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Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

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Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#81

Post by thayne »

foxylad wrote: post #41

Can HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame "Google cancels all the stuff" posts? Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever? If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now,…

> every time they've decided to deprecate services, there's always plenty of notice

Ah, but with AWS, if something is deprecated, generally they tell you you should use something else, but the old way will continue to work indefinitely. You can switch over on your own timeframe.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#82

Post by asciimike »

igorhvr wrote: post #65
foxylad wrote: post #41

Can HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame "Google cancels all the stuff" posts? Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever? If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now,…

The thing is they change/deprecate/retire paid-for services too (in a brutal contrast with the competiton). Two quotes from one of the posts referenced in the submission (from Steve Yegge): ...I know I haven’t gone into a lot of specific details about GCP’s deprecations. I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with…

On the first, I've worked as a PM on Firebase, App Engine, and Endpoints.

Nobody has been forced to migrate from the Firebase RTDB to Firestore (and AFAICT the Firestore API hasn't deprecated anything?), App Engine deprecations (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations) are basically "you can't do new things using these old things, but the old ones will continue to run" (though other deprecations I've done have provided clear explanations of why we're deprecating and how someone can work around it), and Endpoints is still around despite being comically out of date (it's even getting a managed version!).

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#83

Post by mtlynch »

foxylad wrote: post #41

Can HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame "Google cancels all the stuff" posts? Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever? If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now,…

>If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now, and every time they've decided to deprecate services, there's always plenty of notice, a superior replacement, and usually lower costs.

Really? I've had the complete opposite experience on AppEngine as a paying customer.

I was using Python2 AppEngine with ndb and the Users API. Cloud Datastore + ndb automagically cached your data and worked pretty nicely. When they moved to Firestore, they dropped that feature and recommended you buy your own Redis DB and manage caching yourself. They got rid of the Users API entirely and forced apps onto OAuth, which is much more complicated to integrate.

They old AppEngine emulator worked really nicely as well, in that you could emulate a pretty full AppEngine environment locally. When they moved from Python 2 to 3, they dropped most of the emulator's features. True, AppEngine apps require less AppEngine-specific code, so there's less need for an emulator, but it's still useful for testing certain scenarios. I checked recently and it seemed like they had improved their emulator, but I believe there was about a year where there was no Admin UI for their emulators like there had been for AppEngine Python2.

It's all caused me to move away from AppEngine and rely more on vendor-agnostic stacks.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#84

Post by dilyevsky »

slenk wrote: post #52
throwaway894345 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just completed a migration from AWS to GCP. My experience was previously entirely AWS, but GCP has been really nice. GCP has fewer features (e.g., no scheduled filestore backups), but GKE is far and away better than EKS and the overall console UX is far better as well. There’s also generally less to understand and thus misconfigure, and far fewer half-baked features to wade through to find the happy path (I’ve spen…

I feel you on Cloudformation :S I haven't used Kubernetes on either platform - so there may be more to that. One thing I really dislike about GCP is how expensive it is for personal or hobby use. I burned through $300 for a simple vm on GCP in a few weeks because their cheapest instances are so expensive.

How? Their single core instance is like $25/mo, it took me months to burn through it

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#85

Post by asciimike »

ethbr0 wrote: post #57
DistressedDrone wrote: post #54

> The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft-currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share-or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by…

Pull a page from Microsoft's book and count every Gmail user as a Google Cloud user.

They sorta did that by counting GSuite as "Cloud", but I don't think it's reported quite the same as O365 == Azure.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#87

Post by asciimike »

junon wrote: post #78
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a billing issue look like? Is it something trivial, like they charged you for $X+X, but you only used $X (e.g., they double billed you -- should be solvable with a phone call)? Or more complex, e.g, they charged for more egress than you actually used (kind of hard to prove or disprove after the fact)?

Not GP, but in my experience, AWS bills run away from you if you're not careful. They don't have great tooling (or, at least, accessible or intuitive tooling) to determine what your bill is going to be, or to set limits. Pair that with a misconfiguration because of their horrendous web interface, and you're in for a surprisingly large bill at the end of the month. Google, on the other hand, has some of the best tooli…

The last startup I was at repeatedly ended up with $25k AWS bills due to runaway elastic search clusters or dynamodb. The only reason we resolved them was due to us having hired our former AWS account rep.

I got my fair share of those from customers while at GCP, but I agree that in the past several years GCP has gotten much better at billing infra given all the problems we heard of...

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#88

Post by EdwardDiego »

XorNot wrote: post #27
fortyrod wrote: post #22

Probably would have been better for the author to have taken the "don't sell out to a single cloud vendor API" angle. But I guess no clicky-baits for that approach. I've been screwed over by both AWS and Azure, and never by GCloud, but that doesn't mean I trust any of them.

The best (silliest) business model I've seen is the new thing of vendors promising to make you cross-cloud...via locking you into the platform offered by the vendor (which is usually entirely hosted on one specific cloud provider anyway). There's valid reasons to support multiple providers, but that is definitely not one of them.

K8s tends to work well as a basis for abstracting away the specific cloud provider to an extent.

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#89

Post by igorhvr »

johncena33 wrote: post #80
igorhvr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Submitter (& author) here. I just changed the submission title to exactly match the original.

May I ask why did you change the title to begin with?

I thought the new title better but I did not want to change the original (because I had already shared the link with friends), so I just changed when submitting. Should've gone with the original...

Re: Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

#90

Post by treesknees »

tantalor wrote: post #42
tarikjn wrote: post #9

Google generally does not come off to me as having a great customer support culture. To appreciate the scale of the issue, take a look at the hoops and blackboxes merchants who want to be listed on Google Shopping have to go through and all the horror stories online. I did notice on Google Workspace and Google One that they do seem to be trying to improve the support experience.

Can you give an example or link? Not very useful comment otherwise.

Gotta love a typical hackernews comment begging for links instead of just searching for it yourself. On the contrary I don't think your comment is useful either.
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