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

#221

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 11:53 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…

That’s not true anymore until you are going for 6/7 (depending on your org). Now, committees are based in your org and members are expected to be somewhat familiar with your work.

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

#222

Post by hairicane » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12:29 PM UTC

I recently switched from AWS to Google due to the complexity of managing AWS. However, I am not willing to use ANY proprietary GCP services or any tools at any level. Firebase looks amazing, not a chance I’ll use it.

GCP is great if you’re going to stick to containers and Cloud SQL. You can pick up your toys and leave if Google tries some stupid shenanigans.

But for the time being I am saving money directly by hosting on GCP, and saving even more money by not needing as much DevOps investment.

Honestly I think people are so used to AWS that they don’t realize how much of a complicated mess it’s become.

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

#223

Post by virgilp » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12:38 PM UTC

tester34 wrote: post #220

virgilp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think they sell 100% of uptime, I guess it is around 99.9....

I never said they do, I said they sell "GCE VMs with years of uptime" i.e. "just pay for VM and let us worry about maintenance, you can simply assume it works for all intents and purposes".

But, the kind of stuff that people are worried about is not VM uptime. It's "honest customer being banned with no recourse and having entire livehood destroyed". You don't hear Google bragging that "we have an SLA of 99.9% service to honest customers - we only destroy 1 out of every 1000 businesses that choose us!". You can bet that their SLA there is 100%, even if it's not achievable, 100% is absolutely their target. Just like the target for Facebook is 100% security, and you won't hear Zuck bragging that "we are 99.9% secure, we only leak your private data once every 3 years!".

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

#224

Post by raiflip » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:01 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #200

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…

I think monorepo makes it easier to update downstream dependencies atomically as part of an upstream change, and thus encourages a culture of unstable APIs. That is, careful evolution of internal APIs is not given much weight, so modularity - in the sense of containing change - suffers. I don't think monorepos must necessarily go this way, but expressing dependencies in terms of build targets rather than versioned ar…

I think this is absolutely it. A lot of best practices go down the drain when the compiler compiles the bytecode. As such a lot of best practices are about people, not the computer. APIs can be just as stable behind a network or a library, but way more people are onboard with never break your APIs than they are never break your function.

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

#225

Post by sidibe » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

DistressedDrone wrote: post #54

> The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft-currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share-or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by…

If they could onboard themselves on Google Cloud they'd probably be the biggest cloud. Seems like that's what they should be trying to do, it'd also future-proof them if they have to split up the business

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

#226

Post by realityIsntHere » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #204

nemothekid wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But they will let Russia.

And bend to china.

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

#227

Post by realityIsntHere » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

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.

Butterfly keyboard denials, drm music, brainwashing/marketing, only letting you install Apple approved apps, lies about security, to name a few.

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

#228

Post by jrockway » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #208

jrockway wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

> 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)

This kind of confirms my point -- the committee isn't looking for "created a disaster area a month before promo packets were due". They want a consistent track record of success at the next level.

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

#229

Post by hobs » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #148

hobs wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just got kicked off of google music as a paying customer, so nope, got a shitty youtube music replacement. As a paying google fi customer got transferred to hangouts then that got canceled and I apparently need to change my phone number if I want to make an outgoing voip call again because ??? google.

Same here. I ended up on Spotify instead, which is still shitty although less than I remember (no music player should ever display the notice "can't play the current song", that is its core feature). However I don't think the two can be compared: we don't need to launch a giant project to make serious infrastructure changes to switch provider.

Just responding to the OP "Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever?"

Which to be clear they are not responsible for running all their services forever, but it puts a lie to the idea that google is fine with stability in a service, they'll take something commercially successful enough and sacrifice it for something else in hope it attains "hypergrowth".

At the end of the day google doesnt give a flip about its customers, the structure of google will always incentive new services over fixing/maintaining existing stuff and anyone who has a pollyannish view of this needs to wake up.

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

#230

Post by asciimike » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 2:08 PM UTC

TheReveller wrote: post #190

sjfidsfkds wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, really? Quota are recorded by code that must be changed by pull request, not an entry in a db? That sounds like an insane waste of engineer time.

Not generally. There is a quota service for all modern gcp APIs that handles per region, per user, and per project quotas that internally you just need the right permissions to update for a customer request, no PR required.

Ah, so everything's finally been moved to superquota? I was also living in an app engine world, where everything was... Old and broken.