15 ms·

Why We Moved from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform

361 points by jganetsk 10y ago

pw 10y ago
Anyone run Ruby on GAE's new "Flexible Environment"?
- matt4077 10y ago
  Thought about it, but I believe it was the pricing model that made it rather unattractive compared to just running Compute Engines.
jvehent 10y ago
Does anyone have feedback running app at scale in Google Cloud for more than one year?
- pbbakkum 10y ago
  We've been running it for about a year to power Quizlet - overall things have been good and we're happy. AWS and GCP are complicated enough that they're tough to compare holistically, but on most of the things we care about we find GCP to be equivalent or better (sometimes significantly) than AWS. It really does have better networking and disk technology, and the pricing is much better. Here's the analysis we did: https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp. Rough patches are: - Live migration is sometimes not seamless. - Pub/sub is missing some core features.
  - BrandonY 10y ago
    Can I ask what the Pub/sub features you miss are?
    - ryangordon 10y ago
      Mainly Pub/Sub does not let a single subscription subscribe to multiple topics
1_2__3 10y ago
That was so much handwaving in an article that if you put your palm in front of the screen you'd hear clapping.
cagataygurturk 10y ago
You moved because you did not understand how to run AWS wisely.
- tbrock 10y ago
  Most people don't have time for that. Just give me kubernetes or GAE. I'm convinced Google's infrastructure play will ultimately win the hearts and minds of developers because they understand this.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- lallysingh 10y ago
  There's an implication that AWS requires more effort to understand how to run it wisely than google's offering. Depends on lots of factors, obviously.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    You should always understand the underlying fundamentals of something you're using. If not, be prepared for the eventual pain.
    - KirinDave 10y ago
      I'm sorry, but this is not a sustainable strategy for modern society. Consumers, entrepreneurs, corporations, they all interface with technology and social constructs they do not fully understand as part of daily life.
      - jjnoakes 10y ago
        And enough of them get burned by that lack of knowledge. Some may be comfortable with that lottery, others are not. For most, it depends on the risk of an issue (mostly measured ad-hoc by how many times you hear of others having an issue) vs the potential pain one would feel if an issue arises. For a business's core infrastructure, I've heard enough so that the risk is high enough, when taken together with the potential loss of everything, that I make it a point to spend time and effort to understand as much as I can about what I rely on. For walking down the sidewalk, no one is suggesting that you understand the fundamentals of concrete curing. The risk of something happening to you must be practically zero, and the potential harm if something does also seems quite low. Of course, there's always going to be a success story in the midst of the crowd where someone flew by the seat of their pants and everything worked out. I happen to think that's a minority, and I also don't feel comfortable gambling with my business like that. But to each their own.
serge2k 10y ago
> Want to run a message bus? AWS will make your head spin with SNS, SQS, Kinesis, Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose. GCP has only Pub/Sub which just works and is insanely scalable. This point is oddly weak in comparison to the others. > Amazon has one of the most confusing IAM. While it is nice to set up a role to only allows usage for a particular resource from a specific device and times of day, you end up spending most of your time debugging policies. Haven't used GCP, but I didn't mind IAM. Missed it when I waas trying to figure out Azure stuff. > We moved because we wanted to work on infrastructure that runs YouTube, Gmail and Google Analytics. We moved because Google is fair, much more tech-savvy and launch products that just works. ugh. Perfectly fine article now just reeks of google "fanboy-ism".
- groupmonoid 10y ago
  To add to your point: > Google lets you set up simple Firewall rules. Amazon gives you VPC, security groups, network access control lists and a big, fat headache. AWS also gives you firewall rules, in addition to the other options. If you don't get why you would need them, you don't really have to use them.
- cheeseprocedure 10y ago
  > This point is oddly weak in comparison to the others. Agreed - it was senseless. SNS/SQS aren't particularly complex and they scale like crazy. Kinesis is something else entirely (N-hour record retention w/arbitrary consumers and offsets) and doesn't even belong in the comparison. > ugh. Perfectly fine article now just reeks of google "fanboy-ism". Do Google's core products actually run on GCP these days? I was under the impression they do not.
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    > Do Google's core products actually run on GCP these days? I was under the impression they do not. Not really. They are influenced by, but the same, code as runs Google. (for instance, Kubernetes is based on Borg)
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
"Moreover, people you invite to projects must be Gmail or Google App users" - I'm trying to figure out why walled garden lock-in is being treated as a feature. It sounds like a lot of his reason for switching is simplicity. From this article, it sounds like AWS has a lot more options and control, and GAE just does what it wants or thinks is best. I suppose to some, the latter may be appealing, but at least the author is honest with a "your mileage may vary". Willing to bet this simplicity costs a lot of options other companies may wish to use.
scrollaway 10y ago
Saw this article the other day, it didn't get upvoted much - I'm not sure why it's getting to the frontpage now, it really isn't saying anything at all. I agree with the sentiment though. I haven't been dealing with AWS very long but I keep hitting limitations. Stupid limitations. Sometimes they're a big deal (IPv6 is not available natively. WTF, doesn't AWS run half the web?). Sometimes they're not a big deal, but still annoying (DNSSEC isn't supported by Route53). Sometimes, they're unbelievable (AWS Lambda is Python 2.7 only, no Python 3, in 2016). Sometimes it's probably something that would be fixed with a single line of code (Ed25519 is not supported as a keypair). Sometimes, the product itself just sucks (Cloudformation), requires a Ph.D (IAM) or has ridiculous limitations (certificate manager). And sometimes, it's just the aws cli that, in between its million subcommands available, cannot do basic things like creating S3 redirect rules or update ACM certs. But all the time, it's the web UI that sucks the most - I have to use a separate browser for cloudwatch logs and S3 because the native UI is just that bad. And god forbid you enable 2FA, you'll have to get your phone out twice a day. These are all the limitations I hit in a few months using AWS. I wonder how many more I'll hit within the next year. Is Google actually any better? Seems to me it's just different kinds of limitations.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  The reason why it's on the frontpage now is that a Google employee posted it, and probably had a bunch of other employees upvote it. Jason Ganetsky is the lead developer of the Pub/Sub feature talked about in the article (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ganetsky-691aa43 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ganetsky-691aa43) and almost all his submissions are Google announcements: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jganetsk https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jganetsk EDIT: While I enjoy the downvotes, I did some more research. This submission is not even the first dupe of this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lugassy.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lugassy.net The first share was by the author (reasonable and unsurprising), and the first dupe was by a user who is also almost entirely Google Cloud promotional submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vgt https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vgt His username is a hard string to search because it's short, but if you read a few comments, it doesn't take long to confirm vgt is another Googler working on GCE: https://twitter.com/thetinot https://twitter.com/thetinot Apparently, that promotional attempt wasn't too successful so they tried again today.
godisdad 10y ago
so triggering. but mainly my fear in using GCP is this: Google is a product psycho, this is not their core business, I get the feeling that anything about GCP could change or disappear at any time for any reason and I as the customer is left to react to these changes.
- jedc 10y ago
  It hasn't been their core business historically, but all they're doing is commercializing stuff that's been in internal use for many years. And they've publicly been making a VERY hard push into the cloud business... they aren't going anywhere.
  - godisdad 10y ago
    They hired Ray Kurzweil too, I'm sure they're trying to commercialize the singularity. GOOG/Alphabet as a company is going to be around, but will this line of business be with this set of offerings?
- KirinDave 10y ago
  > I get the feeling that anything about GCP could change or disappear at any time for any reason and I as the customer is left to react to these changes. Google is very committed to GCP and you see it in their work. Much like Amazon, they have a huge sum of computing capacity they aren't always using. It's an obvious business play. But what's more, it's become the basis of differentiating their mobile platform. Google is trying to develop and sell-for-cheap the tools to make really good mobile apps (e.g., Firebase) to try and shore up the app ecosystem of their platform. Given that a lot of the things they offer are 3rd gen variants of their core tech for developing things internally, it seems fairly reasonable to assume they're in this for the long haul.
  - godisdad 10y ago
    It's a reasonable assumption, but still an assumption and a risk to take on. There are really compelling things about GCP not even mentioned in the article but I'm not sure if Google's got enough skin in the game to warrant me predicating my infrastructure on it without deep pricing incentives. Digital Ocean and AWS are dedicated to continuing this line of business and keeping those customers addicted. Google is conducting another large and expensive moon shot which fine since it's part of their DNA.
tmaly 10y ago
What would the equivalent of say a $20 node on Digital ocean cost on the Google Cloud Platform?
- lbn 10y ago
  This is a good tool for cost estimation - https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ Google Compute Engine instances will always be more expensive than DO/Linode because GCP offers so much more. GCE instances will only be cheaper than DO droplets if you will shut down the instances when you don't need them as you don't get charged for them when they are off unlike DO.
- jahewson 10y ago
  Between about $25 and $40 depending on how you configure the machine. GCP doesn't offer exactly the same configurations as DO.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Despite me working on GCE, I have to give a shout out to all the hosts like DO that include a hefty amount of network egress in the price. The network is heavily overcommitted (how many of you actually send X GiB/month/droplet?), less reliable, etc. but for those that use it to serve images for "don't care" it can't (yet) be beat. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine and Cloud and want your business.
- tracker1 10y ago
  I'm in the same boat... prepping a handful of .Net apps to run under docker (dokku) and migrating from Azure host to DO... though I may well continue to use Azure's storage services, and Azure SQL... the pricing is a bit better than the alternatives.
swagv 10y ago
Is this Jeopardy? Why is the headline in the form of a question?
oellegaard 10y ago
"Moreover, people you invite to projects must be Gmail or Google App users" Potentially a deal-breaker for us. We had a LOT of issues accessing various Google services after switching from Google Apps to Office 365, which is cheaper and includes the office suite which the rest of the world use.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Just create accounts for logging in into GCP? They don't have to really use gmail or be logged in into Google all the time. They could use a separate browser for GCP. I'm doing that when I have to use Google Drive.
  - fulafel 10y ago
    Just the linkage into a Google account is still a liability: last time I tried to register with an employer email address, the process failed and further registration attempts with that email address were blocked. And there was no number to call.
- oaktowner 10y ago
  Google PM here. That's not exactly right. You need a Google account, but it does not need to have gmail attached to it. Yes, lots of people don't know such a thing exists...but it's easy to set up. On the "standard" Google account creation page is a link that says something like "I prefer to use my current email address." As long as you have an email address that Google can validate, it's fine to use that instead of a gmail address.
brechin 10y ago
As someone who worked at a company that used almost all of the GCP products, I agree with just about everything in this article. GCP is pretty amazing (and simple) to deal with. They offer so many features that work very well within their platform. They have a similar 99.95% SLA on most of their services, and they often automatically apply credits for missed SLAs (YMMV, this may only apply when you have account reps paying attention). The major downsides that I've noticed are: 1) Documentation is lacking (but improving!) 2) Issues that aren't affecting a lot of customers can sometimes take a long time to resolve. 3) Many services (including App Engine Flexible Environments) are still in beta, meaning no SLA, and they recommend against using them in prod. Unless you have a big paid support contract you'll have no clue how soon (if ever) things will reach GA.
- jazoom 10y ago
  And they have very few locations of datacentre
  - ktta 10y ago
    I think they have more than AWS. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-...
    - cjg_ 10y ago
      Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, Belgium, Taiwan definitely is fewer than the 11 AWS regions.
- kevincox 10y ago
  I agree with all of your point except for the beta woes. If I'm building a production product I would much rather they be upfront about when products are still "beta" and under heavy development as opposed to shipping a buggy and unreliable product that I only realize is in that state after I stick x GB of data in it or start making x req/s. For example at a previous job we were "early" adopters of Amazon Redshift and it gave us no end of troubles. That should definitely be labeled "beta" until they sort those issues out.
pdq 10y ago
The same way TodoMVC [1] has standardized Javascript framework 'Hello World' comparisons, someone should make an up-to-date CloudApp matrix which shows a basic cloud benchmark app in a matrix comparison for Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc. so users can see basic price/bandwidth/performance. There's so much Enterprise Buzzword Bingo that Amazon and Google try to confuse you on as to why there service is magically better, but IMO the biggest selling points for startups are price/bandwidth/performance. And the prices and machine configurations change all the time. [1] http://todomvc.com/ http://todomvc.com/
avitzurel 10y ago
This article is very hand-wavy (I agree with some of the comments here), but as a heavy AWS user here are things that bother me 1. Networking -> I completely agree with the OP here, The networking on AWS needs to be better. I don't want the strongest machine just to have a better transfer rate. It makes complete sense to have a micro machine for some services, but if those services are accessed or access other HTTP/s services, it will be unnecessarily slow 2. Pricing -> I have the privilege of working at a company that can afford to pay 3 year in advance. Even if you do that though Amazon will keep you on the machine types you purchased and not on the newest parallel machine types. In which case if you paid 3 year in advance you are often "stuck" on previous generation instance types. 3. Someone mentioned CloudFormation here. I completely ditched it in favor of terraform, CloudFormation looks like a tool from the 90s after using Terraform (which itself isn't clear of flaws as well) 4. In terms of VPC and networking I completely disagree with the OP, the networking and security settings on Amazon are great (if you understand them). You can define instances that have absolutely no access to/from the outside world. If you build a secure service, some of your services living in a "sandbox" makes total sense 5. App Engine -> The amount of complaints I heard about this service over the last couple of years are just insane. I heard from multiple users of the platform that it sucks. While I have absolutely zero experience with it myself, I tend to listen to people that suffer from it daily.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  App Engine is a joke. It was an interesting and novel idea at the time but it is not something you want to pick up today (or last year, or the year before that, or the one before that either). GAE is a massive lock-in with outdated software in a world where there's so many better, cheaper, non-lock-in alternatives, even within Google itself.
  - anysz 10y ago
    Care to share these alternatives ?
    - scrollaway 10y ago
dkopi 10y ago
"Amazon’s awesome, but Google Cloud is built by developers, for developers, and you see it right away." AWS is built by developers for developers as well. Most of the complaints here about AWS aren't actually about AWS not being "for developers", but about AWS requiring a certain learning curve. It's a perfect trade-off between power and flexibility vs agility.
- hoodoof 10y ago
  What software targetting developers is not "built by developers for developers". Every language, IDE, compiler, etc etc
- sjellis 10y ago
  I think that it's fairer to say that it's built by enterprise technical people for enterprise technical people. Things like the fine-grained control over networking and resource permissions are hallmarks of enterprise tech. That's not to say that these things don't solve real problems, but they are the problems of big organizations. Smaller teams building pure-cloud products don't have the same problems, and may not even have people with Big Corp experience. AWS is the Java of cloud platforms.
mrharrison 10y ago
Yes, yes, yes, I am also a GCP cheerleader. It's so easy and intuitive to use. A load balancer is called a load balancer, an instance is called a compute instance, SQL is called SQL etc.., no AWS name deciphering. GCP's sidebar UI navigation is a dream compared to AWS's mind numbing grid of features. I had a fault tolerant highly scalable system up in hours, and I'm not a dev ops guy, I mostly do frontend.
rpedela 10y ago
For me, it is primarily about Postgres. If Google Cloud had an equivalent offering to Postgres RDS then I would seriously consider it. I think RDS is one area where AWS is significantly better than many of their competitors. You can use any of the major relational databases and they handle backup, failover, read slaves, encryption at rest, etc.
- matrix 10y ago
  Ditto. If Google offered an equivalent of RDS PostgreSQL, I'd switch tomorrow.
  - meddlepal 10y ago
    Dear GCP Product Managers are you listening?! Please add this :)
    - deesix 10y ago
      Yes. We are listening. Disclosure: I work on GCP
  - vincentdm 10y ago
    Me too!
    - sjellis 10y ago
      Another vote for PostgreSQL. I've recently completed an AWS migration project, am about to start another, and really wish that I could have pitched GCP. The two reasons that I didn't were the "Beta" tags on things (in particular, App Engine Flexible Environment), and the situation with hosted SQL (1st gen vs. 2nd gen, both MySQL-only).
  - rprime 10y ago
    Same. We just switched to Amazon mostly due to Postgres RDS (and $100k in credits, but that's another story). When Google will get their Postgres game on, we'll switch for sure.
danellis 10y ago
I've tried both AWS and GCP (as well as several smaller VPS providers), and I definitely preferred working with GCP. AWS has plenty of features, but it all gets bewildering at times, whereas GCP seems to have a much more nicely presented UI. But I have $15,000 in AWS credits from Stripe's Atlas program, and that was enough to make me reluctantly migrate from GCP to AWS. It means I can do things the "right way" instead of the "cheap way". It's unfortunate Google couldn't offer something similar.
- rstupek 10y ago
  I thought the opposite. Google's UI is bewildering, nothing makes logical sense with how its put together. Disjointed pieces. Poor documentation. Incomplete API samples that didn't compile even for its own language (golang)
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I think they all tend to be a little like that... I'm thinking compose.io is in a good position to offer dbaas on the various cloud solutions, docker cloud for app management... Could be the best of both worlds there... gitlab's work for CI/CD is interesting as well.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
    Agreed. And this isn't the first Google interface that I find completely unintuitive. My first foray into the Google docs was trying to get oauth working. The developer console is confusing and not laid out well. Documentation can sometimes point you in one direction, only to realize you're about to implement something that will be end-of-life in months. AWS Console is not perfect, but IMO, it's much more clear where I need to go to find things, even without reading a single piece of documentation. And I've rarely had issues with AWS documentation not being clear and correct.
    - vacri 10y ago
      I only use the Google Apps for Business from Teh Goog, and while it's nice, the documentation is hard to navigate and not so hot. I expect a little bit of bitrot from such large product lines in the documentation so I understand a bit of staleness, but finding the right documentation and then trying to skim through it... it's frustrating and poorly laid-out in Google, in my opinion. Maybe GCE docs are better, though.
rajathagasthya 10y ago
> Amazon’s awesome, but Google Cloud is built by developers, for developers, and you see it right away. Isn't that what AWS was also built for initially? For internal use by developers? I see this statement from time to time in articles like this.
- crucifiction 10y ago
  It is a marketing material, not an article. Very thin on details with every point somehow being in GCE's favor? There is nothing AWS does better or they liked better?
- cagataygurturk 10y ago
  AWS is built by monkeys with humanities degree.
jread 10y ago
Word of caution - we've observed 2 global (all regions down concurrently) networking outages on GCE this year. 18 minutes on April 11 and 1.5-1.7 hours last night (except for us-west1 - down only 10 minutes): https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16015 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16015 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007 https://cloudharmony.com/status-for-google https://cloudharmony.com/status-for-google
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Wouldn't the phrase be "down simultaneously"?
  - jread 10y ago
    I think concurrent is better in this context because the outage periods overlapped but were not synchronized.
- snewman 10y ago
  Wait: seriously, a 1.5 hour multi-region GCE outage just last night? That would be huge, how is it that we haven't heard about this? The linked /16015 status report doesn't have much information.
  - jread 10y ago
    I think partially due to the timing - 12-2AM PT vs 6-7PM on April 11. Google hasn't provided specifics - but our VMs in every region were 100% inaccessible during that period.
  - Twirrim 10y ago
    "how is it that we haven't heard about this?" Not enough customers to complain / notice. Gartner report in the last week or two pointed out that Amazon is way in the lead with more cloud capacity than all the other providers combined. The top two clouds are AWS and Azure. When either of those have major incidents you hear about it all over twitter etc. because that's a large user base that gets impacted. Google is in third place (according to them), but dramatically far behind. They do praise Google's big data tools, but point out even then people use AWS for most stuff and Google just for their big data bits.
rigocalin 10y ago
GCE has some major limitations. They just introduced static IP addresses 2 months ago..and I had to re-create all my servers to make use of the static IP. Then, you either assign a public IP to each machine, or build yourself a solution...luke a NAT gateway. Google does not offer a service like this. The machine that are part of the same subnet cannot talk to each other directly.. they have to go via the google gateway. This reduces the posibility of implementing High Avalability solutions that are based on broadcast or Virtual IP (MS SQL, Windows failover, vrrp...etc). Labels that you apply to VM's or firewall rules are free text without the possibility to select from a labels list/cloud or type a new one...accidents can happen. The MySQL solution is only reachable via INTERNET!!!. They seems to have a beta for using a local socket if you install a sql proxy on each server where you need sql db access...but not in production. No support for MS SQL.
- tracker1 10y ago
  To the point on MS-SQL, tbh, if you need MS-SQL, Azure for SQL proper, or Azure SQL will both be far less expensive than on any other cloud platform, offsetting any pricing difference for your application VMs even. I'll be testing some latency between DO and Azure just so I can use some of Azure's services while keeping my applications on DO. Also considering Database Labs (databaselabs.io) for PostgreSQL on DO. Though I do like some of Azure's other offerings... Azure Tables are pretty nice if your needs fit the paradigm, even wrote some node.js wrappers to make access a lot easier a couple years ago, if I go with Azure will likely update them.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Another odd limitation: No support for internal load balancers; all LBs must be public. They have it as an alpha release available on request, so it's coming, but it's a serious deficiency right now. The lack of a hosted VPN solution is also weird.
  - boulos 10y ago
    You don't have to tell us, internal LB was a long time coming. As for hosted VPN, do you mean something different than our Cloud VPN offering? ( https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/vpn/overview https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/vpn/overview)
omegaworks 10y ago
Reads more like an advert for a buffet than a reasoned take on the architectural and business tradeoffs. Detailed price breakdowns are difficult to read? That's your argument? Really? "By developers, for developers!" so original. [0] I expect more effort to go into this from a technical perspective. Give me some workload / price differentials. Examples of architectures that are simpler on GCP then AWS. My app relies on a hybrid of Firebase and AWS for the heavy assets. Still trying to justify the move to Google Firebase for the full stack. I'm the only dev so it's time and energy I can't spend on frontend iteration helping real users. 0. http://pbskids.org/zoom/ http://pbskids.org/zoom/
- boulos 10y ago
  In a side thread, the quizlet folks mention their real-world experience and reasoning for coming to GCP. In your case, as a Firebase customer, the integration is already there and you could start adding pieces over time. As the integration between Cloud and Firebase improves, I'm guessing you'll find more reason to "just do it on Google Cloud". Ping the Firebase people about their current Alpha programs ;). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
cyberferret 10y ago
We've been using AWS since nearly the day it was released. Overall I really like it, but I haven't dived deep into the GC platform so I cannot really give a definitive comparison. A couple of things that baffle me about AWS though - * You can purchase reserved instances from anywhere in the world in a few seconds, but WHY when I want to on sell an unused reserved instance in the marketplace, do I HAVE to have a US bank account for Amazon to pay my revenues into?? Why can they just not credit my existing account which I pay thousands per month to them? * We still battle with occasional high latency spikes for EC2 instances talking to RDS instances within the same VPC! Continuous "MySQL server has gone away" log messages. Ironically, we have absolutely no trouble with Non-VPC EC2 instances that use classic bridging to talk to the same RDS server within the VPC! We thought to simplify our architecture by putting everything in one VPC for better security and ease of maintenance, but had to go back to a cobbled half and half solution to maintain performance. Hence why we now have a few reserved 'VPC only' instances which we cannot recoup costs by onselling in the marketplace... :(
- dc_gregory 10y ago
  Raise a ticket; I see no issues VPC => RDS endpoint at all. Might be something gone sideways in a layer you can't see.
- hrez 10y ago
  You can modify your RI's from EC2-VPC to EC2-Classic
sandstrom 10y ago
I use AWS extensively and it has many benefits. That said, I think they need to rethink some thing if they want to stay ahead of Google, Digital Ocean, etc. Some thoughts: ## More focus on core products - Still no IPv6, it's 2016. - EC2/VPC (compute) didn't have a simple NAT-instance until a few months ago. - S3 (storage) still has nothing like Nearline (GCE) and Glacier is so confusing and complicated that few bother using it. - ELB (Load Balancer) still has scaling problems (with bursts). - Still only a single public key per instance, why? - Can only use ACM certificates for CloudFront if they are in us-east-1 (despite ACM being available in other geographies and CloudFront is global). Nothing major but weird. - S3 has like a handful of different ways of setting permissions (per file, per bucket, iam, and some weird old xml-format). Why not simplify this? ## Interfaces are terrible - Basically the entire console UI is low quality. - Same with APIs, they could use a lot more polish. - This is the API call to create a CloudFront (CDN) distribution: http://pastie.org/10931494 http://pastie.org/10931494 (no offence, but it looks like a group of schizophrenic monkeys designed that API). ## Think less about press-releases - Apparently AWS force everyone to write the press-release for every product before designing[1]. - While it's good to keep the end-goal in mind I think many important details are lost. - The press-release-thinking focus too much on features and too little on quality and (even more important) refinements to existing things. ## Release fewer features - Every year on ReInvent [AWS conference] they tout how many hundreds of new features they've released[2]. I wish they'd release far fewer features and make them great instead (+ refine existing stuff). [1] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backwards.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backward... [2] https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/vpblogimg/2015/04/Aws-Summit-2015-London-innovation.jpg https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/vpblogimg/2015/04/Aws-Sum...
- jolux 10y ago
  > ## Interfaces are terrible >- Basically the entire console UI is low quality. I wouldn't bet on them fixing this. Amazon in general are not big on design and in particular they aren't about making things look good. I think in general they see it as a waste of time, something that can always be done later after they have beaten their competitors. Obviously there's a threshold for this sort of neglect but they seem pretty expert at riding it. Frankly what you said about it is polite. The AWS web interface is horrendously ugly and just barely functions well enough to be used. It's a testament to how little they care about good design but then again their consumer-facing website is no peach either.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
"Moreover, people you invite to projects must be Gmail or Google App users which are secure by default and usually already set up." Uhh...no. Why would anyone assume some random Gmail account is secure by default?
- boulos 10y ago
  I wish they wouldn't have called these a "Google Account", but you can use any email provider now to sign in/up with Google. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so if you sign up I indirectly ... take your money?
meddlepal 10y ago
I'm slowly moving over some my companies stuff from AWS to GCE/GKE. The platform may not be as mature but it feels a whole hell of a lot more well thought out and put together. Also hosted Kubernetes is a big deal for us since we really don't want to manage that ourselves but would prefer to use an open source offering for containers compared to ECS.
- boulos 10y ago
  Glad to hear it!
jstepka 10y ago
related industry review; * http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/08/05/aws-microsoft-azure-clear-leaders-in-gartners-iaas-magic-quadrant/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/08/05/aws-microsoft-azure-... day to day i work with AWS, Azure, and Google quite a bit -- from what, in terms of investment, i would say gartner is accurate. i'm not sure why digital ocean wasn't taken as serious.
Scarbutt 10y ago
With google cloud sql and amazon aurora being mysql compatible do any of you get the temptation of starting your projects with mysql instead postgresql?
- caleblloyd 10y ago
  Google Cloud SQL runs outside of your network (on a public IP). Thus it doesn't respect your firewall rules and can't use internal network addresses. I run my own replicated compute engine mysql nodes for this reason. Amazon RDS and Aurora were superior DBAAS products when I was using AWS. Kubernetes on Google Container Engine is ultimately what convinced me to switch though.
sandGorgon 10y ago
The biggest problem with Google Cloud is data store lockin..which is worse than programming language lockin. I would move to them in heartbeat if they had anything like postgres RDS ... But Google seems to love it's own version of MySQL. Anybody know if this is on the roadmap ?
- hoodoof 10y ago
  Why is it such a big deal, why not just run Postgres yourself?
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    Why can't I run my own servers then ? The whole point of AWS is moot then. Between everything else, database is the single most critical aspect - and there's a huge value for a high availability system.
hoodoof 10y ago
IAM is complex because it is powerful. Unfortunately.
justinlardinois 10y ago
I found Google App Engine difficult to work with as recently as two years ago, just for a small proof-of-concept app. It took a lot of shoehorning to use third party Python libraries, the file upload API is just weird, and the admin panel was buggy. Also, another random oddity: somewhere in one of its built in libraries there was a function for validating email addresses. It was returning true on a bunch of very obviously bad address formats, so I looked up the source and found that all the function did was verify its argument wasn't the empty string. I imagine GAE is better now, but my first experience with it left a bad taste in my mouth.
- jscholes 10y ago
  > Also, another random oddity: somewhere in one of its built in libraries there was a function for validating email addresses. It was returning true on a bunch of very obviously bad address formats, so I looked up the source and found that all the function did was verify its argument wasn't the empty string. My favourite comment of the whole thread.
ivarrian 10y ago
We have several workloads on AWS and we are mostly happy with it in spite of having several gripes. Google does not have a region in Australia, preventing us from even considering it. If anyone from the GCE team is on here, are there any plans to come down under?
known 10y ago
Unlike AWS, GAE is very easy to use.
westoque 10y ago
Did you also investigate moving to Heroku rather than GAE?
Mayzie 10y ago
Really want Google Cloud to be an option for us - but given that they lack a Sydney/Australian data centre means they miss out on a lot.
user5994461 10y ago
Good. We're finally seeing people migrating to the better platform =) This article is addressing that most of the GCE services are simpler and a lot easier to use and manage than the AWS counterpartS. (That final S being important, having many small and unpolished pieces just contribute to the complexity.) It goes hand in hand with what I had already written about the platform. Expect GCE to be 20-50% cheaper and 1-3x faster: https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/ https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-201... https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/a-simple-cost-comparison-between-gce-an-aws/ https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/a-simple-cost-com... When you see that GCE has less market revenues, you should keep in mind that GCE could be half the price of AWS in average (yep, no kidding). That means the actual gap in customers is way smaller than it appears at first sight ;) With that being said. Both platforms are relatively new and spinning services like mad, they both have important features missing (albeit not the same ones.)
mluggy 10y ago
Hi guys, I'm the original poster. Sorry for joining so late. I read each and every feedback and also updated the medium article. In no particular order: 1) Didn't mean to hand-wave. For the last few months GCP was the new shiny toy for me. I got over excited and plan to do deeper post, battling 2 or more products (i.e Kinesis vs. Pubsub) 2) Not anti-AWS at all. I still find it wonderful: https://lugassy.net/search?q=aws https://lugassy.net/search?q=aws. what really flipped me was this: https://twitter.com/mluggy/status/727764607176159232 https://twitter.com/mluggy/status/727764607176159232 and other small anonyances 3) Downsides to GCP. Certainly! added to the article 4) For developers, by developers. I realize this was tacky. Let me try again with 4 examples: a) Trace/breakpoints in production b) Connecting through virtual socket files instead of tcp c) writing and collecting logs centrally with console.log and specifically d) DATAFLOW which is architecturally brilliant (AWS add "Streams" to every new product where GCP simply treat every product as source and/or sink) 5) Yes I favor GCP for simplicity and dev-friendliness. I don't want to train people for AWS devops/gotchas. I don't need sophisticated IAM and VPC to feel smart. GCP ui/quickbar is nicer. For example networking is all on one page. Most products are properly named (CDN instead of CloudFront, DNS instead of Route53, Pub/Sub instead of Kinesis) 6) GAE. I was exposed to some horror stories about its and datastore early days. History aside, I use it today through Flexible VMs which is really docker under the hood + ability to SSH + easy deployment/versioning + cool tracer/debugger. My code is Node.js and haven't coded any GAE specific necessity Again loved the comments. keep it going!

361 points by jganetsk 10y ago

pw 10y ago

Anyone run Ruby on GAE's new "Flexible Environment"?

matt4077 10y ago
Thought about it, but I believe it was the pricing model that made it rather unattractive compared to just running Compute Engines.

jvehent 10y ago

Does anyone have feedback running app at scale in Google Cloud for more than one year?

pbbakkum 10y ago
We've been running it for about a year to power Quizlet - overall things have been good and we're happy. AWS and GCP are complicated enough that they're tough to compare holistically, but on most of the things we care about we find GCP to be equivalent or better (sometimes significantly) than AWS. It really does have better networking and disk technology, and the pricing is much better. Here's the analysis we did: https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp. Rough patches are: - Live migration is sometimes not seamless. - Pub/sub is missing some core features.
- BrandonY 10y ago
  Can I ask what the Pub/sub features you miss are?
  - ryangordon 10y ago
    Mainly Pub/Sub does not let a single subscription subscribe to multiple topics

1_2__3 10y ago

That was so much handwaving in an article that if you put your palm in front of the screen you'd hear clapping.

cagataygurturk 10y ago

You moved because you did not understand how to run AWS wisely.

tbrock 10y ago
Most people don't have time for that. Just give me kubernetes or GAE. I'm convinced Google's infrastructure play will ultimately win the hearts and minds of developers because they understand this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
lallysingh 10y ago
There's an implication that AWS requires more effort to understand how to run it wisely than google's offering. Depends on lots of factors, obviously.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  You should always understand the underlying fundamentals of something you're using. If not, be prepared for the eventual pain.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is not a sustainable strategy for modern society. Consumers, entrepreneurs, corporations, they all interface with technology and social constructs they do not fully understand as part of daily life.
    - jjnoakes 10y ago
      And enough of them get burned by that lack of knowledge. Some may be comfortable with that lottery, others are not. For most, it depends on the risk of an issue (mostly measured ad-hoc by how many times you hear of others having an issue) vs the potential pain one would feel if an issue arises. For a business's core infrastructure, I've heard enough so that the risk is high enough, when taken together with the potential loss of everything, that I make it a point to spend time and effort to understand as much as I can about what I rely on. For walking down the sidewalk, no one is suggesting that you understand the fundamentals of concrete curing. The risk of something happening to you must be practically zero, and the potential harm if something does also seems quite low. Of course, there's always going to be a success story in the midst of the crowd where someone flew by the seat of their pants and everything worked out. I happen to think that's a minority, and I also don't feel comfortable gambling with my business like that. But to each their own.

serge2k 10y ago

> Want to run a message bus? AWS will make your head spin with SNS, SQS, Kinesis, Kinesis Streams and Kinesis Firehose. GCP has only Pub/Sub which just works and is insanely scalable. This point is oddly weak in comparison to the others. > Amazon has one of the most confusing IAM. While it is nice to set up a role to only allows usage for a particular resource from a specific device and times of day, you end up spending most of your time debugging policies. Haven't used GCP, but I didn't mind IAM. Missed it when I waas trying to figure out Azure stuff. > We moved because we wanted to work on infrastructure that runs YouTube, Gmail and Google Analytics. We moved because Google is fair, much more tech-savvy and launch products that just works. ugh. Perfectly fine article now just reeks of google "fanboy-ism".

groupmonoid 10y ago
To add to your point: > Google lets you set up simple Firewall rules. Amazon gives you VPC, security groups, network access control lists and a big, fat headache. AWS also gives you firewall rules, in addition to the other options. If you don't get why you would need them, you don't really have to use them.
cheeseprocedure 10y ago
> This point is oddly weak in comparison to the others. Agreed - it was senseless. SNS/SQS aren't particularly complex and they scale like crazy. Kinesis is something else entirely (N-hour record retention w/arbitrary consumers and offsets) and doesn't even belong in the comparison. > ugh. Perfectly fine article now just reeks of google "fanboy-ism". Do Google's core products actually run on GCP these days? I was under the impression they do not.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  > Do Google's core products actually run on GCP these days? I was under the impression they do not. Not really. They are influenced by, but the same, code as runs Google. (for instance, Kubernetes is based on Borg)

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

"Moreover, people you invite to projects must be Gmail or Google App users" - I'm trying to figure out why walled garden lock-in is being treated as a feature. It sounds like a lot of his reason for switching is simplicity. From this article, it sounds like AWS has a lot more options and control, and GAE just does what it wants or thinks is best. I suppose to some, the latter may be appealing, but at least the author is honest with a "your mileage may vary". Willing to bet this simplicity costs a lot of options other companies may wish to use.

scrollaway 10y ago

Saw this article the other day, it didn't get upvoted much - I'm not sure why it's getting to the frontpage now, it really isn't saying anything at all. I agree with the sentiment though. I haven't been dealing with AWS very long but I keep hitting limitations. Stupid limitations. Sometimes they're a big deal (IPv6 is not available natively. WTF, doesn't AWS run half the web?). Sometimes they're not a big deal, but still annoying (DNSSEC isn't supported by Route53). Sometimes, they're unbelievable (AWS Lambda is Python 2.7 only, no Python 3, in 2016). Sometimes it's probably something that would be fixed with a single line of code (Ed25519 is not supported as a keypair). Sometimes, the product itself just sucks (Cloudformation), requires a Ph.D (IAM) or has ridiculous limitations (certificate manager). And sometimes, it's just the aws cli that, in between its million subcommands available, cannot do basic things like creating S3 redirect rules or update ACM certs. But all the time, it's the web UI that sucks the most - I have to use a separate browser for cloudwatch logs and S3 because the native UI is just that bad. And god forbid you enable 2FA, you'll have to get your phone out twice a day. These are all the limitations I hit in a few months using AWS. I wonder how many more I'll hit within the next year. Is Google actually any better? Seems to me it's just different kinds of limitations.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
The reason why it's on the frontpage now is that a Google employee posted it, and probably had a bunch of other employees upvote it. Jason Ganetsky is the lead developer of the Pub/Sub feature talked about in the article (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ganetsky-691aa43 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-ganetsky-691aa43) and almost all his submissions are Google announcements: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jganetsk https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jganetsk EDIT: While I enjoy the downvotes, I did some more research. This submission is not even the first dupe of this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lugassy.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lugassy.net The first share was by the author (reasonable and unsurprising), and the first dupe was by a user who is also almost entirely Google Cloud promotional submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vgt https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vgt His username is a hard string to search because it's short, but if you read a few comments, it doesn't take long to confirm vgt is another Googler working on GCE: https://twitter.com/thetinot https://twitter.com/thetinot Apparently, that promotional attempt wasn't too successful so they tried again today.

godisdad 10y ago

so triggering. but mainly my fear in using GCP is this: Google is a product psycho, this is not their core business, I get the feeling that anything about GCP could change or disappear at any time for any reason and I as the customer is left to react to these changes.

jedc 10y ago
It hasn't been their core business historically, but all they're doing is commercializing stuff that's been in internal use for many years. And they've publicly been making a VERY hard push into the cloud business... they aren't going anywhere.
- godisdad 10y ago
  They hired Ray Kurzweil too, I'm sure they're trying to commercialize the singularity. GOOG/Alphabet as a company is going to be around, but will this line of business be with this set of offerings?
KirinDave 10y ago
> I get the feeling that anything about GCP could change or disappear at any time for any reason and I as the customer is left to react to these changes. Google is very committed to GCP and you see it in their work. Much like Amazon, they have a huge sum of computing capacity they aren't always using. It's an obvious business play. But what's more, it's become the basis of differentiating their mobile platform. Google is trying to develop and sell-for-cheap the tools to make really good mobile apps (e.g., Firebase) to try and shore up the app ecosystem of their platform. Given that a lot of the things they offer are 3rd gen variants of their core tech for developing things internally, it seems fairly reasonable to assume they're in this for the long haul.
- godisdad 10y ago
  It's a reasonable assumption, but still an assumption and a risk to take on. There are really compelling things about GCP not even mentioned in the article but I'm not sure if Google's got enough skin in the game to warrant me predicating my infrastructure on it without deep pricing incentives. Digital Ocean and AWS are dedicated to continuing this line of business and keeping those customers addicted. Google is conducting another large and expensive moon shot which fine since it's part of their DNA.

tmaly 10y ago

What would the equivalent of say a $20 node on Digital ocean cost on the Google Cloud Platform?

lbn 10y ago
This is a good tool for cost estimation - https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ Google Compute Engine instances will always be more expensive than DO/Linode because GCP offers so much more. GCE instances will only be cheaper than DO droplets if you will shut down the instances when you don't need them as you don't get charged for them when they are off unlike DO.
jahewson 10y ago
Between about $25 and $40 depending on how you configure the machine. GCP doesn't offer exactly the same configurations as DO.
- boulos 10y ago
  Despite me working on GCE, I have to give a shout out to all the hosts like DO that include a hefty amount of network egress in the price. The network is heavily overcommitted (how many of you actually send X GiB/month/droplet?), less reliable, etc. but for those that use it to serve images for "don't care" it can't (yet) be beat. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine and Cloud and want your business.
tracker1 10y ago
I'm in the same boat... prepping a handful of .Net apps to run under docker (dokku) and migrating from Azure host to DO... though I may well continue to use Azure's storage services, and Azure SQL... the pricing is a bit better than the alternatives.

swagv 10y ago

Is this Jeopardy? Why is the headline in the form of a question?

oellegaard 10y ago

"Moreover, people you invite to projects must be Gmail or Google App users" Potentially a deal-breaker for us. We had a LOT of issues accessing various Google services after switching from Google Apps to Office 365, which is cheaper and includes the office suite which the rest of the world use.

pmontra 10y ago
Just create accounts for logging in into GCP? They don't have to really use gmail or be logged in into Google all the time. They could use a separate browser for GCP. I'm doing that when I have to use Google Drive.
- fulafel 10y ago
  Just the linkage into a Google account is still a liability: last time I tried to register with an employer email address, the process failed and further registration attempts with that email address were blocked. And there was no number to call.
oaktowner 10y ago
Google PM here. That's not exactly right. You need a Google account, but it does not need to have gmail attached to it. Yes, lots of people don't know such a thing exists...but it's easy to set up. On the "standard" Google account creation page is a link that says something like "I prefer to use my current email address." As long as you have an email address that Google can validate, it's fine to use that instead of a gmail address.

brechin 10y ago

As someone who worked at a company that used almost all of the GCP products, I agree with just about everything in this article. GCP is pretty amazing (and simple) to deal with. They offer so many features that work very well within their platform. They have a similar 99.95% SLA on most of their services, and they often automatically apply credits for missed SLAs (YMMV, this may only apply when you have account reps paying attention). The major downsides that I've noticed are: 1) Documentation is lacking (but improving!) 2) Issues that aren't affecting a lot of customers can sometimes take a long time to resolve. 3) Many services (including App Engine Flexible Environments) are still in beta, meaning no SLA, and they recommend against using them in prod. Unless you have a big paid support contract you'll have no clue how soon (if ever) things will reach GA.

jazoom 10y ago
And they have very few locations of datacentre
- ktta 10y ago
  I think they have more than AWS. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-zones https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-...
  - cjg_ 10y ago
    Oregon, Iowa, South Carolina, Belgium, Taiwan definitely is fewer than the 11 AWS regions.
kevincox 10y ago
I agree with all of your point except for the beta woes. If I'm building a production product I would much rather they be upfront about when products are still "beta" and under heavy development as opposed to shipping a buggy and unreliable product that I only realize is in that state after I stick x GB of data in it or start making x req/s. For example at a previous job we were "early" adopters of Amazon Redshift and it gave us no end of troubles. That should definitely be labeled "beta" until they sort those issues out.

pdq 10y ago

The same way TodoMVC [1] has standardized Javascript framework 'Hello World' comparisons, someone should make an up-to-date CloudApp matrix which shows a basic cloud benchmark app in a matrix comparison for Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc. so users can see basic price/bandwidth/performance. There's so much Enterprise Buzzword Bingo that Amazon and Google try to confuse you on as to why there service is magically better, but IMO the biggest selling points for startups are price/bandwidth/performance. And the prices and machine configurations change all the time. [1] http://todomvc.com/ http://todomvc.com/

avitzurel 10y ago

This article is very hand-wavy (I agree with some of the comments here), but as a heavy AWS user here are things that bother me 1. Networking -> I completely agree with the OP here, The networking on AWS needs to be better. I don't want the strongest machine just to have a better transfer rate. It makes complete sense to have a micro machine for some services, but if those services are accessed or access other HTTP/s services, it will be unnecessarily slow 2. Pricing -> I have the privilege of working at a company that can afford to pay 3 year in advance. Even if you do that though Amazon will keep you on the machine types you purchased and not on the newest parallel machine types. In which case if you paid 3 year in advance you are often "stuck" on previous generation instance types. 3. Someone mentioned CloudFormation here. I completely ditched it in favor of terraform, CloudFormation looks like a tool from the 90s after using Terraform (which itself isn't clear of flaws as well) 4. In terms of VPC and networking I completely disagree with the OP, the networking and security settings on Amazon are great (if you understand them). You can define instances that have absolutely no access to/from the outside world. If you build a secure service, some of your services living in a "sandbox" makes total sense 5. App Engine -> The amount of complaints I heard about this service over the last couple of years are just insane. I heard from multiple users of the platform that it sucks. While I have absolutely zero experience with it myself, I tend to listen to people that suffer from it daily.

scrollaway 10y ago
App Engine is a joke. It was an interesting and novel idea at the time but it is not something you want to pick up today (or last year, or the year before that, or the one before that either). GAE is a massive lock-in with outdated software in a world where there's so many better, cheaper, non-lock-in alternatives, even within Google itself.
- anysz 10y ago
  Care to share these alternatives ?
  - scrollaway 10y ago

dkopi 10y ago

"Amazon’s awesome, but Google Cloud is built by developers, for developers, and you see it right away." AWS is built by developers for developers as well. Most of the complaints here about AWS aren't actually about AWS not being "for developers", but about AWS requiring a certain learning curve. It's a perfect trade-off between power and flexibility vs agility.

hoodoof 10y ago
What software targetting developers is not "built by developers for developers". Every language, IDE, compiler, etc etc
sjellis 10y ago
I think that it's fairer to say that it's built by enterprise technical people for enterprise technical people. Things like the fine-grained control over networking and resource permissions are hallmarks of enterprise tech. That's not to say that these things don't solve real problems, but they are the problems of big organizations. Smaller teams building pure-cloud products don't have the same problems, and may not even have people with Big Corp experience. AWS is the Java of cloud platforms.

mrharrison 10y ago

Yes, yes, yes, I am also a GCP cheerleader. It's so easy and intuitive to use. A load balancer is called a load balancer, an instance is called a compute instance, SQL is called SQL etc.., no AWS name deciphering. GCP's sidebar UI navigation is a dream compared to AWS's mind numbing grid of features. I had a fault tolerant highly scalable system up in hours, and I'm not a dev ops guy, I mostly do frontend.

rpedela 10y ago

For me, it is primarily about Postgres. If Google Cloud had an equivalent offering to Postgres RDS then I would seriously consider it. I think RDS is one area where AWS is significantly better than many of their competitors. You can use any of the major relational databases and they handle backup, failover, read slaves, encryption at rest, etc.

matrix 10y ago
Ditto. If Google offered an equivalent of RDS PostgreSQL, I'd switch tomorrow.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  Dear GCP Product Managers are you listening?! Please add this :)
  - deesix 10y ago
    Yes. We are listening. Disclosure: I work on GCP
- vincentdm 10y ago
  Me too!
  - sjellis 10y ago
    Another vote for PostgreSQL. I've recently completed an AWS migration project, am about to start another, and really wish that I could have pitched GCP. The two reasons that I didn't were the "Beta" tags on things (in particular, App Engine Flexible Environment), and the situation with hosted SQL (1st gen vs. 2nd gen, both MySQL-only).
- rprime 10y ago
  Same. We just switched to Amazon mostly due to Postgres RDS (and $100k in credits, but that's another story). When Google will get their Postgres game on, we'll switch for sure.

danellis 10y ago

I've tried both AWS and GCP (as well as several smaller VPS providers), and I definitely preferred working with GCP. AWS has plenty of features, but it all gets bewildering at times, whereas GCP seems to have a much more nicely presented UI. But I have $15,000 in AWS credits from Stripe's Atlas program, and that was enough to make me reluctantly migrate from GCP to AWS. It means I can do things the "right way" instead of the "cheap way". It's unfortunate Google couldn't offer something similar.

rstupek 10y ago
I thought the opposite. Google's UI is bewildering, nothing makes logical sense with how its put together. Disjointed pieces. Poor documentation. Incomplete API samples that didn't compile even for its own language (golang)
- tracker1 10y ago
  I think they all tend to be a little like that... I'm thinking compose.io is in a good position to offer dbaas on the various cloud solutions, docker cloud for app management... Could be the best of both worlds there... gitlab's work for CI/CD is interesting as well.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago
  Agreed. And this isn't the first Google interface that I find completely unintuitive. My first foray into the Google docs was trying to get oauth working. The developer console is confusing and not laid out well. Documentation can sometimes point you in one direction, only to realize you're about to implement something that will be end-of-life in months. AWS Console is not perfect, but IMO, it's much more clear where I need to go to find things, even without reading a single piece of documentation. And I've rarely had issues with AWS documentation not being clear and correct.
  - vacri 10y ago
    I only use the Google Apps for Business from Teh Goog, and while it's nice, the documentation is hard to navigate and not so hot. I expect a little bit of bitrot from such large product lines in the documentation so I understand a bit of staleness, but finding the right documentation and then trying to skim through it... it's frustrating and poorly laid-out in Google, in my opinion. Maybe GCE docs are better, though.

rajathagasthya 10y ago

> Amazon’s awesome, but Google Cloud is built by developers, for developers, and you see it right away. Isn't that what AWS was also built for initially? For internal use by developers? I see this statement from time to time in articles like this.

crucifiction 10y ago
It is a marketing material, not an article. Very thin on details with every point somehow being in GCE's favor? There is nothing AWS does better or they liked better?
cagataygurturk 10y ago
AWS is built by monkeys with humanities degree.

jread 10y ago

Word of caution - we've observed 2 global (all regions down concurrently) networking outages on GCE this year. 18 minutes on April 11 and 1.5-1.7 hours last night (except for us-west1 - down only 10 minutes): https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16015 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16015 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16007 https://cloudharmony.com/status-for-google https://cloudharmony.com/status-for-google

ben_jones 10y ago
Wouldn't the phrase be "down simultaneously"?
- jread 10y ago
  I think concurrent is better in this context because the outage periods overlapped but were not synchronized.
snewman 10y ago
Wait: seriously, a 1.5 hour multi-region GCE outage just last night? That would be huge, how is it that we haven't heard about this? The linked /16015 status report doesn't have much information.
- jread 10y ago
  I think partially due to the timing - 12-2AM PT vs 6-7PM on April 11. Google hasn't provided specifics - but our VMs in every region were 100% inaccessible during that period.
- Twirrim 10y ago
  "how is it that we haven't heard about this?" Not enough customers to complain / notice. Gartner report in the last week or two pointed out that Amazon is way in the lead with more cloud capacity than all the other providers combined. The top two clouds are AWS and Azure. When either of those have major incidents you hear about it all over twitter etc. because that's a large user base that gets impacted. Google is in third place (according to them), but dramatically far behind. They do praise Google's big data tools, but point out even then people use AWS for most stuff and Google just for their big data bits.

rigocalin 10y ago

GCE has some major limitations. They just introduced static IP addresses 2 months ago..and I had to re-create all my servers to make use of the static IP. Then, you either assign a public IP to each machine, or build yourself a solution...luke a NAT gateway. Google does not offer a service like this. The machine that are part of the same subnet cannot talk to each other directly.. they have to go via the google gateway. This reduces the posibility of implementing High Avalability solutions that are based on broadcast or Virtual IP (MS SQL, Windows failover, vrrp...etc). Labels that you apply to VM's or firewall rules are free text without the possibility to select from a labels list/cloud or type a new one...accidents can happen. The MySQL solution is only reachable via INTERNET!!!. They seems to have a beta for using a local socket if you install a sql proxy on each server where you need sql db access...but not in production. No support for MS SQL.

tracker1 10y ago
To the point on MS-SQL, tbh, if you need MS-SQL, Azure for SQL proper, or Azure SQL will both be far less expensive than on any other cloud platform, offsetting any pricing difference for your application VMs even. I'll be testing some latency between DO and Azure just so I can use some of Azure's services while keeping my applications on DO. Also considering Database Labs (databaselabs.io) for PostgreSQL on DO. Though I do like some of Azure's other offerings... Azure Tables are pretty nice if your needs fit the paradigm, even wrote some node.js wrappers to make access a lot easier a couple years ago, if I go with Azure will likely update them.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
Another odd limitation: No support for internal load balancers; all LBs must be public. They have it as an alpha release available on request, so it's coming, but it's a serious deficiency right now. The lack of a hosted VPN solution is also weird.
- boulos 10y ago
  You don't have to tell us, internal LB was a long time coming. As for hosted VPN, do you mean something different than our Cloud VPN offering? ( https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/vpn/overview https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/vpn/overview)

omegaworks 10y ago

Reads more like an advert for a buffet than a reasoned take on the architectural and business tradeoffs. Detailed price breakdowns are difficult to read? That's your argument? Really? "By developers, for developers!" so original. [0] I expect more effort to go into this from a technical perspective. Give me some workload / price differentials. Examples of architectures that are simpler on GCP then AWS. My app relies on a hybrid of Firebase and AWS for the heavy assets. Still trying to justify the move to Google Firebase for the full stack. I'm the only dev so it's time and energy I can't spend on frontend iteration helping real users. 0. http://pbskids.org/zoom/ http://pbskids.org/zoom/

boulos 10y ago
In a side thread, the quizlet folks mention their real-world experience and reasoning for coming to GCP. In your case, as a Firebase customer, the integration is already there and you could start adding pieces over time. As the integration between Cloud and Firebase improves, I'm guessing you'll find more reason to "just do it on Google Cloud". Ping the Firebase people about their current Alpha programs ;). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

cyberferret 10y ago

We've been using AWS since nearly the day it was released. Overall I really like it, but I haven't dived deep into the GC platform so I cannot really give a definitive comparison. A couple of things that baffle me about AWS though - * You can purchase reserved instances from anywhere in the world in a few seconds, but WHY when I want to on sell an unused reserved instance in the marketplace, do I HAVE to have a US bank account for Amazon to pay my revenues into?? Why can they just not credit my existing account which I pay thousands per month to them? * We still battle with occasional high latency spikes for EC2 instances talking to RDS instances within the same VPC! Continuous "MySQL server has gone away" log messages. Ironically, we have absolutely no trouble with Non-VPC EC2 instances that use classic bridging to talk to the same RDS server within the VPC! We thought to simplify our architecture by putting everything in one VPC for better security and ease of maintenance, but had to go back to a cobbled half and half solution to maintain performance. Hence why we now have a few reserved 'VPC only' instances which we cannot recoup costs by onselling in the marketplace... :(

dc_gregory 10y ago
Raise a ticket; I see no issues VPC => RDS endpoint at all. Might be something gone sideways in a layer you can't see.
hrez 10y ago
You can modify your RI's from EC2-VPC to EC2-Classic

sandstrom 10y ago

I use AWS extensively and it has many benefits. That said, I think they need to rethink some thing if they want to stay ahead of Google, Digital Ocean, etc. Some thoughts: ## More focus on core products - Still no IPv6, it's 2016. - EC2/VPC (compute) didn't have a simple NAT-instance until a few months ago. - S3 (storage) still has nothing like Nearline (GCE) and Glacier is so confusing and complicated that few bother using it. - ELB (Load Balancer) still has scaling problems (with bursts). - Still only a single public key per instance, why? - Can only use ACM certificates for CloudFront if they are in us-east-1 (despite ACM being available in other geographies and CloudFront is global). Nothing major but weird. - S3 has like a handful of different ways of setting permissions (per file, per bucket, iam, and some weird old xml-format). Why not simplify this? ## Interfaces are terrible - Basically the entire console UI is low quality. - Same with APIs, they could use a lot more polish. - This is the API call to create a CloudFront (CDN) distribution: http://pastie.org/10931494 http://pastie.org/10931494 (no offence, but it looks like a group of schizophrenic monkeys designed that API). ## Think less about press-releases - Apparently AWS force everyone to write the press-release for every product before designing[1]. - While it's good to keep the end-goal in mind I think many important details are lost. - The press-release-thinking focus too much on features and too little on quality and (even more important) refinements to existing things. ## Release fewer features - Every year on ReInvent [AWS conference] they tout how many hundreds of new features they've released[2]. I wish they'd release far fewer features and make them great instead (+ refine existing stuff). [1] http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backwards.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/11/working_backward... [2] https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/vpblogimg/2015/04/Aws-Summit-2015-London-innovation.jpg https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/vpblogimg/2015/04/Aws-Sum...

jolux 10y ago
> ## Interfaces are terrible >- Basically the entire console UI is low quality. I wouldn't bet on them fixing this. Amazon in general are not big on design and in particular they aren't about making things look good. I think in general they see it as a waste of time, something that can always be done later after they have beaten their competitors. Obviously there's a threshold for this sort of neglect but they seem pretty expert at riding it. Frankly what you said about it is polite. The AWS web interface is horrendously ugly and just barely functions well enough to be used. It's a testament to how little they care about good design but then again their consumer-facing website is no peach either.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 10y ago

"Moreover, people you invite to projects must be Gmail or Google App users which are secure by default and usually already set up." Uhh...no. Why would anyone assume some random Gmail account is secure by default?

boulos 10y ago
I wish they wouldn't have called these a "Google Account", but you can use any email provider now to sign in/up with Google. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so if you sign up I indirectly ... take your money?

meddlepal 10y ago

I'm slowly moving over some my companies stuff from AWS to GCE/GKE. The platform may not be as mature but it feels a whole hell of a lot more well thought out and put together. Also hosted Kubernetes is a big deal for us since we really don't want to manage that ourselves but would prefer to use an open source offering for containers compared to ECS.

boulos 10y ago
Glad to hear it!

jstepka 10y ago

related industry review; * http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/08/05/aws-microsoft-azure-clear-leaders-in-gartners-iaas-magic-quadrant/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2016/08/05/aws-microsoft-azure-... day to day i work with AWS, Azure, and Google quite a bit -- from what, in terms of investment, i would say gartner is accurate. i'm not sure why digital ocean wasn't taken as serious.

Scarbutt 10y ago

With google cloud sql and amazon aurora being mysql compatible do any of you get the temptation of starting your projects with mysql instead postgresql?

caleblloyd 10y ago
Google Cloud SQL runs outside of your network (on a public IP). Thus it doesn't respect your firewall rules and can't use internal network addresses. I run my own replicated compute engine mysql nodes for this reason. Amazon RDS and Aurora were superior DBAAS products when I was using AWS. Kubernetes on Google Container Engine is ultimately what convinced me to switch though.

sandGorgon 10y ago

The biggest problem with Google Cloud is data store lockin..which is worse than programming language lockin. I would move to them in heartbeat if they had anything like postgres RDS ... But Google seems to love it's own version of MySQL. Anybody know if this is on the roadmap ?

hoodoof 10y ago
Why is it such a big deal, why not just run Postgres yourself?
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  Why can't I run my own servers then ? The whole point of AWS is moot then. Between everything else, database is the single most critical aspect - and there's a huge value for a high availability system.

hoodoof 10y ago

IAM is complex because it is powerful. Unfortunately.

justinlardinois 10y ago

I found Google App Engine difficult to work with as recently as two years ago, just for a small proof-of-concept app. It took a lot of shoehorning to use third party Python libraries, the file upload API is just weird, and the admin panel was buggy. Also, another random oddity: somewhere in one of its built in libraries there was a function for validating email addresses. It was returning true on a bunch of very obviously bad address formats, so I looked up the source and found that all the function did was verify its argument wasn't the empty string. I imagine GAE is better now, but my first experience with it left a bad taste in my mouth.

jscholes 10y ago
> Also, another random oddity: somewhere in one of its built in libraries there was a function for validating email addresses. It was returning true on a bunch of very obviously bad address formats, so I looked up the source and found that all the function did was verify its argument wasn't the empty string. My favourite comment of the whole thread.

ivarrian 10y ago

We have several workloads on AWS and we are mostly happy with it in spite of having several gripes. Google does not have a region in Australia, preventing us from even considering it. If anyone from the GCE team is on here, are there any plans to come down under?

known 10y ago

Unlike AWS, GAE is very easy to use.

westoque 10y ago

Did you also investigate moving to Heroku rather than GAE?

Mayzie 10y ago

Really want Google Cloud to be an option for us - but given that they lack a Sydney/Australian data centre means they miss out on a lot.

user5994461 10y ago

Good. We're finally seeing people migrating to the better platform =) This article is addressing that most of the GCE services are simpler and a lot easier to use and manage than the AWS counterpartS. (That final S being important, having many small and unpolished pieces just contribute to the complexity.) It goes hand in hand with what I had already written about the platform. Expect GCE to be 20-50% cheaper and 1-3x faster: https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/ https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-201... https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/a-simple-cost-comparison-between-gce-an-aws/ https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/a-simple-cost-com... When you see that GCE has less market revenues, you should keep in mind that GCE could be half the price of AWS in average (yep, no kidding). That means the actual gap in customers is way smaller than it appears at first sight ;) With that being said. Both platforms are relatively new and spinning services like mad, they both have important features missing (albeit not the same ones.)

mluggy 10y ago

Hi guys, I'm the original poster. Sorry for joining so late. I read each and every feedback and also updated the medium article. In no particular order: 1) Didn't mean to hand-wave. For the last few months GCP was the new shiny toy for me. I got over excited and plan to do deeper post, battling 2 or more products (i.e Kinesis vs. Pubsub) 2) Not anti-AWS at all. I still find it wonderful: https://lugassy.net/search?q=aws https://lugassy.net/search?q=aws. what really flipped me was this: https://twitter.com/mluggy/status/727764607176159232 https://twitter.com/mluggy/status/727764607176159232 and other small anonyances 3) Downsides to GCP. Certainly! added to the article 4) For developers, by developers. I realize this was tacky. Let me try again with 4 examples: a) Trace/breakpoints in production b) Connecting through virtual socket files instead of tcp c) writing and collecting logs centrally with console.log and specifically d) DATAFLOW which is architecturally brilliant (AWS add "Streams" to every new product where GCP simply treat every product as source and/or sink) 5) Yes I favor GCP for simplicity and dev-friendliness. I don't want to train people for AWS devops/gotchas. I don't need sophisticated IAM and VPC to feel smart. GCP ui/quickbar is nicer. For example networking is all on one page. Most products are properly named (CDN instead of CloudFront, DNS instead of Route53, Pub/Sub instead of Kinesis) 6) GAE. I was exposed to some horror stories about its and datastore early days. History aside, I use it today through Flexible VMs which is really docker under the hood + ability to SSH + easy deployment/versioning + cool tracer/debugger. My code is Node.js and haven't coded any GAE specific necessity Again loved the comments. keep it going!