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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)

#281

Post by pclmulqdq »

foobarian wrote: post #232
next_xibalba wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The group [Pichai, Page, and Porat] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said. [1] That they’ve actually discussed shutting it down in the recent past lends plausibility to this risk. In 2019, they set 2023 as a deadline for moving into the #2 spot ahead of Azure. Obviously, they’ve not gotten anywhere near that. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/…

Wow. Imagine top level execs at Ford discussing, but eventually dismissing--the idea of leaving the automobile market entirely. Their hearts really aren't in it as much as with AWS.

Ford, ironically, is an example of a company that has recently exited a huge business segment - they no longer make sedans. They now exclusively make SUVs and trucks. It is largely thought of as a pretty good move on their part.

Google probably should spin off GCP rather than killing it, but it's not a terrible idea to divest from a failing arm of a business. Google (like Intel) just does it too early.

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

#282

Post by maccard »

fbdab103 wrote: post #258
tjpnz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>unless you really are being abusive That doesn't put my mind at ease. Under who's definition? Do I even get told what I did wrong? You try to draw a distinction between the free and paid products but that doesn't address the perception people have of the company in general. If I was a small startup I wouldn't want to risk it.

I remember hearing a story about how one engineer had worked for something nefarious (spam? gambling? straight-up malware?) and got hired by a different company. Eventually something triggered on that engineer's account that caused Google to spread a blacklist to everyone's account at the new company. Potentially apocryphal, but it rings true enough that you have no idea what might anger the Google automation.

This is a fairly serious accusation. I'd really love to see some proof of that.

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

#283

Post by ggm »

AWS: there is a specific option to fix your specific problem, but it's buried in a menu with 258 choices in

  CamelCaseButWhichOne?
GCP:

  gcloud --butwhichone --orIsitThisOne --No-Dammit-Its-In-YAML=./yaml-file

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

#284

Post by dlubarov »

next_xibalba wrote: post #194
preommr wrote: 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…

> The group [Pichai, Page, and Porat] even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely, this person said. [1] That they’ve actually discussed shutting it down in the recent past lends plausibility to this risk. In 2019, they set 2023 as a deadline for moving into the #2 spot ahead of Azure. Obviously, they’ve not gotten anywhere near that. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/…

That doesn't sound plausible; this "person with direct knowledge" must have somehow received bad information or not been honest.

In 2019 GCP was generating $9b/yr revenue, making it second largest revenue source, and the fastest growing one.

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

#285

Post by gerash »

irrational wrote: post #159
preommr wrote: 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 work for a fortune 100 company. Years ago we looked at all the cloud providers trying to determine who to go with. Google was thrown out on the first day for this very reason. They simply cannot be trusted not to kill their products at the drop of a hat.

I was expecting rigorous analysis in terms of cost of services and the complexity/simplicity of offering, reliability figures, etc. but this fortune 100 company went with feelings

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

#286

Post by cco »

preommr wrote: 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'm a bit surprised they haven't spun GCP out of Google and into Alphabet.

Even if it's just to assuage fears.

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

#287

Post by deanCommie »

> GCP has done well integrating their different services together. GCP provides a smaller set of core primitives that are global and work well for lots of use cases. Pub/Sub is probably the best example I have for this. GCP has Pub/Sub. Pub/Sub seems flexible enough to replace most (all?) of AWS’ various queues.

I feel like if you're going to spend this much time writing something in this much detail, the least you can do is try to understand some of the things you're criticizing and not say things so wildly incorrect.

> In AWS you have SQS, SNS, Amazon MQ, Kinesis Data Streams, Kinesis Data Firehose, DynamoDB Streams, and maybe another queueing service by the time you read this post.

The most accurate criticism would be that Pub/Sub combines AWS's SQS and SNS. AWS had SQS first for 1-to-1 async queuing integrations. Then they added SNS for fan-out. GCP just started with fan-out from the start and said "well if you don't want to fan out, and just have one subscription, it's basically fine.

That's actually also true with AWS too - nobody is stopping you from using SNS this way. SQS was the first AWS service (S3 went "GA" first, though), and AWS doesn't deprecate things that are popular with customers.

Amazon MQ is Amazon's managed Apache MQ. You can criticize Amazon for hosting managed open source software, but there is a reason why it exists for customers that want to use an industry standard queueing service but not worry about operating it.

GCP's competitor to Kinesis isn't Pub/Sub, it's Dataflow -> https://cloud.google.com/dataflow Both are described as for the same use case - streaming, analytics, batch processing.

Kinesis Data Firehose may be another valid criticism. It can be thought of a "Simplified Kinesis that can push data instead of pulling it". It is clearly coupled tightly with Kinesis Data Streams itself, so in another company that cared less about not breaking backwards compatibility maybe they would've bolted those features on top of Kinesis.

DynamoDB Streams is also not a separate service. It's a feature of DynamoDB - streams data capture streams from a database. Exactly like... https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/docs/change-streams-overvi...

> 2019 Update: Amazon has now released another streaming service: Amazon Managed Streaming Kafka.

GCP also has a Managed Kafka service only theirs is a collaboration with Confluent: https://cloud.google.com/learn/what-is-apache-kafka

"Confluent Cloud on Google Cloud provides fully managed Apache Kafka as a service so you can focus on building apps and not managing clusters."

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

#288

Post by nucleardog »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
preommr wrote: 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 worked at an ad agency for a time. We were spending millions a year with Google on AdWords.

We onboarded a new client who had many different locations serving different brands. We set up these accounts, set up Google accounts for the locations to own/access the AdWords accounts, etc.

Out of about a dozen accounts, one got suspended.

There is no general Google Support for that. So I contacted AdWords support. They put in a ticket for me with the accounts team. They also told me it's unlikely I'd ever hear back about it and advised me that my best course of action was just to register a new account and hope that wasn't suspended too.

Three years later when I left that company, I was still getting occasional emails to remind me that my ticket was still open but there were no updates to provide.

Meanwhile, in AWS land...

With my personal AWS account (~$3k/yr spend) I've never had an issue getting in touch with support that can resolve any issue I raise. I accidentally bought a bunch of reservations under the wrong account and put a ticket in and they swapped them to the intended account right away. I raised a ticket about trying to use a new product and running into some issues that appeared to be on their end and a day later got an email from the lead engineer for the product.

At a company spending ~$250k/yr, not only could I access _the exact same support_, but we also had an account rep that would swing by the office once a month just to check in. We had his direct email and phone. He was actually empowered to do things. We had an AWS key leak and ran up over $100k in additional costs before we caught it and our payment didn't go through. Sent him an email and almost immediately got back to not worry about it--he'd put a note on the account that no action was to be taken without his approval. Shot off a ticket to support about the spend due to a security breach, and they asked us some basic questions to demonstrate that we knew how to prevent this happening again and then cancelled over $100k in charges. (Current company I'm at spends ~$360k/yr on GCP and we have no contact at Google.)

This isn't "conflating google's free product support with their B2B support". This is "google's culture does not leave room for providing proper product support".

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

#289

Post by gerash »

jsnell wrote: post #147
imwillofficial wrote: post #81

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…

This was eye opening

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

#290

Post by raincole »

gerash wrote: post #285
irrational wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a fortune 100 company. Years ago we looked at all the cloud providers trying to determine who to go with. Google was thrown out on the first day for this very reason. They simply cannot be trusted not to kill their products at the drop of a hat.

I was expecting rigorous analysis in terms of cost of services and the complexity/simplicity of offering, reliability figures, etc. but this fortune 100 company went with feelings

This is why starting your comment with "I work for a fortune 100 company" adds zero credibility to what's following.

It might adds negative credibility on HN.

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