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Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

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Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#331

Post by madrox »

This is a hard problem for any sufficiently large application...web or otherwise. Solving it, in my experience, requires a strongly supported central body focused on managing code quality across teams. I know this is a relatively straightforward exercise with large React apps. I've never seen it done with Angular to know how difficult that is. Doing this all comes with a cost of maintaining that team and possibly slower development, of course.

However, I assert that no cloud provider has won or lost significant cloud deals based on the speed of their UI, and most engineers who live in the cloud do so through CLI tools. While people may not like it, and perhaps it's caused some engineers to do something different for personal projects, this is rightly not a KPI for Google Cloud, hence the state of of the cloud console.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#332

Post by rasz »

>JavaScript 15.7 MB

Some time ago Google moved away from rendering pages server side. Youtube right now downloads 1MB of mostly json packed data for client side rendering. Irony of this is old Youtube layout (pre Polymer, their client side YT rendering engine) downloaded ~30KB of pre rendered html. The difference to users is Youtube website visibly slowly appearing in front of your eyes (while one CPU core is pegged at 100%) instead of Old YT just loading instantly and working.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#333

Post by [deleted] »

_Microft wrote: post #15

User to Dev: the memory usage is excessive. Dev with 256 GB RAM to User: WFM I would not be surprised if a lot of these problems could be traced back to developers having above-average network connections and super beefy computers. Combine that with fresh or minimal installs while testing the software, without lots of data that accumulated over month or years of use and in consequence they experience their products a…

[deleted]

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#334

Post by shadowgovt »

daxfohl wrote: post #307
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 the product as a whole is chasing feature parity, not speed of UI. I thought google was actively avoiding parity-chasing, opting to "do their own thing, which will be better" instead. Or have I just been drinking the kool-aid?

While they do have some initiatives that are unique, the Cloud org's goal is absolutely "Beat Amazon and Microsoft at the market-share game." Which means they need all the meat-and-potatoes features (storage, compute, short-lived functions, monitoring and analysis, permissions on all of the above).

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#335

Post by r1ch »

polytely wrote: post #277
pimlottc wrote: post #111

The G Suite (now Google Workplace) admin console GUI is also pretty slow. What makes it worse is that you have no other choice - it's the only complete tool for administrating G Suite. There are APIs for some things, but quite a lot is only available in the GUI, and new features always show up there first (if they ever make it to the API at all). There isn't even a way to import/export settings, so you have to painst…

G Suite is the worst piece of shit I have to use in my work and I curse the developers every time I'm forced to use it. It's like they went out of their way to make the worst design choices at every point. It would be impressive if it wasn't so depressing.

I can't even get through to G Suite support lately since the only way is through the admin console chat bot, which is bugged and freezes at "transfer me to Cloud Support". Absolutely one of the worst products I have to use on a day-to-day basis.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#336

Post by lowdose »

I can find my way easier in Google Cloud than in AWS. The services are also more polished and seem more mature compared to AWS. I'm about to give Google Colab Pro a try because the free version has been deteriorating.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#337

Post by steren »

stingraycharles wrote: post #270
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…

Stackdriver Monitoring is now fully merged into the Cloud Console.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#338

Post by aprdm »

landerwust wrote: post #330
aprdm wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't this simple. You have millions of LoC already written, docs, onboarding, hundreds of teams with different opinions, training people in a different tech stack. In green field development or smaller companies, sure, I however do not find it as exciting since there are not real people / technical challenges most of the time, once you compare with what you can build with 1000s of engineers.

I do not miss Google's monorepo one iota. It had huge benefits, but after stepping back far enough the result also easily begins to look a little like Stockholm syndrome. Anything they want to open source they basically have to rewrite from scratch because of that godawful repo, never mind reasoning about what actually ended up in your binary on any particular day when depending on such a gargantuan tree, and of cour…

Can you expand on "If I came across a codebase like that today, I'd likely be quite vocal on reallocating the evidently outsized engineering budget to some more productive use"

Like, Google (or other company) still has to deliver to production and they do so using their existing system. I believe not supporting the existing system means not having deliveries.

I am actually facing a similar issue in my current job and it isn't an easy thing to move away from.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#339

Post by arcturus17 »

luord wrote: post #313

Knowing that the target audience for this is developers (for the most part), the decision to make it a javascript application in the first place instead of rendering from the server seems like overkill, at least IMO. Maybe it's just me, but I don't really care about fewer page reloads or having multiple animations and interactivity. I understand why those can have an impact on end users and so I do think that SPAs ha…

SSR wouldn't mean it'd be faster because it could have still been coded like spaghetti.

You sound reasonable and I'm not directing this to you in particular, but there is a clear bias on HN that SPA sites are inherently slower or less performant, which is not true at all. Either can be fast or slow.

The debate around SPA and SSR is so heated and centered on the front-end bit that people forget that UX performance depends a lot on the server. Websites are client-server systems regardless of the front-end architecture.

I'd wager that the case of GCP is no different and that the perceived slow UIs are caused by problems all across the stack.

Re: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow?

#340

Post by pjmlp »

XCSme wrote: post #80
levosmetalo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone assuming that just because someone works for Google has to be competent? Solving algorithmic puzzles is not an indicator or actual technical skills. To me, it looks like a work of incompetent developers led by incompetent technical managers upon requirements of clueless and ignorant product managers.

I used to think Google hires only "top" developers. Lately I think they mostly hire average or below-average people which resulted in products of average or below-average quality.

Besides well known computing idols, it is basically who is able to put up with their hiring process and manages to score a job offer.
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