Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

debugbear.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 405 posts

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#261

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

Google employs 115000 people, are you sure they are all 100x rockstars?

Anyways, if the management was forced to use Google Cloud's UI, I'm sure it would look and feel completely different.

As it is, they're making a product they don't really have a personal stake in.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#262

Post by wrsh07 »

woah wrote: post #154
wrsh07 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by attributing it do incompetence you're missing the incentives problem. Others point this out, but Google just has no incentives to improve this UX. Think about who makes the decisions to use Google cloud and what criteria they are using. The snappiness of the gcp ui is not likely to be near the top of their list

DigitalOcean built a big business off of easy to use cloud hosting.

Yes but I don't know that they have much success convincing already huge companies to switch to their cloud

B2 large business is different than b2c or b2 small business

It's all about who is making the decisions

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#263

Post by wnevets »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart. Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component…

Isn't this what happened to Facebook's iOS and Android Apps? IIRC their Android app had thousands, upon thousands of overlapping class files.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#264

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart. Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component…

I would have thought that you could reasonably decouple concerns in order to fix it as well. Have every service expose a nice restful API, and then have one team responsible for the web interface but use those apis. Obviously, you need a way to require a reasonable performance out of the backing apis, but at least then you only have the one team to be concerned with how to build the front end and ensure that it works well.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#265

Post by 908B64B197 »

tanilama wrote: post #146
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

I don't think I agree with you here. Make Cloud UI fast is probably not their priority. This is an enterprise product, not consumer facing, users are much less likely to be turned off due to slow UI. They will wait. Integrity/Security would be much higher on the list than UI loading speed. Not surprising at all.

I also wonder how often the UI is used vs the command line.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#266

Post by dmitriid »

tracker1 wrote: post #257
dmitriid wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> enterprise products would rather get more features out over micro optimizations. I've been using logs, bigquery, dataflow, and a smattering of other products pretty regularly for the past few years. Are these products getting "more features"? Hardly. Well, dataflow deprecates minor SDK versions every month, so you have to run twice as fast just to stay in one place. Instead, they have been redesigning the logs inte…

I don't entirely agree... Material Design is pretty great imho and I like most of their UI choices (for applications that seem to sometimes get priority). I think what this comes down to, is that their best technical minded developers are busy working on tooling, platforms, systems or other lower-level development. Their best design focused developers on public facing applications. This tends to leave the most junior…

Material UI is ... well. It just is. It's mediocre at best, and hilariously bad at worst:

- Insufficient contrast everywhere https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA

- Inconsistent use of their own guidelines: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 (references the old design of the site, but the new one is just as bad)

- Bad physical metaphors: https://grumpy.website/post/0UnXYXhD9

- Or the hilarious story where they needed a user study involving 600 people to tell them that if a text field doesn't look like a text field, people won't be able to tell it's a text field: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...

And that's just off the top of my head.

But all of that could be forgiven if Google bothered or cared. They don't.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#267

Post by aloukissas »

blakesterz wrote: post #6
api wrote: post #2

Atlassian Jira is dog slow too. Drives me nuts.

Atlassian is one of those places that I just can't believe has gotten so widely used. Every single thing I've used that is an Atlassian product drives me nuts. I really don't understand how anyone at any point looked at Jira or Confluence or anything Atlassian puts out and said "yep, this is the best version of this thing I've seen, sign me up". I've been using JIRA for years now, and it never gets any easier or bett…

It's one of those products that is "sold" not "bought".

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#268

Post by [deleted] »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

[deleted]

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#269

Post by 908B64B197 »

thanksforthe42 wrote: post #161
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #115

I think the answer is: This is the best the richest and best companies in the world, with their best paid 100x rockstar developers can do. Google is literally both the creator of the browser (Chrome), the framework (Angular) and the web-app (GCP) we use and still, this mess is the best they can give us. They have direct access to the creators of Chrome and Angular, in some sense they are the owners of the internet an…

After working with graduates from "the best university", I doubt it is "the best". After using "the best" search engine, and finding what I needed on Bing instead, I started doubting it was "the best". Perception is different than reality. I genuinely wonder if these are "the best", or if these employees were merely the ones willing to move their lives to a new city for a high paying job. But I'm sure FAANG and FAANG…

It's all a matter of signal to noise ratio.

> Perception is different than reality. I genuinely wonder if these are "the best", or if these employees were merely the ones willing to move their lives to a new city for a high paying job.

You can always find that one diamond in the rough. It's true there's a selection bias toward folks that are willing to relocate. But I bet the average engineers at Google is much better than at Generic Company Co.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#270

Post by stingraycharles »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211

There's a meta-answer, which is Google is shipping its org chart. Google Cloud UI is one giant Angular app with components written by sub-teams across wildly disparate timezones, much less offices. Their ability to consolidate resources is poor. They came late-to-the-game on tooling up an infrastructure team to provide both standardized libraries and rigor on how the architecture is used. The duplication of component…

And even then in the Google Cloud console I still feel that parts such as Stackdriver are, in fact, completely separate parts of the UI and not integrated into the bigger whole. Same for many other products.

Which begs the question, what problem are they solving with this “unification but actually not” approach? Couldn’t they just bite the bullet and give up on the unification and be done with it?

Phrased differently, what are the advantages of this unification and reuse of components, exactly?

Post reply on HN