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I think GCP is better than AWS (2020)

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

#181
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…

> GCS Archive Storage

Have you considered Backblaze B2? (It has free egress!)

I think GCS is pretty good as a coherent offering that includes the various storage tiers + auto-classing + lifecycle notifications to pub/sub to feed Cloud Dataflow, etc. But if you're storing data purely for retention or disaster recovery, you should consider a service architected as a backup provider that happens to present an object-store abstraction, rather than an object-storage provider that happens to support your backup software — often you'll find very different that the provider themselves have made very different CapEx trade-offs, resulting in very different pricing models, that can favor your use-case heavily.

(I say this as someone who uses GCP for elastic load, but has non-IaaS bare-metal for base load; and where the DB instances living on that bare metal do their pgbackrest backups + WAL streaming against a B2 bucket.)

But, of course, if your data-to-be-archived is originating in GCP, it may well cost you more to send it over an external provider like Backblaze, than it costs to just keep it in GCS. That is, as they say, "where they get ya."

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

#182
post #82

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers. Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million. Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use q…

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

I had a Google Workspace account and a bizarre issue with my account thinking I was on a Caribbean island. I was a paying customer, and could talk to a human, but it was an awful experience.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

> conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. * Google Domains * Google Cloud IoT Core * Jamboard Also they increased Google Maps pricing by like 10x at one point, and they increased Cloud Storage prices pretty substantially last year too. Price increases can be just as impactful as killing a product. I don't think AWS has ever increased any prices or shut down any service (though quite a few are essent…

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

#184
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, hence the "Many things are actually experiments and shouldn't be marketed as more than that" and/or "random little things".

Google very clearly stated in no uncertain terms that Stadia was a real product that they were committed to for the long term. Stating, after the fact, that it was "actually" an "experiment" or a "random little thing" is not just dismissive - it's pure revisionist history.

Yeah... Google employees just _do_ that sort of shitty redirection, and it's obnoxious as fuck.

Maybe it works in a "We're too polite to disrupt whatever political game you're playing in the hopes that you'll reciprocate when we splash obvious bullshit when we play ours." snakepit that seems to be most of Google, but out here, we're unchained by that political nonsense.

Bonus chatter: We get that you'd like die for your coworkers or whatever, but as people who have no social (or political) investment in either the services or how they're made, these "But they're run by GOOD, PASSIONATE people! I have personal experience with this!" appeals are simply irrelevant.

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

#185
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an oddly aggressive comment - perhaps the problem isn't prediction but extrapolation of past experiences with Google, would you not agree that it gives you a sliver of worry that they may cut the service off? You seem very intense about Google's offering, maybe you feel attacked by the points made in the thread, but the way you're approaching this discussion is very strange.

I'm tired of reading the same thing over and over where people prognosticate based on poor readings of events and I think people should put there money where their mouth is. I really do not think the chance of GCP discontinuing a core service is high enough to warrant the level of comments this gets and if I find myself constantly reading these comments, maybe I can at least be compensated by people making bad bets o…

Nonzero is enough to choose an alternative.

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

#186
post #82

I'll continue beating the dead horse: I don't trust Google. At best GCP is slightly better than AWS (debatable), which is not enough to offset the risk because of how much of a pain it is to switch cloud providers. Even if GCP shutting down is one in a million, aws shutting down is 1 in ten million. Also, I keep getting the feeling that Google keeps trying to automate their customer service through bots. I have use q…

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

Having spent the past week dealing with GCP support, which I pay for, I can assure you, it sucks. It’s miserable and my least favorite part of GCP by far.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an unfortunate conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. All of what you say is pretty accurate for free-tier Gmail/etc. No customer service, risk of an account getting blocked and nothing you can do, new apps not finding success and getting cancelled. But none of it is the case with GCP. Customer service is great and you can reach real people easily, paid accounts aren't getting shut…

> conflation of free Gmail/etc. consumer products with GCP. * Google Domains * Google Cloud IoT Core * Jamboard Also they increased Google Maps pricing by like 10x at one point, and they increased Cloud Storage prices pretty substantially last year too. Price increases can be just as impactful as killing a product. I don't think AWS has ever increased any prices or shut down any service (though quite a few are essent…

Public IP prices just saw a massive (announced) price increase. Admittedly it was from free, so perhaps not a true “increase”.

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

#188
To everyone saying GCP will be gone - it generates over $8 billion in revenue per year and $400 million in profit. There's no chance they kill it any time soon.

Yes it posted heavy losses in the past, but any major infrastructure does, and obviously there is a major amount of potential - and they have around 10% of the total cloud market share, not insignificant by any means.

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

#189
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t my experience. Amazon supports most stuff roughly forever.

Sure, sure. I totally get where you're coming from. By the way, how's the Fire Phone holding up for you these days? I assume it's still working well and powerful enough to do your web searches on a9.com, and read sites like the Amapedia and DPReviews. Do you happen to know how many of the Alexa.com top500 sites it can browse, or do you need to ask on Amazon Askville? But I know it won't be able to play Amazon's hit g…

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

#190
post #179
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppEngine today is wildly different to the App Engine I fell in love with 15 years ago. Since you're checking notes, please check out all the AE service deprecation notes. Disclosure: I worked for Google for ~10 years, and I fought internally many of those deprecation decisions. I did not succeed.

Google making AppEngine in the first place always felt weird to me. It was great for some web developers, but outside that use case, really not so much. But it came with a great collection of side technologies, which got unbundled (Datastore, etc) because there were folks (like me) who wanted to use the side tech but not AE itself (for many, many years you couldn't "import numpy" but people would still say "see? We h…

No, we all just migrated the decision of using GAE to using Cloud Functions / Run / Tasks, which is fine. Those are easier for Google to scale over time, than AppEngine.

The problem with AppEngine was that they had to heavily modify the runtimes for isolation... the JVM needed to be secured and that meant maintaining a separate fork, which also meant being perpetually always behind in versions. It also meant any upgrade had to go through a huge security evaluation.

So, moving to another process model, containers, worked much better.

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