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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

kevinslin.com

381–390 of 394 posts

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several reasons: - Google has a lot of experience running containerized services because of Borg. Google Research says that they have been running these workloads since 2005. - The above gives them insight into how to do this well. They would have the internal infrastructure, logging and monitoring already setup. - They are the creator and still a major contributor to Kubernetes itself which means they can…

The Borg thing is pure marketing. Amazon also has been running internally on containers for years before ECS. But workloads for massive FAANG companies designed by FAANG engineers turn out to be quite different than most AWS/GCP customers. Just like EC2 wasn't Amazon selling its "spare capacity during off-peak" but always a purpose built service with completely isolated data centers and network fabric from day 1, the…

I only have one thing to point out about Borg and that is large numbers of Borg developers started working on Kubernetes. They got rid of Borg mistakes and replaced them with all new mistakes. :)

I don't see K8S being about lock-in at all. Using a cloud provider gives you some sort of lock-in and you should be utilizing that providers strengths.

Using Kubernetes is all about the patterns that it provides and how it removes a certain class of problems for you. Deployments, scaling, logging, etc are some of the patterns it provides and the consistency matters. How many of us have worked at companies where deploying two services have been completely different? One team runs the jenkins pipeline while another ftps the files over. Now multiply that by several services and several tasks (logging, scaling, etc).

The benefit is in the patterns.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#382

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Sounds familiar. Product and sales areas of the business look at immediate revenues - and hopefully profit - but are always more keen to do that at the cost of increasing technical debt within the engineering side of the business. Unless sales see a real impact to technical debt, they will always choose the short-term approach.

Agreed, and I don't think that's even necessarily the worst thing. It just means that engineering and product/sales have to have a conversation, mutual trust, and a shared vision that extends beyond the next quarter. These are hard things to cultivate, however.

Most of the places I've seen this go bad were because one side was incentivized to not care about the other.

If product has PM or financial incentives that reward without regard to technical debt...

If engineering has PM or financial incentives that reward without regard to user experience...

If you want people to cooperate, set up shared, team-based incentives!

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#383

We spend 100s of 1000’s of dollars a month on AWS. Our rep tried getting me to upgrade to paid support, and I said there was no way I was going to do that. I’m already paying AWS millions a year and will be giving them more and more business as Loom continues to skyrocket in usage. No way I’m paying for support at that scale. It’s a bogus model to charge your customers more when they’re continuing to accelerate in gr…

The way that support is paid for within AWS is roughly like the way that tipping works in the US at a restaurant. The cost of the 'food' doesn't include the cost of your server/support person. Everybody knows that and so you pay the server separately in the form of a tip - usually as a % of the bill.

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Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way that support is paid for within AWS is roughly like the way that tipping works in the US at a restaurant. The cost of the 'food' doesn't include the cost of your server/support person. Everybody knows that and so you pay the server separately in the form of a tip - usually as a % of the bill.

Does AWS not pay their support staff and engineers salaries?

btw my comment/question here is genuine - I want to know so I know I'm not potentially missing something critical and being a jerk

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#385
post #164

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This has also been my experience. When we first launched on GCP, there was no question that it was the way to go (frankly, because of BigQuery). Working with AWS, when we launched, was going to cost us significantly more up-front, before we had even brought on our first customer. Fast forward 5 years... AWS has closed the gap in every way that matters. I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's, but…

(I work at AWS) > I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than Amazon's If you have the time, could you expand on this? While I'm not directly involved in security at AWS, I'd be down to forward your thoughts to people who do.

Just wanted to say thanks for the responses. I've forwarded this comment chain over to some people who are interested in this space.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#386
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and I don't think that's even necessarily the worst thing. It just means that engineering and product/sales have to have a conversation, mutual trust, and a shared vision that extends beyond the next quarter. These are hard things to cultivate, however.

Most of the places I've seen this go bad were because one side was incentivized to not care about the other. If product has PM or financial incentives that reward without regard to technical debt... If engineering has PM or financial incentives that reward without regard to user experience... If you want people to cooperate, set up shared, team-based incentives!

I agree. In whichever case, blaming individual engineers seems weird. Rarely are individual engineers to blame, and even when they are the organization should be robust enough to route around the occasional deficient engineer.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work at Google on Cloud, and am now an AWS customer. Have used both clouds extensively. My comments are mostly backed up by my experience at startups and are not colored by my experience at Google (too different a beast). GCP is great for teams that are also using GSuite because you can set permissions at the level of a Google Group and have them propagate to individual members. You can, of course, also cre…

Gone deep on IAM in AWS, attempted a similar thing on GCP later for another project, was very surprised how weak GCP IAM was. Top of mind things I found weak/weird: - Basically can’t do least privilege, only want a role to read messages from one pubsub queue? Nope not possible - IAM policies seem bolted on, legacy roles seem much better fit in the ecosystem, but they suck obvs. - different gcp resources have somewher…

Haha, my company is still pretty small and I have very few policies with star-less ARNs. :)

But I agree, AWS IAM is some black magic and is very powerful.

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#388

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To be fair, Covid likely played a part in that long silence. I believe there was even a hiring freeze for a bit in spring. Not that it excuses bad behavior...

I had virtually the same experience in 2018. Gave me an offer for less than half I was currently making too. It crushed me because I found a team that I was unbelievably excited to work with.

I should mention though that I did re-apply last year and they were much more prompt

Re: Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

#389

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you only get billing/account support unless you have subscription, starting at 150 US$ month

That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some really general and technical questions of AWS support and always received a helpful reply without a paid support plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is better. In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases, they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly. Our other experience…

Speaking from experience, yes, customer issues that can't be answered by support agents do get escalated to the engineering (and PM) teams.
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