it after use).
Post reply on HN