I think GCP is better than AWS (2020) • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by nathants » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 8:52 AM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #330

nathants wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

consider lambdas for managing ec2 spot instances, and other low volume tasks.

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

#332

Post by bng5 » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 8:53 AM UTC

negus wrote: post #322

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #227

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.

I have very little experience with GCP as not much of an infra person. However, for me the most annoying bit is how the profiler is using its welcome screen as a loading indicator as well as 'there is no data' page. Makes it very hard to browse data.

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

#333

Post by deadmutex » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 8:56 AM UTC

Shakahs wrote: post #103

GCP has some nice things but AWS is simply more reliable. The GCP outage [1] in April is a great example. A fire in europe-west9-a "zone" took down the entire europe-west9 "region" (because this entire "region" is actually housed in a single datacenter), which then caused a global GCP console/API outage because GCP's single global control plane couldn't reach europe-west9. The fact that a zonal issue escalated to a r…

> Nitro. AWS has essentially eliminated the performance overhead of virtualization with Nitro, and years later GCP still has no equivalent

FYI, per https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/introducing-c...

The Compute Engine C3 machine series, now available in Private Preview, is the first VM in the public cloud with the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and with Google’s custom Intel IPU. C3 machine instances use offload hardware for more predictable and efficient compute, high-performance storage, and a programmable packet processing capability for low latency and accelerated, secure networking

Disclosure: I work for GCP

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

#334

Post by jiggawatts » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:00 AM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #269

solatic wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why are we to believe statements that GCP is here to stay? They are, after all, statements to customers who need to hear it to make the purchase. But who knows how they actually think? The whole reason why Google cannot be trusted here is precisely because of their tendency to be inauthentic in their public statements.

I wouldn't believe anything they say. Just look at the numbers. They aren't going to walk away from a business doing about $35 billion per year run rate, growing at 20%+. It isn't in their interest to do so.

Unless competition picks up and they have to cut prices and stop being profitable.

And then they'll turn it off as casually as you or I might turn off a garden tap.

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

#335

Post by flowingfocus » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:22 AM UTC

TNWin wrote: post #114

We unfortunately have three vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure) at my company because of acquisitions and the cost involved to consolidate. I am part of the central team that manages the provisioning users and accounts and billing. AWS is miles ahead of how we can express what we want in accounting. AWS reps are much much more knowledgeable and a pleasure to work with when it comes to billing.

Shameless plug: At the company I work for (meshcloud) we have developed a freely available model that describes the capabilities your central team is building up: https://cloudfoundation.org/maturity-model/

Disclaimer: meshcloud sells a product for teams in that space

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

#336

Post by ramraj07 » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:30 AM UTC

pid-1 wrote: post #77

siquick wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience of using both, AWS AppRunner is as good as Cloud Run except you can’t scale AppRunner down to 0 instances so it has an ongoing cost.

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.

Scaling down to zero appeals to amateur side project folks - no enterprise customer probably cares about that marginal expense here..

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

#337

Post by leptons » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:32 AM UTC

pid-1 wrote: post #77

siquick wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience of using both, AWS AppRunner is as good as Cloud Run except you can’t scale AppRunner down to 0 instances so it has an ongoing cost.

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.

I've paid $0.00 for my many AWS Lambda functions, and will always pay $0 so long as I keep it under 1 million executions per month (and AWS keeps this free tier going). I also use SimpleDB, SES, and other services that also cost $0.00/mo. The only thing I pay for is S3, which totals about $0.30 per month, for a few gigs of data. And I'm very happy with AWS, It's been costing me less than $6 per year to build out and run a complex web app, albeit with no users. But still, AWS absolutely does scale down to zero very nicely.

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

#338

Post by ramraj07 » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:32 AM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #174

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…

BigQuery is very pleasant. It just works serverlessly. Apparently some of the key people behind BQ are now working on MotherDuck, which is a cloud data warehouse version of DuckDB.

I’ll have to try this just for the name!

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

#339

Post by Jgrubb » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:49 AM UTC

TNWin wrote: post #114

We unfortunately have three vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure) at my company because of acquisitions and the cost involved to consolidate. I am part of the central team that manages the provisioning users and accounts and billing. AWS is miles ahead of how we can express what we want in accounting. AWS reps are much much more knowledgeable and a pleasure to work with when it comes to billing.

Could you elaborate on the accounting part? I'm deeply involved with billing on all three and while AWS seems to have all the data you're looking for in the CUR, it can be a multi-quarter job to build up the expertise to understand that fact.

GCP has different notions, like multiple credits applying to any given charge but again once you build up the expertise you can work with it. Azure seems by far the simplest to deal with and require the least wrangling.

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

#340

Post by h1fra » Thu, Oct 26, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

I personally enjoy GCP much more because it's easier. You can do almost everything from the UI and products are named the way you expect them to be named (except for a few exceptions).

When you are doing devops on the side not as your main job, it's really a game changer compared to the cryptic AWS UI. The only part lacking imo is the log/monitoring which is definitely subpar, just logging proper json is a mess.