Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by paxys » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #158

paxys wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also worked at Google (in an unrelated department) and completely disagree with this. Maintaining old code & services is a problem everywhere. Monorepo vs multirepo, monolith service vs microservices etc. all have nothing to do with it. There will always be a broken dependency, a service/API/library you rely on about to deprecate, new urgent security patches, an outage somewhere upstream or downstream which yo…

The "you must make something new to get promoted" was a common meme (literally) at Google, but I never saw that myself. I got promoted, and I sat on promotion committees, and it didn't seem that important. I did sort of start a new project to get from 4 to 5 (rather a prototype was handed to me by my more senior team members), but it was clear to me that the path to 6 was not starting a new project -- it was increasi…

I definitely encountered this problem at Google (there was a reason it was a meme), but it was far more prevalent at the EM/PM/director level, and so still directly affected the overall product strategy for the org and what you as an IC got to work on.

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

#162

Post by dilyevsky » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

ghayes wrote: post #146

dilyevsky wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made that bed... I’m sure there are more original stories to be told, people just upvote based on their personal experience

The issue here is that the majority of criticisms apply to Google products and services _other than_ GCP. By and large, many commenters here (myself included) have had very good experiences with GCP. Less so with Google Reader.

A fish rots from the head down. I find it hard to believe same dynamics won’t make it down the cloud org given enough time

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

#163

Post by mekster » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

sleepydog wrote: post #136

I've been in GCP support for over 4 years. My opinions are my own. I try to stay as impartial as I can about my employer. I know there are a lot of valid criticisms to be made about GCP. As one of the people often bearing the brunt of the fallout whenever there is a painful outage or deprecation, I share some of them. But it never gets easy to read posts like this. This one appears to be a collection of old hacker ne…

> no one talks about when a process works the way it's supposed to. People want to read about failures.

No, people don't want to read about failures. People want to expect services work as advertised. People write when something doesn't live up to the standard that it should have, even if 99% others are fine.

Years of uptime is expected, so no one writes about that of course but if it goes beyond one's expectation, like being able to run a server for 10 years and over without a down time, I'm sure people start to feel like writing positive stories.

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

#164

Post by manquer » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

plantain wrote: post #55

dilyevsky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several valid reason to do this - concerns about customer solvency and making sure you aint gonna crash tbheir house of cards architectures to name a few. The bigger problem is when those requests get stuck in the bureaucracy hell and all three major cloud provider companies are known to be extremely bureaucratic

Microsoft was the most baffling - happy to give me 25k+ credits for free in their startup program, unable to let me pay them for the same setup going forwards. My quota requests weren't outrageous - never more than 20 VM's, albeit very large VM's.

It is not your quota that is the problem, it is the credit risk.

If you paperwork is not up to spec, they are running the risk of credit exposure when you the customer doesn't' pay. Higher risks for any provider when there is no legal entity to sue etc, which is why they want you to convert to invoice billing.

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

#165

Post by kevan » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

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…

I'd implement a good cost attribution strategy before trying a gatekeeping approach. Companies generally have at least semi-functional mechanisms for managing department budgets. Once there's a clear picture how much each service/webapp/product costs to run then they can feed that into the existing budget infra and let things shake out.

Until you know both halves of the ROI calculation it's difficult to focus effort on trimming the right things. e.g. It seems silly for a team to spend $2k/mo on naive/managed solutions for simple things but maybe it's worth it if it helps them avoid hiring another $10k+/mo engineer.

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

#166

Post by travisgriggs » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:57 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #134

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…

I have also worked at Google (in an unrelated department) and completely disagree with this. Maintaining old code & services is a problem everywhere. Monorepo vs multirepo, monolith service vs microservices etc. all have nothing to do with it. There will always be a broken dependency, a service/API/library you rely on about to deprecate, new urgent security patches, an outage somewhere upstream or downstream which yo…

This sounds like any large organization, where each engineer is only one tooth on a very large gear.

I'm guessing, but do not have enough anecdotal experience myself, that just about any large tech company employee here is reading your description and thinking "sounds like my company."

I'm curious how sound my hypothesis/guess is. Can other large organization employees answer with a claim that this does NOT describe their situation?

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

#167

Post by jsolson » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 4:58 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #152

MisterPea wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concerning the promotion thing, I hear this a lot from Googlers but isn't it the same everywhere else? Most tech companies (big tech at least) will promote on product achievements, not maintenance.

The main difference was/is that at Google your immediate manager, director, PM, peers and everyone else in your product unit (who you work with every day) have almost zero say in whether you get promoted or not. You have to essentially summarize everything you did in bullet points and send it over to an anonymous committee who don't know who you are. They will base their decision on this piece of paper without any ad…

There have been some changes that make this entirely untrue for earlier promos and partially untrue for promotions to L6/Staff. There's considerably more locality at this point.

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

#168

Post by manquer » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

asciimike wrote: post #138

mark-r wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also, if you're paying GCP any reasonable amount of money, you have an account manager who will respond in < 24 hours to connect you with the right PM to deal with the issue. Google deals with lots of random humans, GCP mostly deals with actual businesses. As much as I hated the support offshoring Google (and sometimes GCP) did, most actual businesses could get a human fairly quickly.

Answering tickets is partly the kind of support I look for, Azure will get their account managers of my customer connected to me, Both AWS/Azure are okay to come on customer calls with me for a large enough deal. I never got that kind of support from Google.

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

#169

Post by andreareina » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

loukrazy wrote: post #122

avodonosov wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't the failing tests the problem of the person who changed that line? What you describe is very strange. If someone changes a shared module, and some tests fail in result, his changes simply should not be merged. > you will get a ticket to understand what has changed, make changes and fire up every tests Do you fire tests manually?

If you make changes to a large shared module, is it your responsibility to chase down each and every usage of it? For example if you are upgrading a dependency due to a somewhat breaking security issue such as Jackson 2.8->2.12

IIRC that's how it works for internal APIs in the linux kernel.

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

#170

Post by cocoland2 » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #162

ghayes wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here is that the majority of criticisms apply to Google products and services _other than_ GCP. By and large, many commenters here (myself included) have had very good experiences with GCP. Less so with Google Reader.

A fish rots from the head down. I find it hard to believe same dynamics won’t make it down the cloud org given enough time

My experience with GCP has been quite small , most of which have been with GKE and I find that to be good!

What i hate though is more about the company , is what they project they are vs what they are

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-dro...

``` I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she continued. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images. ```

Not being judgemental about if defense is right or wrong , but its fair to say we are in the running for it. What is not okay is "we care for humanity and freedom of speech" and then do backchannel discussions on how dissent can be quelled with government agencies.

So to me distrust is for the company possibly and probably not so much on the reliability of its services