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Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

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Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#101

Post by markmark »

marcinzm wrote: post #62
foxylad wrote: post #41

Can HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame "Google cancels all the stuff" posts? Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever? If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now,…

>We've used Appengine for 12 years now, and every time they've decided to deprecate services, there's always plenty of notice, a superior replacement, and usually lower costs. That doesn't remove the cost and time of updating your code and migrating.

100% this. Deprecating things your customers use always sucks for your customers. No matter what. It doesn't matter how long the notice is. It doesn't matter how good the replacement is. You have made work for your customers that they wouldn't otherwise need to do.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#102

Post by latch »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #63
latch wrote: post #20

I'm one of those "you'll get my baremetal and systemd out of my dead cold hands", kind of guy. But I have reasonable exposure to both AWS and GC and I can say that, by far, Google Cloud is easier to reason about. As a consequence, it's much harder to misconfigure. The 2 large AWS deploys I've seen have, at best, had billing issues no one really understood (incl AWS), and at worse, security issues. Complaining that ma…

What does a billing issue look like? Is it something trivial, like they charged you for $X+X, but you only used $X (e.g., they double billed you -- should be solvable with a phone call)? Or more complex, e.g, they charged for more egress than you actually used (kind of hard to prove or disprove after the fact)?

It's 100% our mistake(s). It's only AWS fault indirectly, in that AWS is complicated and requires a lot of non transferable knowledge.

As a small example, we currently pay $750 for Route53. We don't know why (it isn't traffic). It has something to do with Route53 resolvers that our "lead sre" setup before leaving. AWS support doesn't understand how it's setup, and since $750 is relatively small, we've just left it.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#103

Post by unethical_ban »

philliphaydon wrote: post #38
latch wrote: post #20

I'm one of those "you'll get my baremetal and systemd out of my dead cold hands", kind of guy. But I have reasonable exposure to both AWS and GC and I can say that, by far, Google Cloud is easier to reason about. As a consequence, it's much harder to misconfigure. The 2 large AWS deploys I've seen have, at best, had billing issues no one really understood (incl AWS), and at worse, security issues. Complaining that ma…

I used to think the problem with AWS was pricing and hidden costs etc. But in reality it’s because companies just let developers run wild without restriction on AWS and end up over provisioning or pulling in expensive services to solve dead simple problems. The issue is definitely not AWS. It’s always the developers. You really need a gate keeper to AWS to question why you need a service and ask for a price estimate…

Funny, since AWS has much more granular control over IAM roles and users than GCP does, so that the infrastructure/security group should be able to provision devs with the ability to roll their own IAM in a scoped way to prevent issues.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#104

Post by goodcjw2 »

[DISCLAMER: I used to work at Google in general, but not at Google Cloud]

I'm not sure whether this has been discussed here before, but I'd love to take this forum to share an angle from the tech side of things:

IMO, Google is _cursed_ to keep deprecating its products and services. It's cursed by Google's famous choice of mono-repo tech stack.

It makes all the sense and has all the benefits. But at a cost: we had to keep every single line of code in active development mode. Whenever someone changed a line of code in a random file that's three steps away on your dependency chain, you will get a ticket to understand what has changed, make changes and fire up every tests (also fix them in 99% of the cases).

Yeah, the "Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore." is kind of true story for internal engineers.

We once had a shipped product (which took about 20-engineer-month to develop in the first place) in maintenance mode, but still requires a full time engineer to deal with those random things all the time. Would have save 90% of that person's time it it's on a sperate branch and we only need to focus on security patches. (NO, there is no such concept of branching in Google's dev system).

We kept doing this for a while and soon realized that there is no way we can sustain this, especially after the only guys who understand how everything works switched teams. Thus, it just became obvious that deprecation is the only "responsible" and "reasonable" choice.

Honestly, I think Google's engineering practice is somewhat flawed for the lack of a good solution to support shipped products in maintenance. As a result, there is either massively successful products being actively developed; or deprecated products.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#105

Post by cbushko »

I am using GKE, buckets, cloud SQL, pubsub and IAM, big query.

Our costs are 1/3rd of what AWS was.

Their support isn't as good as AWS.

I use terraform for everything and Google authors that provider and I find that their resources are very consistent.

IAM is a bit of a mess but at least it is a consistent mess.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#106

Post by zimbatm »

philliphaydon wrote: post #38
latch wrote: post #20

I'm one of those "you'll get my baremetal and systemd out of my dead cold hands", kind of guy. But I have reasonable exposure to both AWS and GC and I can say that, by far, Google Cloud is easier to reason about. As a consequence, it's much harder to misconfigure. The 2 large AWS deploys I've seen have, at best, had billing issues no one really understood (incl AWS), and at worse, security issues. Complaining that ma…

I used to think the problem with AWS was pricing and hidden costs etc. But in reality it’s because companies just let developers run wild without restriction on AWS and end up over provisioning or pulling in expensive services to solve dead simple problems. The issue is definitely not AWS. It’s always the developers. You really need a gate keeper to AWS to question why you need a service and ask for a price estimate…

It's not that one-sided. On AWS, you have to go hunt to find the pricing for everything. On GCP, it's right next to the instance that you're starting. The GCP dashboard also provides recommendations to down-size VMs if they are too large. On AWS it's also super easy to spin up a VM and never see it because it's in a different region. These little things add up.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#107

Post by mark-r »

asciimike wrote: post #91
mdtusz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a particularly strange reason to not try their service and to me is akin to saying "I won't use CarRentalCompany because they require a credit card. What if I'm new to driving and total the car by wrapping it around a tree?" If anything, this is just AWS being overly generous and forgiving.

I'm shocked that any cloud provider lets you use prepaid cards... all of the major providers have problems with crypto mining and abuse, so it's crazy that AWS would allow prepaid cards that might be laundered, etc. And IMO, if you're a real customer, all the providers are fairly forgiving, provided you can get in touch with a real human who works there.

Google is infamous for making it impossible to reach a real human. Their DNA is all about automating all the things.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#108

Post by garciasn »

cbushko wrote: post #105

I am using GKE, buckets, cloud SQL, pubsub and IAM, big query. Our costs are 1/3rd of what AWS was. Their support isn't as good as AWS. I use terraform for everything and Google authors that provider and I find that their resources are very consistent. IAM is a bit of a mess but at least it is a consistent mess.

I’m always considering the potential for Google to deprecate GCP but, for us, it’s the best option today.

We’re heavily invested in GCP but aside from BQ, I feel we can lift and shift to another provider if need be with some pain. Even our BQ work, while extensive, is mostly SQL and would likely work with effort but nothing earth shattering.

That said, I still prefer GCP to AWS by far, but there’s no way they’re going to surpass AWS by 2023 unless something big changes.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#109

Post by rezonant »

junon wrote: post #78
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a billing issue look like? Is it something trivial, like they charged you for $X+X, but you only used $X (e.g., they double billed you -- should be solvable with a phone call)? Or more complex, e.g, they charged for more egress than you actually used (kind of hard to prove or disprove after the fact)?

Not GP, but in my experience, AWS bills run away from you if you're not careful. They don't have great tooling (or, at least, accessible or intuitive tooling) to determine what your bill is going to be, or to set limits. Pair that with a misconfiguration because of their horrendous web interface, and you're in for a surprisingly large bill at the end of the month. Google, on the other hand, has some of the best tooli…

Honestly there are tons of examples of runaway bills on both, and neither provides much better of a way to handle visibility of cloud billing than the other. We could discuss the limitations of AWS' billing estimation systems ("only visible when you look!") or GCloud's budgeting system (which has notoriously questionable "limitations" https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/google_cloud_over_run...), but neither of the two are particularly better than the other at avoiding surprise billing.

There is this bias effect that is not common only to this part of the thread but this entire thread, and perhaps any discussion of "which cloud is better" where people who are clearly invested in one platform or another show biases that help them to justify their (or their company's) lock-in decisions.

This is not to say that cloud itself is a bad call, but it's crazy how many people out there don't realize how their situation and fear of "making the 'wrong' decision in the past" affects how they discuss the options (or even how they reinvest in a particular option later!), and how they claim "actually that vendor is worse than mine"

I have larger development investments in both AWS and in Google Cloud. They each have pros and cons but runaway billing is a gotcha of minute-by-minute rental billing of compute, storage and network services (the "cloud") and how we use it, and not really something specific to one vendor or another. It's just something that you have to be constantly aware of, constantly monitor, and work to avoid.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#110

Post by macintux »

goodcjw2 wrote: post #104

[DISCLAMER: I used to work at Google in general, but not at Google Cloud] I'm not sure whether this has been discussed here before, but I'd love to take this forum to share an angle from the tech side of things: IMO, Google is _cursed_ to keep deprecating its products and services. It's cursed by Google's famous choice of mono-repo tech stack. It makes all the sense and has all the benefits. But at a cost: we had to…

> somewhat flawed

That sounds like a significant understatement.

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