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

251–260 of 409 posts

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

#251

Post by nknealk »

div_zero wrote: post #36
craigmcnamara wrote: post #6

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.

Can you please update the terraform docs for google batch? In [1] it’s really difficult to know what everything in the json configuration is under the base64encode() call. What levers can I pull? How do I run something more complex than hello world? Do I need my CICD to upload scripts to GCS and have the instance download them at runtime and hardcode that path into the batch script?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/batch/docs/create-run-job-using-ter...

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

#252

Post by ehPReth »

slimsag wrote: post #197
cameronh90 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Didn't they also shut down GSuite Hangouts for a while, before eventually bringing it back?

I don't think so - I think they were hard moved to "Google Hangouts Chat" which is now just "Google Chat"

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

#253

Post by badrequest »

slrainka wrote: post #225
pid-1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

App Runner is an abstraction on top of FarGate designed to compete with Cloud Run, which is why it doesn’t scale down to zero. I too haven’t found anything that beats the simplicity of a GCP deployment sigh..

If it doesn't scale down to zero, then it doesn't compete with Cloud Run.

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

#254

Post by ehPReth »

silverlyra wrote: post #248
mythz wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting rid of https://domains.google is a good indication that nothing is off-limits and everything is a bean counter report away from being abandoned. What's worse is that their loss-leading free products kill competing products before they finally abandon it themselves, leaving the space much worse than if they had ever entered it. No chance I'll ever vender lock myself to GCP.

This really resonates with me – yeah, the supposed API-driven engineering company, makes it no longer possible to automatically provision domain names for its "valuable" cloud computing customers? What possible end could that serve? I am baffled by the idea that succeeding via open access to their infrastructure is not a serious long-term goal for Google. For a company who ostensibly is existentially interested in de…

yeah, I'm also very very confused why they sold off Google Domains. I'd love to have flies on the walls for that :/

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

#255

Post by badrequest »

nerdjon wrote: post #25
s-xyz wrote: post #14

I share the same experience and opinion. I cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. GCP has so far covered 99% of my use cases, and I can testify that I have a lot of advanced cases linked to data management, information security, networking and more. I am open and do not judge AWS, and perhaps its also a matter of…

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…

I've been watching folks here on HN speculate that Google will kill GCP "any minute now" for at least the last 4 years, so ya'll can keep holding your breath, I will be having fun deploying things for 1/10th the price of AWS.

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

#256

Post by zinekeller »

ShamelessC wrote: post #162
Alupis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In any case, they weren’t forced to sell them. They had other options including _not_ shutting down.

Fine, sure, but this is a cop-out. Clearly they really want to clear the thing: if it was to be a GCP-only option with no more consumer-focused Domains, they have temporarily set a transition period with no renewals and new domains and then bow out of consumer space, but even the enterprise version is being shu- sorry, I'll be using Google's term here, deprecated (https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/deprecations/feature-d...). The Squarespace buyout is irrelevant here because unlike GCP Domains there are no automation features in the Squarespace's system (and have no plans to implement one), so you are required to migrate to another provider like DNSimple or AWS. This is a clear sign that they really want to dispose of it as soon as feasible.

> 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.

It's a reasonable assumption when you're talking about their first time in closing down things, but there is a clear trend, even solely in the enterprise space. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020254) At this point, it is clear that Google does shut down things when they feel it.

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

#257

Post by poink »

amf12 wrote: post #178
poink wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> See: Pixel Pass being canceled right before it was supposed to pay off with a phone upgrade Did you first try to understand what Pixel Pass was? No, it wasn't supposed to "pay off" with a phone upgrade. To get a new phone, users would have had to renew their Pixel Pass subscription. It wasn't - pay monthly for 2 years and get 2 phones: one at the start and end of the 2 years.

The basic thrust of your argument is equivalent to "Google shut down a product we were paying for at the end of a normal billing cycle, so how could you be mad?" Fair enough, but acknowledging Google will honor basic contractual requirements before shutting a service down doesn't really mitigate the argument that "Google might unceremoniously kill a paid product with minimal warning." Props to Google for not committing actual fraud, for whatever that's worth.

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

#258

Post by fbdab103 »

tjpnz wrote: post #210
crazygringo wrote: post #115

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…

>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.

I remember hearing a story about how one engineer had worked for something nefarious (spam? gambling? straight-up malware?) and got hired by a different company. Eventually something triggered on that engineer's account that caused Google to spread a blacklist to everyone's account at the new company.

Potentially apocryphal, but it rings true enough that you have no idea what might anger the Google automation.

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

#259

Post by ahepp »

jsnell wrote: post #147
imwillofficial wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t my experience. Amazon supports most stuff roughly forever.

Sure, sure. I totally get where you're coming from. By the way, how's the Fire Phone holding up for you these days? I assume it's still working well and powerful enough to do your web searches on a9.com, and read sites like the Amapedia and DPReviews. Do you happen to know how many of the Alexa.com top500 sites it can browse, or do you need to ask on Amazon Askville? But I know it won't be able to play Amazon's hit g…

I bet if you combine every single one of those products, they have less users than stadia

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

#260

Post by timmytokyo »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #180
mvdtnz wrote: 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.

What folks at google think and what they say publicly aren't the same thing. It's naive to think otherwise. Look to what actually makes sense for them to do and you'll have your answer. Internal folks knew google would walk away in a few years if it didn't work. Stadia was largely a group of people out of the failed and left behind Daydream (VR) project.

So we as customers need to read tea leaves in order to figure out which services Google considers "real" and which are "experiments"?

No thanks.

Post reply on HN