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Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

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Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#81
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand AWS and GCP services almost have a 1-to-1 mapping; so one only need to know one platform to be able to start working with the other.

After 2-3 years of working with one then the other, yes and no. They can be quite similar on some accounts, but not quite the same. GCP also has that very Google thing of having very slightly different yet still kind of competing products at the same time.

So does AWS. For just messaging there is SQS, SNS, Amazon MQ, Event Bridge, Kinesis, MSK and probably a couple more tied to product families like IoT and video streaming.

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#82
post #47

I see some Google Cloud folks in the comments, so question for you, if you're able to share: There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this jus…

When a company like Deutsche Bank [1] signs a 10-year deal, you can be sure that they have been convinced that the products they rely on will not go anywhere. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-07/google-de... (Google Cloud employee here)

Comment like this makes me wonder if you ever worked in enterprise before. Plenty of services/products have been cancelled/mothballed on large enterprise contracts once the services/products are no longer profitable, the services/products generally get sunsetted.

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#83
post #47

I see some Google Cloud folks in the comments, so question for you, if you're able to share: There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this jus…

Yes, that's happening, promotion process at Google is doing it. Take a look at Pubsub, IOT, and Datalab

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#84
post #47

I see some Google Cloud folks in the comments, so question for you, if you're able to share: There seems to be a general fear about Google potentially killing off a product, based on recent history [1]. Now I know most of these are on the consumer side of things, but you can imagine people's concerns if the same thing started happening to Google Cloud products. Is the GCP team aware of these concerns, (or is this jus…

Yes, that's happening, promotion process at Google is doing it. Take a look at Pubsub, IOT, and Datalab

Whats happening with pubsub?

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#85
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: Do they kill off GCP services/features? Often? More or less than AWS?

As a user of GCP, this really feels like a HackerNews meme that doesn't have any substance. I have never had a GCP feature killed, but I've had many AWS features mothballed. I am not really sure how to change the perception here since it's easy to say: "Google kills products-- therefore I will never use any Google product†" † Except search, email and phone.

We've had to deal with a few. They removed a gcs api a couple years ago and told you to update to the newest version of the sdks. obviously they didnt tell you which version it was actually fixed in, figuring that out was an adventure in itself. everyone's runs off master right? Worse, they hadnt even updated all of them by that point.

We updated to working versions, but support kept telling us we were using the old one. Turns out they didnt update the dataflow runtime, which they own and we cant inspect or update, and they were reporting it to us for us to fix...

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#86
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firebase is kind of weird. It's like a Cloud in a Cloud.

I figured the characterization is Firebase is a PaaS (similar to Heroku) where Google Cloud is IaaS.

Not exactly. Yes, I would probably characterize Firebase as a PaaS, but Google Cloud is much more than just IaaS, as it includes some PaaS components, like App Engine.

I would say the general idea behind Firebase is that it is designed to build fully functional applications without any additional components. E.g. you could serve your static web app using Firebase Hosting, manage users with Firebase Auth, use Firestore for data storage (the syncing features of Firestore are truly amazing if you're not familiar with them), and tie things together with Cloud Functions. Also, note that while Firebase was originally pretty heavily focused on mobile, especially native mobile, most of their services work great on the web regardless.

The other thing about Firebase (referencing the previous comment about it being a little weird as a "Cloud in a Cloud"), is that it essentially exists on top of GCP. For example, a Firebase Project is really a GCP project under the covers, Cloud Functions for Firebase are really some syntactic sugar on top of GCP functions, etc. While that can be a little confusing at first, it can provide some great value. We have apps where most of our backend is in GCP (e.g. running Node in App Engine Flexible, using Cloud SQL Postgres for our DB, using Cloud PubSub topics for our eventing system, etc.) but then we use Firebase Auth for our user authentication, Firebase Hosting to serve our React app, etc.

Yes, I'm a definite Firebase fan boy, but that's because I feel like I can be so productive with it, without needing to worry much about underlying infrastructure, while still being easy to integrate with the horsepower of GCP.

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#88
post #38
post #17

The major cloud providers REALLY need to focus on fixing years old bugs in their widely used offerings instead of launching new ones. I guess the incentives are out of whack tho, since a working and widely used but slightly broken offering will be used by their existing customers. But if a competitor beats them to the next major thing, they will lose customers as they migrate over to use it. So they're in a kind of a…

I wonder if it would be possible to run a site where people submit and rate bugs/enhancements/workarounds in cloud products. E.g. AWS Config doesn't support service X or sharing ENIs across NLB target groups can ruin your day.

Azure has the feedback forum: https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback

It supports ranking, and you can even assign 1, 2, or 3 votes for a specific issue depending on how important it is to you.

Of course, this doesn't matter, because this is just where customers are told to go complain by support. It's like telling an upset child to shout at a wall to get their "feelings out".

A casual stroll through the list of suggestions will quickly uncovers hundreds and hundreds that would be a trivial fix, but has a huge impact on customers. Some of these have languished for years with either no feedback or "WONTFIX".

Azure Active Directory in particular has some shocking open issues.

My favourite is that you can't stop an App Service so that it stops spending money! You can only delete it. If you downgrade it to the Free tier, that removes features by wiping and corrupting you configuration. This keeps coming up over and over, and the response is: "We don't want to, shh, go away"

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/287593-logic-apps/suggesti...

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion...

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion...

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps/suggestion...

The next best one is that the Portal team absolutely refuses to implement a default region option in the GUI, forcing 100% of their GUI users to click through that unnecessary extra selection every single time.

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/223579-azure-portal/sugges...

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/34192--general-feedback/su...

It's a fun page to dig through, some of the gaps are just so glaring as to beggar belief.

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#89
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, AWS Opsworks. It felt like once containers came into vogue, they stopped working on the product and it was nigh impossible to switch back to vanilla Chef.

Oh, I misunderstood what you meant by mothballed. Still, that is honestly a good example of why AWS is so much more reliable than GCP. AWS will keep the service running as-is even if they don't make any changes to it. GCP would just deprecate it instead and kill it off completely. Maybe that hasn't affected you yet, but the available evidence says that it has burnt plenty of people. We can't even be sure whether GCP…

> Maybe that hasn't affected you yet, but the available evidence says that it has burnt plenty of people.

What evidence are you referring to here?

Re: Google Cloud products in 4 words or less

#90
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it it has to be memeable. Imagine technical manages bickering in front of their managers. "Let me get this straight, Google canceled a service and you didn't see it coming?" ^ this needs a comeback. "Let me get this straight, you ran into another AWS scaling limit and you didn't see it coming?" or something.

If I had a dime for every time I see a convoluted architecture in our code that only exists due to the arbitrary hard limits in AWS I'd be able to quit and never again worry about arbitrary AWS limits.

I'm pretty sure they aren't arbitrary at all and are mostly due to managed and serverless offerings backed by duct tape and chewing gum. On a few occasions I have been left with all-but-proof that behind the "let us handle scaling for you" smoke and mirrors is a bash script on an EC2 instance sized by guesswork and hardcoded until you complain, at which point support might be able to shuffle it between instance types to eek out a bit more vertical scaling.
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