Live data from Hacker News

I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

nandovillalba.medium.com

201–210 of 409 posts

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

#201
post #16
post #7

I don't buy the article's argument around the "Fear that GCP may be abandoned by Google". Yes, it is highly unlikely that Google will wake-up one day and announce a deprecation day for GCP, like they did with dozens of other products. What is not unlikely though is that they under-invest in it compared to AWS, and being a 2nd or 3rd player, they would fall behind in products and/or reliability, unable to compete on p…

Not going to happen; they kill consumer- not enterprise products. I searched https://killedbygoogle.com/ for "Google Cloud" and the only dead enterprise products that stood out were Google Cloud Messaging and Google Cloud Prediction API. But they replaced those with Firebase Cloud Messaging and the AI Platform Prediction API.

And Enterprise Hangouts:

> Workspace customers (the paid business version of Google apps) finally had Hangouts removed in March 2022

And Google Domains..

And Google Cloud IoT Core..

And Google Go Links..

And Google Maps Coordinate..

...

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

#202
post #85
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…

It's not entirely a fair take, since nobody figured out how to make cloud gaming feasible. They have all given up, or are in the process of giving up.

Didn't Microsoft just spend a year in court with their top VPs & CEO fighting against the UK & US governments over cloud gaming so that they could buy Activision for roughly $70 billion?

I believe they had to make concessions with the UK to somewhat outsource the cloud gaming aspect of the deal so that it could go through. This was something they didn't seem to want to do but also forced them to extend their merger & pay additional dividends to shareholders of Activision.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a fortune 100 company. Years ago we looked at all the cloud providers trying to determine who to go with. Google was thrown out on the first day for this very reason. They simply cannot be trusted not to kill their products at the drop of a hat.

That speaks volumes about the quality of decision-making at your fortune 100 company, and about their ability to do due diligence.

What do you mean specifically?

It seems like all the OP is saying is that the company evaluated alternatives (Azure & AWS) whose cloud products are "first class" citizens of the business whereas with Google the first class product is search, advertising, Android (a couple other things but you get the idea).

It doesn't seem too far out of left field that Google would flounder with all it's cloud products being phased out in favor of some other new product they've made or acquired.

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

#204
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah... Google employees just _do_ that sort of shitty redirection, and it's obnoxious as fuck. Maybe it works in a "We're too polite to disrupt whatever political game you're playing in the hopes that you'll reciprocate when we splash obvious bullshit when we play ours." snakepit that seems to be most of Google, but out here, we're unchained by that political nonsense. Bonus chatter: We get that you'd like die for y…

There is a reason contracts, contract law and the court system all exist.

Most people and companies don't do things which aren't in their interest after stating they will. It isn't a Google thing.

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

#205
A lot of people (understandably) complain about longevity of various Google products. One thing that's nice about their overall cloud strategy is their focus on interoperability.

As the incumbents, AWS and Azure strive for lock-in. As the relative upstart, GCP aims to grease the wheels of switching to their platform. To that end, they've pioneered technologies like Kubernetes and the golang CDK to enable people implement their services in a vendor-agnostic way so they can easily switch around. GCP encourages that, which is nice, especially in the worst cases.

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

#206

I find the GCP documentation to be lacking compared to AWS. Specifically while using GCP with Terraform I hit more frustrating nonsense error messages with little to no google hits or undocumented behavior around IAM config compared to my experience doing similar things on AWS.

I'm a technical writing manager on GCP, and we are actively working on improving Terraform documentation. Thank you for bringing up two significant problems with using TF on GCP. If you are willing (and of course have the time), we would love to hear other issues you - or anyone else who reads this thread - are having with TF documentation on GCP as we try and make things better.

I am about to go through this so happy to give feedback

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

#207
Perhaps from a technology standpoint (debateable).

But from the perspective of a CEO, we want

1. Talent hiring should be easy, so we can plan growth

2. There should be a good self service support for developers

3. Need good sales support in architecture and tech selection (when needed)

4. Need to be able to get through to support engineer in 5 mins or less (we use aws premium support)

5. Need single vendor (as much as possible).

We consume a lot if what aws has to offer - we use their workspaces, mac cloud, device farm, code commit etc

We did a proper shoot out. While aws has its idiosyncrasies- it’s light years ahead of Google and Microsoft

Ps. We use Gsuite (for the last decade) - teaching a live human used to a challenge - now it’s a major pain.

If we find a better alternative to Gmail, Gdocs (etc). I’d switch in a heartbeat.

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

#208

See Google/Alphabet's latest quarterly earnings. There's a decent chance that in a few years GCP will be no more. I had an argument with one of the biggest investors in Google a few years ago, in which I was predicting exactly this scenario. He didn't believe me. Perhaps I was right after all. GCP lost a ton of money since its inception. Its leadership is so far away from being able to run this business properly, tha…

While I appreciate you've disclosed your affiliations in your profile, can you claim complete objectivity on this topic?

Would your stake in VMware and AWS not be {threatened,weakened}, perhaps severely, should Google succeed in Cloud?

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 essent…

AWS just KILLED EC2!!! Well, EC2-classic. And they did so with two years of notice and support to transition all customers. Really a class act of migration. I'm not sure Google won't just send out an email on a Friday before a long weekend and then kill the servers the following Monday.

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/09/farewell-ec2-cl...

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

#210
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…

>unless you really are being abusive

That doesn't put my mind at ease. Under who's definition? Do I even get told what I did wrong? You try to draw a distinction between the free and paid products but that doesn't address the perception people have of the company in general. If I was a small startup I wouldn't want to risk it.

Post reply on HN