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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

#201

Post by barrkel »

alephnan wrote: post #150
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 worked as a SWE at Google and also at Google cloud. I both disagree with this and find it a very perplexing angle. I think the issue is a mis-aligned (financial) incentive structure. With the right incentive structure, challenges in either monorepo or federated repo can be overcome. With the wrong incentive structure, problems will grow in both monorepo and federated repo. The choice of repo simply manifests the wa…

I think monorepo has an effect, but the bigger effect is dependencies expressed as build targets rather than versioned artifacts. When your dependencies are in the eternal present, you're forced to upgrade, or you're a blocker. And I don't think you can do dependencies as build targets well without a monorepo.

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

#202

Post by nikanj »

tpetry wrote: post #180
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…

I am on GCP, the greatest fear is not they increasing prices or disabling a product it‘s getting flagged and not being able to do anything. The support has been helpfull, that‘s true. I guess having this fear is mostly people on hn reading these stories so often and how it is resolved: knowing someone at google. I don‘t know anyone and i should not have to. There should be some contact for disabled accounts you can r…

The only viable alternative to knowing someone at Google, is getting your story to the front page of HN / Slashdot / similar, and hoping someone from the other side of the wall reaches out.

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

#203

Post by nikanj »

alephnan wrote: post #151
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…

This crowd also harshly criticized the Coinbase founder / Bitcoin when we he was looking for a co-founder, and now his share of Coinbase is worth $10 billion or so.

We also harshly criticized 642 other "I just need a programmer"-posts here that month, and all of those companies are bankrupt and long forgotten

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

#204

Post by nikanj »

nemothekid wrote: post #159
realityIsntHere wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the odd thing is that Google has been significantly better for consumers than other FAANG companies. Apple has historically been anti consumer and anti developer with a huge marketing budget to wash it. Facebook intentionally makes us sad. M$ and their anti competitive practices should be well known.

> Apple has historically been anti consumer What? Apple has been pro-consumer to the detriment of everyone else. Developers are still screaming that they aren't allowed to install malware on my iphone.

And FBI is still upset that Apple won't install a back door for them.

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

#205

Post by Dylan16807 »

Clewza313 wrote: post #195
booi wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were multiple companies forced off Google Maps because of a pricing change. This could absolutely happen and has happened before.

That's very different from Google deciding to shut down Maps.

If a big chunk of the companies that are using it have to stop, I wouldn't say it's all that different.

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

#206

Post by barrkel »

avodonosov wrote: post #125
loukrazy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You do not chase down, the buld system detects all affected modules and runs their tests. That's the advantage of monorepo - contineous integration that includes all dependent modules.

It's also a disadvantage, to be clear. Tests take longer to run when you need to rebuild your database and not just your own code. There's no easy way to put something in maintenance mode and only take changes for bug fixes, because maintaining forks is not a significant thing. Thus downstream dependencies must pay not just for bug fixes but also for feature improvements, deprecations etc.

It works well enough if everything is making money and is being actively developed.

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

#207

Post by Dylan16807 »

treesknees wrote: post #90
tantalor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example or link? Not very useful comment otherwise.

Gotta love a typical hackernews comment begging for links instead of just searching for it yourself. On the contrary I don't think your comment is useful either.

Asking for links is just fine for a comment that vague.

Even for non-vague comments, it's often much better for one person to post links than to make 50 people repeat the same search.

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

#208

Post by kevingadd »

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…

With respect to your experience, the impact of promotion chasing was heavily felt by product teams and I wouldn't expect it to be that visible to people on the promo committees. I watched multiple fellow Googlers rush project work and cut corners in order to be able to "ship" and put the project in their promo package (and be frustrated when they missed promo). In some cases I got to watch them abandon the project and move on to something else even though it badly needed additional maintenance and cleanup due to all the corner-cutting. In one specific case, all the corner cutting led to multiple significant exploit chains (one of them delivered persistent root on Chromebooks)

Maybe it was just way worse in my org (Chrome).

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

#209

Post by virgilp »

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 their GCE VMs with years of uptime.

This is literally what you sell. It's like a restaurant owner complaining about the bad reviews, saying "nobody talks about all the people that we fed and never got food poisoning!". Yeah, I only need to hear about a few of those to be concerned about going there, I don't care it's less than 1% of your customers that get food poisoning.

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

#210

Post by obeche »

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…

Google beats AWS; as AWS does not let you build truly isolated components. Unlike Google, who has projects.
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