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Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

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141–150 of 202 posts

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#141
post #38

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/oc…

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Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#142
post #38

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/oc…

Firebase is great, but in my little experience, as it's database grows, it becomes clunky to sort and query, especially since everything is pretty much done client side.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#143
post #142
post #38

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/oc…

Firebase is great, but in my little experience, as it's database grows, it becomes clunky to sort and query, especially since everything is pretty much done client side.

Try Cloud Firestore, it has a lot of improvements with querying over the RTDB. I can also confirm sorting/querying is handled server-side. (Disclaimer: I'm the PM for it and use it for my own side-projects)

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#145
post #109
post #38

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/oc…

Firebase is great, but covered under a separate agreement with Google, and its terms aren't as friendly to corporate users. For example, they still aren't encrypting tenant data at REST. Nothing is COPPA compliant.

I lot has changed in the last year or so, might be worth looking again. Most of the backend services are under GCP's terms of service, products like Cloud Firestore all do encryption at rest, etc.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#146
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you migrated anything off of Firebase? Or still kept the “base” projects and upgraded around it? I’m interested specifically in how expensive Firebase is for popular products

I haven't migrated off of Firebase but this is something I've thought a lot about as I've selected Firebase for many of my client projects. As far as I can tell there is no open-source alternative with feature parity that makes it easy to migrate away from Firebase. I'd be curious to hear about how people have done this.

This is actually what I'm afraid of - specifically vendor lock-in and being stuck with a stack that has high operating cost. From some of the comments I've seen, Firebase has high operating costs. But I'm still planning on testing this out myself with a small project soon.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#147
post #68

I see lots of evaluation of GCP, or comparison between GCP vs AWS recently. But I don't see as many for the Azure platform, although Azure being the 2nd in the cloud provider market, and even closing on AWS in market share. Anybody has any insights on this?

I don’t have a ton of experience with Azure as a whole but have used their VM service for a bit.

Azure VMs are way behind compared to EC2 IMO. Burstable VMs (the cheap ones) aren’t available in all data centers or for all images (which they call SKUs), storage accounts are weird, provisioning times are slower, their cheapest instance types (Standard_A) are REALLY slow, documentation is confusing, extremely spread out and contradictory at times, account management via Azure AD is way more confusing than IAM at least at first, their auto scaling service (scale sets) is less flexible than AWS autoscaling, etc.

Also, Microsoft and HashiCorp are pretty much the only maintainer of the Packer and Terraform providers. The difference in commit history between the ARM provider and the AWS provider are stark. This means that when you encounter bugs or cryptic errors from the Azure API (which will happen), you’ll be waiting a bit for a fix, even if you cut the PR.

The other thing with Azure is that every large company uses it for Windows workloads because they get massive discounts and tons of credits

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#148
post #68

I see lots of evaluation of GCP, or comparison between GCP vs AWS recently. But I don't see as many for the Azure platform, although Azure being the 2nd in the cloud provider market, and even closing on AWS in market share. Anybody has any insights on this?

I've used Azure a bit and it's been pretty painful for the most part. There are three, maybe four identity management systems (Azure native, MS Live, Hosted AD, others?). Working with the SDKs and doing programmatic authentication was painful. I did a fair bit with AKS. It had a lot of shortcomings that would take a while to go into. They ended up suggesting I use ACS-engine. There are some products that are neat, th…

Could you go into it? I’ve kept hearing good things about AKS, but my experience with their VM service left me skeptical of those claims.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#150
post #37

Although the author mentions they haven't had experience with AppEngine, it's the reason why I love Google Cloud SO much over anything else. If you're a startup running something on Elixir (or even Rails), AppEngine's experience is hard to beat. Not many people do know: * You can run multiple microservices on AppEngine under one application. * Each of these can have many versions serving different percentages of traf…

Appengine gets very, very expensive as you scale and still has a ton of limitations that only bite you once you have some load.
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