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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)

#301

Post by jillesvangurp »

Ameo wrote: 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…

We used cloud run for a while and it's great. It does not allow for background threads though and that caused us to upgrade the setup eventually.

Upgrading from cloud run to use proper vms was very easy because vms can be booted with a docker container as one of the arguments. It will just go off and run that with a default OS. Running docker containers in gcloud is super easy.

And scaling that is easy too. Basically you define an instance template that defines vm details; including the docker container url. And then you update your instance group with that template and all the instances are replaced one by one. You use the instance group as a service for your load balancer and with the right health checks configured this basically gives you zero down time deployments, auto scaling, etc. If there's an issue starting the container, it just aborts the restart and continues running the old containers.

The closest thing in AWS would be ECS but it's a lot more hassle to setup.

One great feature in gcloud is "copy this screen/dialog/whatever as a gcloud command". That made scripting the above super easy. We use github actions for all this. For each service, we use 1 command to update the template and 1 command to deploy it.

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

#302

Post by sz4kerto »

latchkey wrote: post #53
Ameo wrote: 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…

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

Cloud Postgres had some issues last year though -- when some UK datacenters stopped because of HVAC failure then HA PSQL instances got stuck during failover and there was no manual way of resolving this .

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/fmEL9i2fArADKawkZA...

"Customers experienced downtime on Tuesday, 19 July 2022 starting at 09:25 US/Pacific. 36% of zonal (non-HA) instances in europe-west2-a were affected. Additionally, 31% of regional (HA) instances whose primaries were located in europe-west2-a experienced extended downtime because they were unable to successfully fail over to another zone. Finally, customers experienced some failures during the incident for backup, instance creation, update, delete, restart, export, and Database Migration Service operations. The total impact duration was 17 hours, 30 minutes."

(This hit us hard.)

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

#303

Post by raffraffraff »

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…

Those are almost (if not all) consumer facing products. I get it though - most of the complaints leveled at Google relate to their shutting down of consumer facing products. What's Google's track record for removing cloud infrastructure services? In the context of this thread, that comparison would be interesting.

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

#304

Post by heyoni »

inlined wrote: post #229
r3trohack3r wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you using a log service directly, or stdout? Stdout has no such issue. On Run (and therefore functions 2nd gen) you get a SIGINT before the container is shut down. Open Telemetry is pretty easy to configure to flush on SIGINT in the background.

My guess would be that their app isn’t running with PID 1. This can happen when services are launched from an entrypoint script in docker without using exec. If the request is fulfilled and the system sends a sigint to the container, docker will relay that to whatever is running on pid 1. If that’s their app, it’ll flush logs and quit. If their app is using another pid, docker will kill the container by force.

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

#306

Post by _cenw »

unethical_ban wrote: post #91
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…

I used to work in cloud security, mostly AWS but got to hear about experiences with GCP. AWS IAM is much better than GCP, or was 3 years ago. If you are in an industry where fine-tuned RBAC per service is a thing you want, it's better to go AWS, all things equal. Also, GCP reps suck compared to AWS in terms of responsiveness and general give-a-shits. Hearsay.

Yeah, no. GCP actually allows you to give developers full permissions on their project. This sort of separation doesn't exist on AWS, at least not without making it very hard to impossible to share resources. So on AWS, you either have a really good platform team that handles permissions / terraform review / all infra setup (unlikely), a bad or understaffed team doing the same so everyone waits a week or two on specific things being set up (and everyone will hate them for killing their velocity), or you let everyone run wild with way too many permissions so they can actually use the console, hoping they'll stick to best practices (they wouldn't). At least developers doing unsafe things is contained in GCP.

But all that aside, AWS is better. It's much more predictable which things will work together from the documentation, the support is better and the IAM is better on paper, if you actually have that unicorn platform/infrastructure team.

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

#307

Post by n_e »

latchkey wrote: post #53
Ameo wrote: 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…

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

> Cloud SQL Postgres

Although it works and is solid, I wouldn’t say it’s fantastic. My impression is that Google makes limited investment in it to steer customers towards their own services such as Cloud Spanner.

- Major versions are 6 months late - Small instances are horribly slow - Integration with other services is poor (e.g. the Cloud Run integration doesn’t work with a database private IP, so you have to fallback to configuring a VPC and connecting the standard way) - IAM authentication, although great when it works, is complicated and poorly documented - The UI has very few features, for example it isn’t possible to query the database from it - Although I’ve never seen any provider have it, automatic upgrades between major versions would have been nice.

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

#308

Post by rendaw »

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.

Rinse and repeat - someone complains about cloud provider, a cloud provider person shows up and makes a "we want to hear more about your problems" statement, people reply, they do nothing. How many times has this happened? I'm more disgusted by the farce than by the lack of action.

Don't you have feedback buttons on the docs? What happens to the feedback from those? Please prove you consider feedback before asking people for more of it.

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

#309

Post by unethical_ban »

_cenw wrote: post #306
unethical_ban wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in cloud security, mostly AWS but got to hear about experiences with GCP. AWS IAM is much better than GCP, or was 3 years ago. If you are in an industry where fine-tuned RBAC per service is a thing you want, it's better to go AWS, all things equal. Also, GCP reps suck compared to AWS in terms of responsiveness and general give-a-shits. Hearsay.

Yeah, no. GCP actually allows you to give developers full permissions on their project. This sort of separation doesn't exist on AWS, at least not without making it very hard to impossible to share resources. So on AWS, you either have a really good platform team that handles permissions / terraform review / all infra setup (unlikely), a bad or understaffed team doing the same so everyone waits a week or two on speci…

Well, I was on a unicorn team, then. Guardrails on all AWS resources, developers deployed via gitlab/terraform to AWS accounts mapped to departments.

You can share resources across AWS accounts. I don't know for easy that is on gcp, but it didn't seem crazy on Amazon.

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

#310

Post by QasimK »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #301
Ameo wrote: 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…

We used cloud run for a while and it's great. It does not allow for background threads though and that caused us to upgrade the setup eventually. Upgrading from cloud run to use proper vms was very easy because vms can be booted with a docker container as one of the arguments. It will just go off and run that with a default OS. Running docker containers in gcloud is super easy. And scaling that is easy too. Basically…

I’ve used Cloud Run and it does allow for background threads.
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