Live data from Hacker News

I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

nandovillalba.medium.com

321–330 of 409 posts

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

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 months notice is too short for big non-tech enterprises. They plan their infrastructure needs in 5-year terms. Changing to a new environment takes re-educating a lot of people, going through a lot of legal and audit meetings, finding enough manpower to do the transfer, putting things on hold purely for the migration,... 12 months is the time for the contracts to settle between these enterprises and cloud-vendors.

If your company is that big and unwieldy that a tiny chance of needing to do a migration in 12 months is unacceptable, you can stick to the key services which offer 36 months of notice. For all I know at that point you can negotiate your own guarantee if you're so big. If you work at a company that can't do a cloud infra migration in 36 months, I don't have any good advice for you, but I doubt most commenters on here…

This isn't a tiny change, if GCloud says "we quit in a year". That is a huge change. Applications using GCloud SDK for services suddenly need to be reworked and redrawn. That alone is a huge change for non-tech companies.

Some companies even need to check with the laws they reside in if the new cloud vendor can even be used.

Just work in any financial, medical, pharmaceutical, government-related... company and you'll understand that a year is nothing for these companies.

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

#322

I use both. GCP sucks, AWS rocks. GCP is theoretically superior because it has more features and integrations built in. But in practice it's a big mess, and if you want to do anything the "not GCP way", you're better off just not using it at all. People talk about GCP "getting X right", which might be true, except to actually use the thing that they "got right" you have to use everything else they have, and good luck…

Can you be more specific? I experience no problems navigating the GCP Console UI. Though I mostly do not do it -- I have stuctured bookmarklets for everything I use and it works really great. And also I use gcloud and Terraform a lot.

GCP support also provides the answers I need.

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

#323

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…

I miss the glory days a few years ago when getting someone on the phone across your org as $400. From what I've read the Oracle boys flooded in and "sorted" that "problem"...

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

#324
post #316

We still use AWS but it's been a couple years since I've really needed to dig into it because we have very competent people who'se job that is now. My memories of having to find the right form, paste the right ID of the right server/bucket/lambda into are pretty traumatic. A TON of guesswork. Lot of what felt like duct taping things together. If you don't have a full mental model of how everything works, they're cert…

Most of that stuff is far better managed with Terraform or similar as you have a record of which values go where that's mostly pretty easy to consume later. Using the console for anything beyond trivial admin is definitely an anti-pattern given how complicated the major cloud platforms are.

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

#325

GCP will shutdown your production servers and take one whole week to get it back. All for missing out on a KYC form. Our story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917 Forget about the initial shutdown, how can you take 1 whole week to resolve something critical like this. Even if Google is offering me $1mil cloud credits today I wouldn't risk my business with them anymore.

Confirm. I like GCP and I'm going to use it for the new projects as well, but the situation with their antifraud checks is really troublesome

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Google Cloud Run is my go-to for all my side projects, and AWS doesn't have anything equivalent. Never saw any reason to use AWS for that reason as Google has everything else I'd need. And if I just want a cheap VPS, would prefer to use something cheaper like Linode or Digital Ocean.

Is google so cheap? I am a small fish in the big sea but I use this for my personal projects: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

GCP and AWS are cheap for small and low traffics applications. But once your usage passes a certain point, you'll quickly find out they're more expensive than other vendors. The problem is, once you reached that point, you're probably already locked yourself in by using their specific offerings not found anywhere else. Limiting yourself to plain vps/containers/k8s might help preventing lock in.

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

#327
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprise surprise, paid GCP customers get the same.

Not in my experience, unfortunately. The reps we got with GCP could give us advice, but no real powers to push stuff or solve problems, it felt more like L1 support. As described bellow, maybe it depends on a company size and/or a country.

our account manager definitely opened doors for us and got us in touch with experts that could solve our issues.

150 sized company in a small EU country. We have a silver enterprise contract.

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

#328

One fundamental difference between GCP and AWS is that AWS puts zones in different buildings in the same, well, "region," whereas GCP just isolated them in the same building. Not the end of the world, but you shouldn't assume that by deploying things regionally with GCP you will be protected against, idk, a fire or water issue that has building-wide impact.

Who told you that GCP AZs typically coexist in the same building? Can you provide the source of this information?

If you open for example one site of us-central1 region ( 41.17425599375981, -95.80193009453644 ) you will see that just this one site has several buildings.

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Imagine top level execs at Ford discussing, but eventually dismissing--the idea of leaving the automobile market entirely. Their hearts really aren't in it as much as with AWS.

Ford, ironically, is an example of a company that has recently exited a huge business segment - they no longer make sedans. They now exclusively make SUVs and trucks. It is largely thought of as a pretty good move on their part. Google probably should spin off GCP rather than killing it, but it's not a terrible idea to divest from a failing arm of a business. Google (like Intel) just does it too early.

This is a US/NA focused comment. Ford makes sedans in EU and other markets. They also make sedans for the US market in China and other manufacturing locations.

So it's true that Ford US manufacturing have exited sedan production, Ford itself continues to build and sell sedans.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I defer to your expertise, esp when it comes to actually using these different services at scale, but as someone who used to deploy only to Heroku and wanted to learn real cloud deployment, AWS was pretty unapproachable. I almost laughed out loud at how unnecessarily arcane and difficult they made things when all I wanted to do was set up a simple Python app on EC2. Google Cloud felt easier and intuitive to get start…

too much maybe? yelling at clouds just feels so good sometimes. apologies. i do actually wish we could have nice things. this is how aws became easy and fun for me[1]. a similar interface could exist for any provider. heroku is right about picking the good parts and exposing only that as an interface. 1. https://github.com/nathants/libaws

Thats sounds sweet. I suppose its just for when you really love lambdas (I don't)?
Post reply on HN