Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#91

Post by ex1710_01 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

ssambros wrote: post #79

gingerlime wrote: post #78

One other thing I believe is worth mentioning -- and to be honest I was a bit surprised with -- is the ecosystem around GCP vs AWS. For example, we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP, but quite a few with AWS. I'm pretty sure there are other similar examples with other services.

> we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP Google Cloud recently released public beta for Memorystore Redis ( https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ ) which is a hosted opensource Redis on GCP. It is availabe in europe-west1 region so it might suit your needs. disclaimer: I am an engineer on Memorystore Redis team.

I apologize for bringing up something that is offtopic here but I am really glad to have read your comment.

Last I read in the docs, Memorystore was not accessible through the AppEngine Standard Environment, which was rather disappointing to me.

I was wondering if just providing the App Engine Standard Environment with the Redis instances address and credentials, along with a service account or IP whitelist for access, would not suffice to be usable there as well. If I'm not wrong, something similar is done in Flexible Environment according to the docs.

https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/connect-redi...

Thanks so much!

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#92

Post by wikibob » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 8:51 PM UTC

mmclean wrote: post #81

dantiberian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, I haven't used the Profiler yet, will check that out soon. What languages have you used it with? I'm looking to use it with the JVM profiler.

[SD APM PM here] Yep, we support Java / JVM, Node.js, and Go; Python is coming soon

What’s the long term plan here with StackDriver and OpenCensus?

Are you eventually going to support high cardinality events with the ability to aggregate and then break down (as opposed to say Prometheus which pre-aggregates, so you can’t break down to debug, and doesn’t support high cardinality).

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#93

Post by fishbone » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

neya wrote: post #37

Although the author mentions they haven't had experience with AppEngine, it's the reason why I love Google Cloud SO much over anything else. If you're a startup running something on Elixir (or even Rails), AppEngine's experience is hard to beat. Not many people do know: * You can run multiple microservices on AppEngine under one application. * Each of these can have many versions serving different percentages of traf…

I’ve been using AppEngine for years and really like it. Had an interesting billing issue recently.

I enabled a task queue to run a longer running task in the background but I didn’t realize there’s a default to retry failed tasks indefinitely. This started slowly increasing my front end instance hours (and my bill). A few hundred bucks later I figured it out and specified a retry attempts limit.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#94

Post by wikibob » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

mmclean wrote: post #81

dantiberian wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, I haven't used the Profiler yet, will check that out soon. What languages have you used it with? I'm looking to use it with the JVM profiler.

[SD APM PM here] Yep, we support Java / JVM, Node.js, and Go; Python is coming soon

Would you be willing to add a contact method in your profile (twitter/email) for some offline questions?

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#95

Post by jasonlotito » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #35

dantiberian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terraform is great because it lets you treat infrastructure as code, but I don't think it makes any promises about cloud agnosticism. In fact it's the opposite, each provider is specific to the service that they are offering. Rather than Terraform offering a lowest common denominator set of resource definitions, each provider can be designed to work in a way that most naturally maps to their offerings and API. In the…

In that case, if you're on AWS, then why not just use CloudFormation? CloudFormation is a lot more powerful on AWS than TF.

CloudFormation is just for AWS Services. We use terraform for more than just AWS Services. HCL is also much nicer to work with than CF. I've also never found anything CF can do that TF can't. I have, however, found many things TF can do that CF can't.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#96

Post by Drdrdrq » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

gingerlime wrote: post #75

This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience. Specifically, support and billing. We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would…

I am in a process of choosing between AWS and GC, and the reason I'm leaning towards AWS is that this is Amazon's primary business. They care about it and they know how to deal with customers. Google on the other hand... They could decide tomorrow that GAE is no longer something they want to deal with, and shut it down. Not likely, I agree, but their incentives and mine are not aligned.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#97

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #80

scarface74 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linked from Hashicorp’s Getting Started page... https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-aw...

Which is neither json or yaml...

It's yet another semi-json format that doesn't have widespread support by any other parsers. Even Hashicorp recommends JSON if you want something that is machine readable.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#98

Post by halbritt » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

fredliu wrote: post #68

I see lots of evaluation of GCP, or comparison between GCP vs AWS recently. But I don't see as many for the Azure platform, although Azure being the 2nd in the cloud provider market, and even closing on AWS in market share. Anybody has any insights on this?

I've used Azure a bit and it's been pretty painful for the most part. There are three, maybe four identity management systems (Azure native, MS Live, Hosted AD, others?). Working with the SDKs and doing programmatic authentication was painful.

I did a fair bit with AKS. It had a lot of shortcomings that would take a while to go into. They ended up suggesting I use ACS-engine.

There are some products that are neat, that I haven't really used at scale, but seem good. Most of the bigdata stuff is pretty legit based on my limited usage.

The customers of my employer are large enterprises. Azure definitely has penetration there. I only have a small sampling, but many of them end up leaving Azure for AWS.

None of them are really considering GCP.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#99

Post by wikibob » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #30

pbrumm wrote: post #7

well written. Things I would add to the Good side. - ability to commit to multi year cpu/ram without upfront costs - they can live migrate your vm to new physical hardware, so no need to have random reboots of your instances - https load balancers allow traffic around the world to enter google network closest to user, this reduces handshakes and reduces comcast like outages to affect users. the above greatly decrease…

> they can live migrate your vm to new physical hardware, so no need to have random reboots of your instances Having supported VMWare at multiple locations, and having worked for a smaller cloud host, it shocks me that AWS don't support live migrations. VMWare can live-migrate VMs between datacenters in different geographic regions, while maintaining active sessions!

Technical debt. AWS had first mover advantage but now is saddled with the decisions they had to make to move fast at the time.

Re: Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

#100

Post by halbritt » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

gingerlime wrote: post #75

This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience. Specifically, support and billing. We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would…

Support seems pathologically bad. Obviously, the support people aren't well trained in all the various products and modes of failure, but they make no effort, take no ownership, and don't really escalate to engineering staff without a lot of hassle.

Had a problem with kube-api going down. I have alerting setup to detect such a thing. Opened a ticket, "I noticed outages for kube-api" gave them the specific times for the alerts, asked for an RFO and got back a response, "can you send me a screenshot of your monitoring software." Following which the support person set the case to "customer pending".

This kind of thing happens on 100% of the cases I open, usually multiple times from multiple support staff.