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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

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Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#141

Post by throwaway894345 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #118
mcny wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing. I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?

When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent? You always can drive cost concessions from sales, especially for base workloads where you have time flexibility. For a big company, cloud rarely saves money for many categories of expense. In a normal market, it is almost always faster time to market to rent, and always cheaper TCO to own.

> When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent?

This is a different market and one which is ultimately constrained by the availability of land. Notably, cloud prices do fall especially relative to the compute power. Specifically I remember when Fargate moved to firecracker and prices fell by like 40% or something similarly considerable.

Maybe managing your own internal cloud is indeed cheaper (especially if you don't account for support or maintenance!), but arguing that cloud prices don't decrease or making some housing analogy seems like poor reasoning.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#142

Post by theginger »

firloop wrote: post #35
avery42 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From GCP docs [0]: Effect of ToS violations Google-wide disabled account In some cases a Google-wide account (which covers access to a variety of Google products like Google Photos, Google Play, Google Drive, and GCP) will be disabled for violations of a Google ToS, egregious policy violations, or as required by law. Owners of disabled Google accounts will not be able to access their Google Cloud resources until the…

Google will suspend entire accounts even if you have more than one owner. A few years back, our business credit card was somehow stolen and used to buy Google Adwords. We disputed the charge with our bank. A day or two later, at 4am local time, our GCP account was suspended for fraud (presumably because the same, stolen, card was attached to that account). All instances were stopped and our service was brought to a h…

On the link above there is a separate section for billing account suspensions and it seems to work how you described.

You can fairly easily swap billing accounts a project is using if you still have an organisation admin account that isn't suspended. I saw this risk coming at a previous company and tried to get them to treat billing accounts like any other important resource and go for redundancy, but the director could not see the value and our Google account manager denied the risk existed, luckily they have been more fortunate and this has not happened to them yet, although it did come close once with some issues with the payments.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#143

Post by Johnny555 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #132
Johnny555 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're planning on building your business on the cloud, the availability of free credits seems like the worst way to evaluate a cloud provider. Generous "free" credits might even be a warning that they have to pay people to use the platform.

This ignores the other big reasons to take losses early, when one is a new(er) player in a market with a dominant competitor. It's not completely wrong, but incomplete.

Doesn't the same logic apply -- that new upstart is unproven and is essentially paying people to use their platform. The last thing your burgeoning new business needs is trying to debug issues on a brand new platform, you can't even hire industry experts to help because there are no industry experts.

So if you want to work on building your business and not debug cloud provider issues, avoid the new upstart.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#144

Post by jjoonathan »

coder543 wrote: post #140
jjoonathan wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree with this comment, because we've gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about cross-referencing. If you're wil…

> pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and seems to be consistently worse than other clouds. Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? I honestly can't remember ever being surprised by what things on AWS cost, and I don't think I'm that shockingly good at detecting hidden costs.

Cloudwatch costs have been the ones my coworkers complain about. The one that got me was sagemaker -- the console had a bug where if you went to a region without endpoints, it would pop up a tutorial screen and the tutorial screen would "stick," hiding endpoints in other regions. Which led to hanging endpoints, which were covered by free tier for a few days before costs exploded. We had alerts active, but they alerted when we span up the resources, which was expected, and didn't make it obvious that paging through all the regions ensuring there were no running resources (itself painful) and watching daily costs for a few days was insufficient to ensure that we weren't going to have a $700 bill at the end of the month (or maybe $1400 -- I forget if $700 was the half refunded cost).

When I shared this anecdote at Re:Invent, the sentiment at the table was "lol that's cute, here's my story with an order of magnitude higher price tag." There were 5 or 6 of us, and my story was the smallest surprise cost except for one other person who was even greener than I was.

> Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for?

Can you tell me how I should have used AWS calculator to prevent my surprise charge? You can't, because AWS calculator assumes you know exactly what you're asking for, and the problem with opaque pricing structures is that you sometimes don't.

Other clouds tend to be much more upfront about "this will cost X," "this is costing X," "you're out of free tier," etc.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#145

Post by majormajor »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #133
ethbr0 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that customer obsession at an entire-organization-depth level does is encourage broad customer use awareness. To an engineer, things are things, because of how they architect and build them. To an engineer who understands a customer, things are things and all the things people actually use them for. Big difference. It also makes "Well, that customer is using it wrong" less of an exceptable engineering dodge…

Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency?

> Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers, right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I don't think we can conclude that the engineering team (rather than the product team) is the source of the deficiency?

I haven't worked inside AWS or GCP, but I've never seen product get everything they want, especially around maintenance/downtime. If "less downtime" is on the roadmap but engineering is constantly pushing back "that'll be really really hard and take a long time and they're just using it wrong anyway," I can't imagine it getting done as quickly as at a place where the engineering team was also focused on customer satisfaction.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#146

Post by jsnell »

fnord77 wrote: post #96
PaulKeeble wrote: post #4

Google's business model is to have no customer service and have customers discard-able without notice when Google chooses. Why would a business want to do business to business with Google and actually pay them at this point? They do 'free' sort of well but they are a terrible option for dependable partner whether you pay them or not.

google's propensity for abruptly cancelling products seems like a substantial business risk, too. GCP revenue has been declining, so... edit: revenue GROWTH is declining

That is not even remotely true. In the latest earnings, Google Cloud revenue grew by 46% year on year, and they said GCP specifically grew faster than Cloud as a whole.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#147

Post by epiphytegreg »

directionless wrote: post #106

This feels like a somewhat narrow and biased comparison. It is focused around getting startup credits, and while that's important, I think it's a very limited view of onboarding. Better would be to think about what the general initial usability of these services are. How easy is it to spin up the compute load? Create reasonable IAM policies? Debug problems? My own experience (and bias) is that while AWS has vastly mo…

I agree, post is very focused on customer support and getting the credits, not at all on product usability. I didn't start building on either AWS or GCP with the expectation I'd have a human to talk to, and from that perspective, GCP was much, much more usable. I found (and find) AWS's interfaces and documentation to be a maze.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#148

Post by gonehome »

This is a good example of why I’m long Amazon and short Google.

Though Jeff Bezos stepping down worries me a bit.

Google doesn’t care that much about their customers. They mint money from their web ad monopoly. They don’t have aligned incentives, they don’t have a customer focused culture.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#149

Post by squiffsquiff »

random5634 wrote: post #105
PaywallBuster wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you only get billing/account support unless you have subscription, starting at 150 US$ month

Huh? Please look at the actual AWS page: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/ Developer support $29/month, and business support is $100 (both go up if you spend more). I paid for business support. You get 24x7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support Engineers Unlimited cases / unlimited contacts (IAM supported) This is for $100/MONTH!! That is the deal of the century. And they are ridiculously helpfu…

I suspect that AWS is 'losing money' on this in the same way that Apple are 'losing money' on their high Street retail shops.

Working at a place with AWS enterprise support by contrast, for the second occasion, I would suggest that many of the places paying $15kpm don't cost that to support.

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