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I have serious trust issues with Google. Their history of discontinuing services, dismal support (even for a paid service), and neglect of bugs in SDKs/APIs - a

I have serious trust issues with Google. Their history of discontinuing services, dismal support (even for a paid service), and neglect of bugs in SDKs/APIs - all three of which I have experienced first-hand - has left a long-term bitter taste. No doubt some individuals are fantastic, but the organisation as a whole gives me an enduring impression of being systematically arrogant and aloof. AWS by contrast have demonstrated fanatically helpful support (even on business level, the cheapest), fixing issues within days of reporting, and a willingness to maintain obsolete/deprecated services (like SimpleDB) long after I'm sure they'd wish everyone had migrated away.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
It seems to me that Google is highly siloed internally. The GCP team is very visible (they engage on HN and elsewhere), and GCP has excellent support. Very different from other parts of Google. I have problems with Google as a whole, but I have as much faith in their cloud as I have in AWS or Digitial Ocean (we currently use all three). The Kubernetes team is also highly engaged on Github (they also occasionally show up on the official Slack channels). The Go community suffers from a depressing abundance of hostility, intransigence and arrogance, and some of Google's projects (e.g. Protobuf, the Go project itself) reflect this, but I was delighted to find that the Kubernetes people are not like this at all. It's a very friendly, quality-focused community. I think they have to be since Kubernetes is still emerging tech that's craving adoption. Same goes for GCP -- Google doesn't hide the fact that they're aggressively courting customers to migrate.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Not to be too cynical but none of this is reassuring. It's making it sound like the moment that GCP stops being the underdog they'll stop being as helpful and courteous :)
saurik 10y ago
This thread of comments from a year and a half ago, on the article "How Amazon took control of the cloud", is really epic on these points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825
- user5994461 10y ago
  Honestly. I would ignore any comment that is that old. Running anything on AWS or Google 3 years ago. That must have been hell.
  - vgt 10y ago
    I'll add that the main issue seems to be with Google AppEngine of two years ago. For compute options Google Cloud has Compute Engine, Container Engine (Kubernetes), and even AppEngine Flex Environment these days. (work at Google Cloud)
  - saurik 10y ago
    The attitudes and competencies of organizations generally doesn't change over the time scale of only a year and a half (which is really not long at all... I mean... I've been using AWS now for over eight years and had a product deployed on App Engine six years ago; the people I work with who really like GCP have been using it for three or four years, and our conversations about it and their experiences track that far back: a little over a year is nothing...), and when it does it is generally due to a massive disruption, such as a changing of the guard at the upper echelons of management. This is particularly true of companies that are dominated by personality effects, as are most of these massive tech companies. FWIW, the serious complaints I would lodge against AWS today are the same things I was complaining about back in 2009 on the Amazon EC2 forums. Sure, the actual technical abilities of products change over a year and a half, but that is neither the complaint of this comment thread here, nor of the one I linked. Let me put it another way: the key issues people have with Google are generally issues that happen over longer scales of working with them: things are great for a half a year or even two or three years, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you (whether or not you are paying for the service and whether or not you are generating lots of revenue; I mean: look at the fate of Google Wallet); if you seriously are throwing out experience from as recently as a year and a half ago and seriously believe that after three years knowledge would have become fundamentally out of date, your article today about "use Google, not Amazon" is clearly also worthless as the real question users need to answer for themselves is "in three years will I have regretted my decision", and you believe articles and comments and experience (such as yours!) is not capable of guiding people, which is ludicrous.

lobster_johnson 10y ago

It seems to me that Google is highly siloed internally. The GCP team is very visible (they engage on HN and elsewhere), and GCP has excellent support. Very different from other parts of Google. I have problems with Google as a whole, but I have as much faith in their cloud as I have in AWS or Digitial Ocean (we currently use all three). The Kubernetes team is also highly engaged on Github (they also occasionally show up on the official Slack channels). The Go community suffers from a depressing abundance of hostility, intransigence and arrogance, and some of Google's projects (e.g. Protobuf, the Go project itself) reflect this, but I was delighted to find that the Kubernetes people are not like this at all. It's a very friendly, quality-focused community. I think they have to be since Kubernetes is still emerging tech that's craving adoption. Same goes for GCP -- Google doesn't hide the fact that they're aggressively courting customers to migrate.

scrollaway 10y ago
Not to be too cynical but none of this is reassuring. It's making it sound like the moment that GCP stops being the underdog they'll stop being as helpful and courteous :)

saurik 10y ago

This thread of comments from a year and a half ago, on the article "How Amazon took control of the cloud", is really epic on these points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825

user5994461 10y ago
Honestly. I would ignore any comment that is that old. Running anything on AWS or Google 3 years ago. That must have been hell.
- vgt 10y ago
  I'll add that the main issue seems to be with Google AppEngine of two years ago. For compute options Google Cloud has Compute Engine, Container Engine (Kubernetes), and even AppEngine Flex Environment these days. (work at Google Cloud)
- saurik 10y ago
  The attitudes and competencies of organizations generally doesn't change over the time scale of only a year and a half (which is really not long at all... I mean... I've been using AWS now for over eight years and had a product deployed on App Engine six years ago; the people I work with who really like GCP have been using it for three or four years, and our conversations about it and their experiences track that far back: a little over a year is nothing...), and when it does it is generally due to a massive disruption, such as a changing of the guard at the upper echelons of management. This is particularly true of companies that are dominated by personality effects, as are most of these massive tech companies. FWIW, the serious complaints I would lodge against AWS today are the same things I was complaining about back in 2009 on the Amazon EC2 forums. Sure, the actual technical abilities of products change over a year and a half, but that is neither the complaint of this comment thread here, nor of the one I linked. Let me put it another way: the key issues people have with Google are generally issues that happen over longer scales of working with them: things are great for a half a year or even two or three years, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you (whether or not you are paying for the service and whether or not you are generating lots of revenue; I mean: look at the fate of Google Wallet); if you seriously are throwing out experience from as recently as a year and a half ago and seriously believe that after three years knowledge would have become fundamentally out of date, your article today about "use Google, not Amazon" is clearly also worthless as the real question users need to answer for themselves is "in three years will I have regretted my decision", and you believe articles and comments and experience (such as yours!) is not capable of guiding people, which is ludicrous.