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We don't use GUI to manage our resources. We use CloudFormation for AWS and Deployment Manager for Google. Let me tell you a couple of things about those servic

We don't use GUI to manage our resources. We use CloudFormation for AWS and Deployment Manager for Google. Let me tell you a couple of things about those services. In AWS some resources are zonal, some regional and some are global. It's a mess to work with. For example, same AMI image has different ids in different regions. You need to create maps and stuff to make your code work across regions. Come to Google Cloud, no more zonal/regional/global fuss. An image is a global resource. It's available by the same id in all regions. Your infrastructure template looks much cleaner. Combine the power of Jinja, you can create far powerful templates and evaluate them on the fly. AWS has "three" queuing systems, "two" storage solutions with different API's and different quirks. Google just has one and its nails the use cases for queuing and storage. AWS micro-instance go poof, without any notice. Their NATS are known for being unreliable. Load balancers can't scale. Every service that I looked into, Google is way better than AWS.

matwood 11y ago
AWS definitely feels like a product that has grown organically and needs some house cleaning. GC was able to look at AWS, take those lessons, and improve from the start.
- StreamBright 11y ago
  Being late for the party has its perks. The also need more work on convincing people moving over and they do a good job with Spotify and other companies who talk openly about moving to GCP.
defen 11y ago
For me, GCP comes with unquantifiable existence risk. As in, how do I know that it won't get shut down in 5 years when some VP sees that it's not bringing in as much money as it should? I trust Amazon more in this regard, and their offering is not "so bad" that I feel a need to switch.
- AdamN 11y ago
  Existence risk here is HUGE. If GCP doesn't move the needle, Google will shut it down. AWS is a much more living organism and I can't see Amazon shutting it down before their drones take over ...
  - mikecb 11y ago
    To shut down GCP, they would be shutting down the same services and infrastructure that power their own services. The dogfooding memo from years back is being taken to heart, and you're seeing more and more exposure of internal services and infrastructure. The scary thing would be if it ends up reducing the rate of innovation because they worry about changing APIs or services too much; obsolete accumulates quickly when you're serving large numbers of people because most business want to write once run till it's dead. But this is true of any service that exposes anything but an extreme abstraction.
    - sofaofthedamned 11y ago
      Exactly. If it wasn't making the money they'd just be shutting the public interface to this thing. It's not like it's orthogonal to their usual business, which is lots of computers and storage doing random workloads.
  - dcgoss 11y ago
    Right after they sealed the huge deal with Spotify? Seems like a near-term shutdown is unlikely.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Not just the whole platform, but specific APIs / services being deprecated / shut down too. Amazon isn't untouched by this problem (see also: VPC migration from EC2 Classic) , but I agree that given their reputation, I don't trust Google to keep even very useful widely-loved stuff around forever.
- abrookewood 11y ago
  Yes, unfortunately, GCE's reputation is tarnished by Google's approach to consumer-level services. I hope this changes over time - we need more competitors in this space.
mayank 11y ago
> AWS has "three" queuing systems, "two" storage solutions with different API's and different quirks. Google just has one and its nails the use cases for queuing and storage. This is not currently true. Google has: Datastore, Cloud SQL, Bigtable, BigQuery and Cloud Storage [1]. Each is intended for a different use case, as are Amazon's offerings. [1] https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/overview#datastore_and_other_storage_options https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/overview#da...
- jsolson 11y ago
  (disclaimer: I work on Google Compute Engine) For queuing AWS has at least SQS and SNS, both of which solve roughly half of what's commonly desired from a queuing system. Google Cloud PubSub coalesces both of these behind a single API that provides clear support for common queuing patterns (1:1, 1:n, n:1, n:n). In terms of storage, I think what the OP was referring to was S3 versus Glacier when compared against Cloud Storage (which offers competitors to both S3 and Glacier within the same API -- just mark a bucket as Nearline as pay less for cold stored objects). If you count all of the additional AWS services that are logical equivalents to the Google ones mentioned you have SimpleDB, RDS, DynamoDB, and Redshift. So yes, many options for many different use cases, but Google coalesces things under a single API where the "verbs" are the same (as in the case of blob storage).
abrookewood 11y ago
Long-time user of AWS. I've never had a NAT service fail, nor a micro-instance disappear. I haven't had much exposure to GCE, but the removal of zones etc is interesting. How do you guarantee that your servers aren't sitting in the same data centre?

matwood 11y ago

AWS definitely feels like a product that has grown organically and needs some house cleaning. GC was able to look at AWS, take those lessons, and improve from the start.

StreamBright 11y ago
Being late for the party has its perks. The also need more work on convincing people moving over and they do a good job with Spotify and other companies who talk openly about moving to GCP.

defen 11y ago

For me, GCP comes with unquantifiable existence risk. As in, how do I know that it won't get shut down in 5 years when some VP sees that it's not bringing in as much money as it should? I trust Amazon more in this regard, and their offering is not "so bad" that I feel a need to switch.

AdamN 11y ago
Existence risk here is HUGE. If GCP doesn't move the needle, Google will shut it down. AWS is a much more living organism and I can't see Amazon shutting it down before their drones take over ...
- mikecb 11y ago
  To shut down GCP, they would be shutting down the same services and infrastructure that power their own services. The dogfooding memo from years back is being taken to heart, and you're seeing more and more exposure of internal services and infrastructure. The scary thing would be if it ends up reducing the rate of innovation because they worry about changing APIs or services too much; obsolete accumulates quickly when you're serving large numbers of people because most business want to write once run till it's dead. But this is true of any service that exposes anything but an extreme abstraction.
  - sofaofthedamned 11y ago
    Exactly. If it wasn't making the money they'd just be shutting the public interface to this thing. It's not like it's orthogonal to their usual business, which is lots of computers and storage doing random workloads.
- dcgoss 11y ago
  Right after they sealed the huge deal with Spotify? Seems like a near-term shutdown is unlikely.
seanp2k2 11y ago
Not just the whole platform, but specific APIs / services being deprecated / shut down too. Amazon isn't untouched by this problem (see also: VPC migration from EC2 Classic) , but I agree that given their reputation, I don't trust Google to keep even very useful widely-loved stuff around forever.
abrookewood 11y ago
Yes, unfortunately, GCE's reputation is tarnished by Google's approach to consumer-level services. I hope this changes over time - we need more competitors in this space.

mayank 11y ago

> AWS has "three" queuing systems, "two" storage solutions with different API's and different quirks. Google just has one and its nails the use cases for queuing and storage. This is not currently true. Google has: Datastore, Cloud SQL, Bigtable, BigQuery and Cloud Storage [1]. Each is intended for a different use case, as are Amazon's offerings. [1] https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/overview#datastore_and_other_storage_options https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/overview#da...

jsolson 11y ago
(disclaimer: I work on Google Compute Engine) For queuing AWS has at least SQS and SNS, both of which solve roughly half of what's commonly desired from a queuing system. Google Cloud PubSub coalesces both of these behind a single API that provides clear support for common queuing patterns (1:1, 1:n, n:1, n:n). In terms of storage, I think what the OP was referring to was S3 versus Glacier when compared against Cloud Storage (which offers competitors to both S3 and Glacier within the same API -- just mark a bucket as Nearline as pay less for cold stored objects). If you count all of the additional AWS services that are logical equivalents to the Google ones mentioned you have SimpleDB, RDS, DynamoDB, and Redshift. So yes, many options for many different use cases, but Google coalesces things under a single API where the "verbs" are the same (as in the case of blob storage).

abrookewood 11y ago

Long-time user of AWS. I've never had a NAT service fail, nor a micro-instance disappear. I haven't had much exposure to GCE, but the removal of zones etc is interesting. How do you guarantee that your servers aren't sitting in the same data centre?