17 ms·

Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly

409 points by dantiberian 8y ago

pdeva1 8y ago
slightly off topic, but since the post mentions StackDriver Monitoring in the ‘Ugly’ section. Just wanted to point that you can get 100% free high quality Infrastructure monitoring from DripStat and use it on all your gcloud vms, thus avoiding that issue completely. https://www.dripstat.com/products/infra/ https://www.dripstat.com/products/infra/
- vageli 8y ago
  Is that your project? You seem to do a decent amount of promotion of it and Chronon Systems. For what it's worth, I'd imagine most people would be hesitant to use a free service for something as critical as their monitoring. Especially since the first term in the terms of service says the service can terminate at any time, without notice.
andypants 8y ago
The ugliest: no ipv6 anywhere except the load balancer.
- dairychris 8y ago
  Seriously? In 2018?
- ggm 8y ago
  Came here to check if this bothered others as much as me. Not disappointed. Considering how strongly other arms of google get Ipv6, this is one of the saddest failures they have.
i0exception 8y ago
I'm surprised that GKE is not included in the list of "Good"s. Managed kubernetes has been a game changer for us.
- dantiberian 8y ago
  I've just updated the post to make it clearer that I'm only talking about services that I used. GKE definitely looks promising, but I haven't used it so I can't give an opinion on it.
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    I will add from my personal experience that GKE has come a long way, and it is probably the best managed K8s experience now. Still has some warts - a lot of the stuff you'd expect out of the box is still beta, or preview. And until this year, I wouldn't have used GKE for any significant installs, at least not without a really good support contract.
jrockway 8y ago
> Sometimes when browsing documentation for a service or API you will find that the old way is deprecated, but the new way that they recommend you use is still in beta or alpha (!). Familiar.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  Also familiar: monitoring frontend is tragic-comic with no units and inscrutable data. It’s cute that the author thinks the internal version must be a lot better! On the other hand, the article doesn’t mention Stackdriver Profiler, which has an amazing UX. Definitely recommended if you are spending significant money on CPU at GCE.
  - dantiberian 8y ago
    Nice, I haven't used the Profiler yet, will check that out soon. What languages have you used it with? I'm looking to use it with the JVM profiler.
    - mmclean 8y ago
      [SD APM PM here] Yep, we support Java / JVM, Node.js, and Go; Python is coming soon
      - wikibob 8y ago
        What’s the long term plan here with StackDriver and OpenCensus? Are you eventually going to support high cardinality events with the ability to aggregate and then break down (as opposed to say Prometheus which pre-aggregates, so you can’t break down to debug, and doesn’t support high cardinality).
      - wikibob 8y ago
        Would you be willing to add a contact method in your profile (twitter/email) for some offline questions?
- clhodapp 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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pbrumm 8y ago
well written. Things I would add to the Good side. - ability to commit to multi year cpu/ram without upfront costs - they can live migrate your vm to new physical hardware, so no need to have random reboots of your instances - https load balancers allow traffic around the world to enter google network closest to user, this reduces handshakes and reduces comcast like outages to affect users. the above greatly decrease my stress.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  I guess that closeness to user got eliminated from the “good” list since Google’s FELB is serving 502 to this author’s customers.
  - dantiberian 8y ago
    They did eventually stop serving sporadic 502's, I've updated the post to make that a bit clearer.
    - ebikelaw 8y ago
      That’s good to hear. My intuition is random failure like that resulted from inability to find your instances, or a belief in their non-existence or ill health.
    - esseti 8y ago
      OP: for the 502 problems give a look at this https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/issues/1396 https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/issues/1396 https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-gce/issues/34 https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-gce/issues/34 I run into the same problem while ago. It may solve your problem as well.
  - pbrumm 8y ago
    maybe. We haven't had any issues with it over last year. The comcast outage last week probably affected more customers.
- stephengillie 8y ago
karmaseed 8y ago
We’re currently having this problem where firebase suddenly stops working with the main wired internet network. I switch to another internet provider (mobile wireless) and firebase starts working immediately. This may be something to do with router settings but has everyone in office confused like hell.
yohann305 8y ago
my very ugly experience: For a mobile app, the cost of storage access bandwidth (Google Storage) for a 30 second video will cost you more than the profit you can make from ad impression (CPM/CPC) using Google Admob, making any video-based business unsustainable using Google's ecosystem. Note: If you work at Google, you might want to pass this message up the chain, thank you. PS: i've played with all types of admob ads to try to make the system profitable, even the IN-YOUR-FACE interstitial ad that everyone hates (even Google themselves hate it, they are limiting its use) PS #2: Google Admob has also removed the ability to create native ads.
- surajrmal 8y ago
  This is to push you towards CDNs. The main data centers cannot scale appropriately to serve high bandwidth applications, and aren't meant to.
  - krn 8y ago
    I am not sure why this was downvoted. Isn't it true, that cloud storage service is supposed to be used for cloud storage, and content delivery service is supposed to be used for content delivery?
    - tejohnso 8y ago
      Media content storage and delivery is an advertised use case [1] > ...highest level of availability and performance is ideal for low-latency, high QPS content serving And the cost using Google Cloud CDN isn't necessarily going to be a major improvement over Google Cloud Storage. Egress cost is similar depending on usage, plus you pay for cache fill and api calls. [1] https://cloud.google.com/storage/use-cases/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/use-cases/
a012 8y ago
I got hard time while trying to figure out searching and filtering Stackdriver logs. I'd rather streaming logs with EFK and search with Kibana, Stackdriver is very basic comparing to it. And also visualizing instance metrics is such a pain, comparing with with AWS Cloudwatch.
fernandotakai 8y ago
honestly, stackdriver is the worse. monitoring, as the author said, is absurd. but their logging solution is even worse, specially when compared to solutions like kibana + elasticsearch. i wouldn't recommend stackdriver to anyone.
fierro 8y ago
article needs a date
- dantiberian 8y ago
  Thanks, I've updated this.
deanCommie 8y ago
I'm always surprised that comparisons like this with AWS miss the fundamental philosophical approach of the cloud offerings. AWS is "infrastructure as a service". Hosts, network switches, load balancers - things that historically cost an arm and a leg, but they could virtualize. Add some elasticity and auto scaling, and you've got the foundation to build anything else on top. The hyper-specificity of SQS vs Kinesis, for example, comes out of the same philosophy: Provide the infrastructure, and let customers figure out what to build on top of it. Google, meanwhile, started with AppEngine - run your apps in the cloud without concern for the hardware. AWS's equivalent is Elastic Bean Stalk - more than one layer of abstraction higher than the default offerings.
- atombender 8y ago
  Google may have started with AppEngine, but that's not how it is today. Google now has a line-up of products directly competing with equivalent AWS services: VMs (Compute Engine), queueing (Pub/sub), key/value storage (GCS, which even has S3 API compatibility), SQL databases (CloudSQL, Spanner), Redis, document storage (Google Datastore), distributed file system (Filestore, like EFS), big data store (BigQuery), etc.
ksajadi 8y ago
This is a very good evaluation. We were running on AWS for 3 years before moving to GCP and have the same experience. To make up for some of the shortages we replaced some parts with the following: - Monitoring with Datadog - Container build and deployment with Cloud 66 Skycap and Habitus - Support: well, I simply wish if Google Support was better or at least they had a more proactive status page update policy.
penland 8y ago
I've been jumping between AWS and Google Cloud ( with a bit of Digital Ocean sprinkled in ) for the last several years. I chose Google as our cloud platform when we founded our company last August. I could War and Peace a bunch of things but that article does a very nice job in the details. Instead, I'll give a one liner: AWS is to Linux as Google Cloud is to FreeBSD. "Rock solid performance and everything is exactly where you think it should be"
- skywhopper 8y ago
  Your analogy is confusing me. On GCP, none of the tools have all the features you expect?
scarface74 8y ago
I keep hearing how great Terraform is because it allows you to treat infrastructure as code in a cloud agnostic manner. But every time I see a Terraform script, it's tied tightly to AWS's infrastructure -- including Hashicorp's own examples.
- sethvargo 8y ago
  Hey there - Seth from Google here. We have a dedicated team of Google engineers who contribute to Terraform as their full time job. We are constantly looking for ways to improve. We added a lot of examples to our Google provider documentation, and we are working on a project that will enable us to add support for new GCP features in Terraform faster. I can’t speak for HashiCorp’s own examples (I mean, I could, I used to work there), but we have a lot of documentation and examples in the Google bits. If there’s a specific thing you think is missing, I’d be happy to help address it.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    That wasn't meant as a critique on either GCP or Terraform. Given a choice between Google creating another bespoke framework for infrastructure as code like CloudFormation and using Terraform, I think choosing Terraform was a great choice. I am huge fan of Hashicorp's other offerings - Consul, Nomad, and Vault. It was meant more as a critique of people choosing Terraform over CloudFormation for AWS to prevent "vendor lock in".
  - briffle 8y ago
    We use terraform to create our new projects, but with them not supporting kubernetes deployments it would be very difficult for us to continue to use them after standup. (I then script kubectl commands to create our deployments, etc.) Their own github repo issue list said they wouldn't support deployments when it was in beta (hashicorp won't do anything that is in beta, another problem with google cloud and its long, stable betas).. Kuberenetes deployments have been out of Beta for at least 6 months, and no movement on the kubernetes provider
    - 8y ago
sethvargo 8y ago
Hey there! Seth from Google here. Thank you for writing up this article and providing this valuable feedback - we really appreciate it. I’m personally taking this feedback and making sure it’s shared with the relevant teams (both positive and negative). On the DevRel team at Google, we often write friction logs (my colleague just authored a post about friction logs in detail: https://devrel.net/developer-experience/an-introduction-to-friction-logging https://devrel.net/developer-experience/an-introduction-to-f...) to help our product and engineering teams identify and fix any rough or unexpected edges in our offerings. This feedback will be valuable to our teams the same way a friction log is valuable. Thank you again for taking the time to write this up!
- optimusclimb 8y ago
  Had to use the cloud storage python API yesterday to retrieve the sizes of many blobs I have stored there. First time using said API. Creating the client was straight forward enough...oh look, there is a section of the API docs on Blobs, cool - create a blob...and there's a size property. And it has no data. Scan through ALL of the docs on the page...ahh, there's a "reload()" method, and sure enough, calling it retrieves the data. Though...why doesn't constructing the object fetch the properties? And if it doesn't, why don't you just write some sentences somewhere telling people the general flow they should expect for how to interact with the API? From my experience with all other GCloud docs, the answer is - because Google couldn't care less if their customers can figure out how to use their products. You write some minimal API docs on functions, MAYBE give one example of doing one specific activity, and then it should be OBVIOUS how to do the rest. Having used both - would never, ever choose to use GCP over AWS if given the choice - and the main reason, aside from any technical differences - is that one company seems to care about what the experience of using their product is, and the other just doesn't.
  - bduerst 8y ago
    Can you point to which docs were you using? On github it says that if it reports 'none' then you need to load the resource. https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-python/latest/storage/blobs.html#google.cloud.storage.blob.Blob.size https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-python/la...
Thaxll 8y ago
I think the GCP LB is way better than anything you can get on AWS.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  It's also more limited in some ways. People like integrating with Akamai/Cloudflare for instance, in which case there is little point to GLBs.
ciguy 8y ago
The article mentions Terraform workspaces and their limitations (Not Google Cloud related at all). The way we get around this is to have separate variable files for each environment. The master file contains sensible defaults and then those get overridden by the environment specific files. This is the only sane way to manage variables in terraform right now IMO. It does require that you specify a file when you run it, but that's somewhat of a bonus as it forces you to be explicit about the environment you are running against. You shouldn't really be running Terraform locally anyway so it's all handled by the CI server in most situations.
- sethrin 8y ago
  Why should one not run Terraform locally?
  - outworlder 8y ago
    Not the parent, but I share the same opinion. You totally can run locally, provided you are a single developer in your project. Once you start collaborating, you need this to be in a CI server or similar. Make it in such a way that the code is guaranteed to be properly versioned, taking the latest from your 'production' branch, as you can run into a situation where you are running terraform based on local changes which are not in version control, by accident or on purpose. Which now means that the state no longer conforms to the latest TF scripts, and this will come back to bite you. This also forces you to provide any settings as part of your CI job, not a one-off command in the CLI. It also give you auditing, and many other benefits. But the most important piece of advice I can give is: no matter what your particular circumstances are, what your project size is, your Terraform skill, or whatever other variable, always use a Terraform remote state, with whatever backend you are most comfortable with. No exceptions. Even if you are running locally, I don't care. Unless you are doing testing while developing the scripts (and I'd argue even then), there is no reason to use a local state, ever.
    - ciguy 8y ago
      Agree 100% with all this.
neya 8y ago
Although the author mentions they haven't had experience with AppEngine, it's the reason why I love Google Cloud SO much over anything else. If you're a startup running something on Elixir (or even Rails), AppEngine's experience is hard to beat. Not many people do know: * You can run multiple microservices on AppEngine under one application. * Each of these can have many versions serving different percentages of traffic. * There is an on the fly image resizing service, which means, you don't need to run complex imagemagick setups on your machine, instead you can simply call your image with parameters appended Eg. - /my.jpg?size=120x80 and it will be resized on the fly. And it's pretty damn fast, too. * If you're also using Cloud SQL, you can directly let your app talk to it without whitelisting IPs or even using the proxy, just using sockets. * You can lock your app under what google calls IAP, a login layer that allows only authorized users to access your app. IF you're building prototype for clients, it's a no brainer and saves you from adding custom auth. (https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/app-engine-quickstart https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/app-engine-quickstart) * The development experience is superb, and has gotten better in the last 2 years. For the record, I tried AWS ElasticBeanstalk recently and it has a lot of bugs, especially with the new interface changes, so I kept coming back to AppEngine. Seriously, if you're doing a startup in 2018, there is no reason to not use AppEngine.
- dantiberian 8y ago
  I looked long and hard at App Engine, but I wasn't able to use it as I needed to be able to accept file uploads that were larger than the upload limit on the App Engine load balancer. Otherwise it likely would have been my choice. I'm looking at using it for some internal applications soon though.
  - amorphid 8y ago
    I haven't tried this myself, but could you have your client(s) get around this via multipart upload?
    - QuercusMax 8y ago
      I don't think you mean multipart upload - that's a single request that contains multiple files. You're talking about some kind of resumable uploads.
magsafe 8y ago
One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/occasionally connected sync scenarios). Firebase Cloud functions allowed me to convert an AWS Elastic Beanstalk project into a 100% serverless architecture, which basically runs itself with no ongoing maintenance or scaling required. It took a significant amount of work off my shoulders. Once I had a positive experience with Firebase, I started poking deeper into the Cloud Console. I realized I could use App Engine, Compute Engine and various other services, which all made perfect sense as "upgrades" to the core Firebase project. I've now migrated the backends of 2 existing, popular iOS apps from AWS to Firebase+GCP. Kudos to the Google team for making Firebase perfect for my needs, and the overall Cloud platform.
- sethvargo 8y ago
  Thank you for the kind words. I'll make sure the firebase teams receive it :)
- bobbydreamer 8y ago
  Yep. Firebase + GCP(app engine) is awesome.
- Jonovono 8y ago
  Ya, we love Firebase! Use Firebase functions heavily and i've been very pleased. That tied with redux works so smoothly. It's a different way of thinking about things but I find it so much easier to maintain and reason about than your conventional rest service. Couple things I wish it had: 1. Ability to `keepalive` certain functions. Cold start is real. We have gotten around this via app engine cron that triggers certain functions. 2. Schedule them on cron. We have gotten around this using app engine. If curious, this is what we are building off of Firebase (and React native) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bunch-group-video-chat-games/id1294869021?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bunch-group-video-chat-games...
- 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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tonglil 8y ago
> Another service that would be very handy is a hosted etcd/Zookeeper service for service discovery, consensus, leader election, and distributed cron jobs. Look at GKE :)
bazza451 8y ago
My main bugbear with GC is the fact their api’s seems to be written with no regards to usability/consistency/stability from a dev perspective. For instance I wanted to create a project progmatically a few months ago - so check out the docs. Ok v1 of the api has it...wait there’s a v2, it’s been completely removed. where has it been moved to...absolutely no clue. so what am I using now? A deprecated api?
whoisjuan 8y ago
Most of the AWS complexity issues that the author mentions are actually enterprise / high-scale features. Sure, they are too complicated and unnecessary for small operations, but many large organizations wouldn't even consider a cloud infrastructure provider without those things (comprehensive permission and identity model, discernible region and inter-region model, breadth, and depth in computing types, highly auditable security model, etc...) I get his points, but all the things he claims are great about GCP are only great for a one-man shop and not for an enterprise operation.
- azurezyq 8y ago
  Easy-to-use permission control doesn't mean simple. For example, you can always use off-the-shelf IAM roles provided by GCP, but you can also mix-match permissions and create your own custom roles. Also network configuration can be complicated if you track down for the detailed form. Any specific feature you're looking for is missing in GCP?
jjjjoe 8y ago
Hey, I work on public-facing support for GCP. Given the point that it's hard to see what mailing lists are available I wanted to point out https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/groups https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/groups It's definitely not as well-integrated as AWS' forums, but it's a starting point.
- dantiberian 8y ago
  Thanks! I've just updated the post with that.
pow_pp_-1_v 8y ago
Reading the comments here a persistent theme seems to be that the documentation is lacking. Something that might help is creating a "dog-fooding" team mostly filled with interns. This team will be responsible for creating samples with the public APIs. Why Interns? Because they will move on to better things around the time when their brains learn the patterns required to navigate the Google cloud API efficiently.
- wikibob 8y ago
  Yes! The documentation problem is NOT complex to solve. I would love to use GCP on more projects but the docs are embarrassing. Are they trying to get engineers to write the docs rather than hiring professional technical writers? Truly baffling.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Isn’t Google using engineers for everything? They’re famous for piss poor support, for example, because they want engineers to build AIs to do support for them.
  - bus_error 8y ago
    [I'm a technical writer at Google working on Cloud documentation] Thank you for the constructive comments regarding GCP and in particular documentation; we are working on addressing the points raised. GCP has a dedicated tech writing team which is growing (we're hiring!) and the documentation is written by tech writers. We work with our colleagues in developer relations (developer advocates, developer programs engineers), UX and the software engineers who created the product. All that said, we know our documentation is not perfect and are constantly working to improve. To that end if you see something that is broken/incorrect, please file a bug (the "SEND FEEDBACK" link in the top right of the documentation page is a bug submission form). We love to hear from users and I can assure you docs bugs do not get routed to /dev/null (we have a bug SLO, just like our SWE colleagues). As a more general tech writing comment, documenting large, fast growing distributed systems such as public clouds is tricky. There's a lot more to documentation than just writing up instructions, such as thoughtful information architecture. It's a challenge that we, and I'm sure our counterparts at AWS et al., are grappling with. As tech writers, we wince when we see errors in our work and feel pain when users are not able to enjoy the product/service as intended due to issues in documentation. The whole developer relations team (DAs, DPEs and tech writers) proactively try and catch these mistakes but of course, we miss some. It is nice to see users feel so passionately about documentation, so please let us know where we have made mistakes and we will fix them and try harder next time.
fredliu 8y ago
I see lots of evaluation of GCP, or comparison between GCP vs AWS recently. But I don't see as many for the Azure platform, although Azure being the 2nd in the cloud provider market, and even closing on AWS in market share. Anybody has any insights on this?
- csmiller 8y ago
  Just a wild guess, but I think the people who use Azure use it for its compliance/security features, and people who need those may not be the most forthcoming about their applications. (Governments, Banks, etc)
- exhilaration 8y ago
  I have a feeling that most of us working with Azure are employed by large corporations outside of Silicon Valley / FAANG. And we're poorly represented on Hacker News. Microsoft's bread and butter was always the Fortune 500's and I have the impression that's where they're making most of their Azure sales.
- halbritt 8y ago
  I've used Azure a bit and it's been pretty painful for the most part. There are three, maybe four identity management systems (Azure native, MS Live, Hosted AD, others?). Working with the SDKs and doing programmatic authentication was painful. I did a fair bit with AKS. It had a lot of shortcomings that would take a while to go into. They ended up suggesting I use ACS-engine. There are some products that are neat, that I haven't really used at scale, but seem good. Most of the bigdata stuff is pretty legit based on my limited usage. The customers of my employer are large enterprises. Azure definitely has penetration there. I only have a small sampling, but many of them end up leaving Azure for AWS. None of them are really considering GCP.
  - nunez 8y ago
    Could you go into it? I’ve kept hearing good things about AKS, but my experience with their VM service left me skeptical of those claims.
gingerlime 8y ago
This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience. Specifically, support and billing. We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would be surprised if quality was any different. Regarding billing, we've been going through some kafkaesque cycle there trying to set invoiced billing. I've filled a form on their invoiced billing page, a sales contact talked to me on the phone and I explained everything. She then sent an email asking me to fill another form, which I did, and then got contacted by another billing team who basically sent me to the original page. I explained the situation and they just didn't really seem to care or understand what's going on. They then tried to arrange a call, but missed two schedules that I've set, called the wrong number, wrong country code... Not sure where this phone call would lead. Absolutely mind boggling experience there. Teams don't talk to each other. They send the customer around running in circles. It's amazing that it's happening with one of the most sophisticated companies in the world in the 21st century.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  I am in a process of choosing between AWS and GC, and the reason I'm leaning towards AWS is that this is Amazon's primary business. They care about it and they know how to deal with customers. Google on the other hand... They could decide tomorrow that GAE is no longer something they want to deal with, and shut it down. Not likely, I agree, but their incentives and mine are not aligned.
  - swozey 8y ago
    I'm not with GCP but I'm fairly closely connected to its technical staff and user community and a heavy consumer and have been so for about 4 years. It gives me a somewhat unique perspective where I'm happy to give them lip when they need it and they have at times and they also ask for my input fairly frequently. In my opinion they are all in on GCP and it's definitely going nowhere but up. They've been on massive hiring sprees and it's to the point that when I visited them at the Googleplex a few months ago a bunch of their campus buildings were now labeled as Google Cloud buildings. Obviously logos can be removed and maybe it will say Android/Allo/whatever in 3 years but the team is incredible and they seem laser focused on growing the platform. You can go through their blog https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ and the improvements they're making and the pace at which they're making them is pretty great. I've used them for ~4 years so I've definitely had frustrations, especially prior to them reorganizing their Support/Account Management structure about 6-12 mo ago (I do k8s so I interact with this side of things as infrequently as possible). This is a huge money maker for them and I think they're doing a great job albeit they still need to focus on their soft skills (support, billing pains, etc). I have migrated a few companies from AWS to GCP and they've all been happy. If the day ever comes to leave GCP I have no problem making that call; I'm not handcuffed to them. Hopefully they just continue to improve.
djhworld 8y ago
I've not used GCP outside of GCP training courses yet (the quality of these is another matter....), but I did come away thinking the console UX and 'Cloud Shell' thing was absolutely brilliant. This post was interesting to me as the training course presenters seemed to make out that StackDriver was the best thing since sliced bread, but I guess they have to being Google partners...
bobbydreamer 8y ago
App engine - it would be good to have a button to delete app engine instead of deleting a project approach.
gingerlime 8y ago
One other thing I believe is worth mentioning -- and to be honest I was a bit surprised with -- is the ecosystem around GCP vs AWS. For example, we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP, but quite a few with AWS. I'm pretty sure there are other similar examples with other services.
- ssambros 8y ago
  > we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP Google Cloud recently released public beta for Memorystore Redis (https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/) which is a hosted opensource Redis on GCP. It is availabe in europe-west1 region so it might suit your needs. disclaimer: I am an engineer on Memorystore Redis team.
  - ex1710_01 8y ago
    I apologize for bringing up something that is offtopic here but I am really glad to have read your comment. Last I read in the docs, Memorystore was not accessible through the AppEngine Standard Environment, which was rather disappointing to me. I was wondering if just providing the App Engine Standard Environment with the Redis instances address and credentials, along with a service account or IP whitelist for access, would not suffice to be usable there as well. If I'm not wrong, something similar is done in Flexible Environment according to the docs. https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/connect-redis-instance-flex https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/connect-redi... Thanks so much!
    - ssambros 8y ago
      Unfortunately that is not possible at this moment. Without going into details: Flex is running on the same cloud infrastructure as Memorystore that it why it is possible to establish networking between them. This is not true for the regular AppEngine.
willcodeforfoo 8y ago
Seconding the issues on the Load Balancer and 502s. We moved our app there earlier this year to take advantage of GKE and just sort of put up with random 502s (especially during deployments, which are supposed to be zero-downtime). We contacted Google Support but they were unable to help and said that yeah, some percentage of dropped requests is fine. I suppose it's something with our Rails app or configuration, but no one was able to help and I decided to stop wasting time trying to fix it. They have more-or-less gone away now but several months later it leaves me with very little confidence in GLBs and quite scared to change anything around.
Havoc 8y ago
I really like the fact that 1x micro VPS is included in their "Always free" allowance. A free *nix VPS in the cloud is a pretty awesome deal no matter how you look at it. I'm currently hosting websites with it & despite being underpowered it seems to be hanging on thanks to cloudflare caching.
madrox 8y ago
I've been running a production project in Google App Engine for three years with six figure active users and can mostly agree with this. A few comments: 1. Stackdriver gets a bad rap. Maybe there are better solutions out there, but it hasn't been our weakest link. It's gotten very expensive, though. 2. Google recently deployed a new HTTP load balancer that is way better than the old one. 3. Instance usage on app engine is a little opaque and very hard to tune. A lot of it is trial and error. 4. Cloud SQL is garbage and the author is being generous if anything. Haven't had a chance to try Spanner, but it seems a lot better. App Engine + SQL has a lot of little hidden gotchas that are impossible to debug. I'd never recommend anyone use it in production. Google Cloud has come a LONG way, and one of the biggest reasons we continue to invest in it is they keep improving based on feedback. Their product team is very engaged. Their IAM additions, improved load balancing, and additional availability zones have been huge for us.
- sipos 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on what is wrong with Cloud SQL? I have next to no experience with it GCP Cloud SQL, but use AWS RDS a lot.
  - madrox 8y ago
    Cloud SQL itself is fine...it's just hosted SQL. That said, there is a lot of google-bespoke code for interfacing various parts of their cloud with it. Cloud SQL Proxy has a lot of gotchas and hard to debug. For example, the per-instance connection limit between app engine and cloudsql is 5, and it's impossible to know how you're bumping against that. Tuning is a frustrating process, and google support hasn't been too helpful.
    - laixer 8y ago
      The limit was never 5. It used to be 12 and now it's 60.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    GCP is 2 years behind in versions and the funky setup around connections is a hassle to deal with. The number of connections is limited and not configurable, and the default way to connecting is to use the Cloud SQL Proxy which is a separate binary/service you have to run to connect. Public IP access is available but that means going through the public internet, and also means you have to whitelist each individual IP accessing it, which is hard or impossible when trying to use ephemeral or private-ip-only instances.
yandrypozo 8y ago
Another Bad/Ugly: impossible to remove AppEngine data and application without removing the whole project, shame on you GCP :(
nvarsj 8y ago
This is a great article! I've used AWS extensively, and GCP moderately. If you take the thoughtworks style approach, I would classify AWS as "Adopt", GCP as "Trial". Google is investing very heavily in GCP, both internally and in sales and marketing. But, it still feels very much like patchwork. At least when you compare to AWS - which, while complex, is very consistent, very well documented, very stable, and performs very well. GCP is also, I believe, a combination of acquisitions, and this bleeds through with differently skinned UIs and URLs. I'd say the big exception to this is GKE. If you're happy with a managed K8S, there is no comparison to GKE right now. GLB+GKE and you're pretty much set to handle anything with little ops work, and probably more affordable than AWS+Kops. Although, I'm not sure what the support story is like.
char_pointer 8y ago
Can't stress enough how great Compute is compared to EC2. A lot of the (enterprise) companies I work with are weary of going all-in on a particular cloud and prefer to hand-roll open source solutions instead of consuming cloudy services; the most they'll use is VMs, basic networking and storage (although GKE seems quite popular as well nowadays). GCP nails this use case IMO. It's fast to provision, reliable, rarely if ever fails during setup, and you don't need a separate start-up company to predict your costs. It's very much quality over quantity though, so whilst this is great and manages to capture a particular market I do think they need put out way more (perhaps lesser quality) stuff to stay competitive with AWS and to a lesser extent Azure.
dfischer 8y ago
+1 Loving Firebase + GCP
ernsheong 8y ago
GCP wins hands down when you need to ssh into your server via mobile on the go. It has a mobile app. I'm not aware of an AWS mobile app!
- nunez 8y ago
  There is one, but it doesn’t do much
lemming 8y ago
One thing I would love to see is root domain CNAME support (or ALIAS, or ANAME, or whatever) so I can host a static website on a root domain. It seems like there's a workaround using CloudFlare, but it would be really nice if GCP itself supported this.
- folli 8y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but does this help: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website
manigandham 8y ago
This is a good perspective from a smaller user. As said before, the core platform is technically fantastic with the fastest and easiest compute, storage, and networking around. Some downsides mentioned already have options in alpha/beta (like more updated UIs, products like memorystore, filestore).
lucasjans 8y ago
Ugly: no VPC secure access to Cloud Functions basically making it worthless to connect with legacy database systems hosted on GCP.
skywhopper 8y ago
Interesting take. In my job, the idea that cross project connections would be rare or that it’s good for all resources in a project to have access to all others seem a little crazy. I agree it’s a far safer default that AWS’s, but it’s not _good_. The biggest wall for me in setting up GCP is that the resources and accounts are all so tightly tied to personal Google identities. This is unworkable for me, but I don’t see any clear way around it. We’ve set up our billing account on a shared account but it becomes hard to work with around personal Google accounts (even moreso when they are corporate Google Apps accounts). The AWS IAM identity model makes much more sense to me, but perhaps I just need a new paradigm for thinking about it. Are there any good resources for relearning how to think about resource ownership in the GCP model for AWS heads?
gizmodo59 8y ago
Okay Google, I would like to report an outage in GKE. Thanks for contacting Google AI support. We can't escalate this to a human because we don't have enough skilled support team but our AI can solve any problem and we use you as a training set. /s (I know its harsh but I'm sure people here can relate to it)
estevaovix 8y ago
Having multiple accounts as best practice has nothing to do with IAM being complex, it’s about organization and security. Would you run all your workloads in a single account? A bit messy if you have tons of resources and people collaborating. And what if this single account gets compromised?

409 points by dantiberian 8y ago

slightly off topic, but since the post mentions StackDriver Monitoring in the ‘Ugly’ section. Just wanted to point that you can get 100% free high quality Infrastructure monitoring from DripStat and use it on all your gcloud vms, thus avoiding that issue completely. https://www.dripstat.com/products/infra/ https://www.dripstat.com/products/infra/

vageli 8y ago
Is that your project? You seem to do a decent amount of promotion of it and Chronon Systems. For what it's worth, I'd imagine most people would be hesitant to use a free service for something as critical as their monitoring. Especially since the first term in the terms of service says the service can terminate at any time, without notice.

andypants 8y ago

The ugliest: no ipv6 anywhere except the load balancer.

dairychris 8y ago
Seriously? In 2018?
ggm 8y ago
Came here to check if this bothered others as much as me. Not disappointed. Considering how strongly other arms of google get Ipv6, this is one of the saddest failures they have.

i0exception 8y ago

I'm surprised that GKE is not included in the list of "Good"s. Managed kubernetes has been a game changer for us.

dantiberian 8y ago
I've just updated the post to make it clearer that I'm only talking about services that I used. GKE definitely looks promising, but I haven't used it so I can't give an opinion on it.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  I will add from my personal experience that GKE has come a long way, and it is probably the best managed K8s experience now. Still has some warts - a lot of the stuff you'd expect out of the box is still beta, or preview. And until this year, I wouldn't have used GKE for any significant installs, at least not without a really good support contract.

jrockway 8y ago

> Sometimes when browsing documentation for a service or API you will find that the old way is deprecated, but the new way that they recommend you use is still in beta or alpha (!). Familiar.

ebikelaw 8y ago
Also familiar: monitoring frontend is tragic-comic with no units and inscrutable data. It’s cute that the author thinks the internal version must be a lot better! On the other hand, the article doesn’t mention Stackdriver Profiler, which has an amazing UX. Definitely recommended if you are spending significant money on CPU at GCE.
- dantiberian 8y ago
  Nice, I haven't used the Profiler yet, will check that out soon. What languages have you used it with? I'm looking to use it with the JVM profiler.
  - mmclean 8y ago
    [SD APM PM here] Yep, we support Java / JVM, Node.js, and Go; Python is coming soon
    - wikibob 8y ago
      What’s the long term plan here with StackDriver and OpenCensus? Are you eventually going to support high cardinality events with the ability to aggregate and then break down (as opposed to say Prometheus which pre-aggregates, so you can’t break down to debug, and doesn’t support high cardinality).
    - wikibob 8y ago
      Would you be willing to add a contact method in your profile (twitter/email) for some offline questions?
clhodapp 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

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pbrumm 8y ago

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

ebikelaw 8y ago
I guess that closeness to user got eliminated from the “good” list since Google’s FELB is serving 502 to this author’s customers.
- dantiberian 8y ago
  They did eventually stop serving sporadic 502's, I've updated the post to make that a bit clearer.
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    That’s good to hear. My intuition is random failure like that resulted from inability to find your instances, or a belief in their non-existence or ill health.
  - esseti 8y ago
    OP: for the 502 problems give a look at this https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/issues/1396 https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/issues/1396 https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-gce/issues/34 https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-gce/issues/34 I run into the same problem while ago. It may solve your problem as well.
- pbrumm 8y ago
  maybe. We haven't had any issues with it over last year. The comcast outage last week probably affected more customers.
stephengillie 8y ago

karmaseed 8y ago

We’re currently having this problem where firebase suddenly stops working with the main wired internet network. I switch to another internet provider (mobile wireless) and firebase starts working immediately. This may be something to do with router settings but has everyone in office confused like hell.

yohann305 8y ago

my very ugly experience: For a mobile app, the cost of storage access bandwidth (Google Storage) for a 30 second video will cost you more than the profit you can make from ad impression (CPM/CPC) using Google Admob, making any video-based business unsustainable using Google's ecosystem. Note: If you work at Google, you might want to pass this message up the chain, thank you. PS: i've played with all types of admob ads to try to make the system profitable, even the IN-YOUR-FACE interstitial ad that everyone hates (even Google themselves hate it, they are limiting its use) PS #2: Google Admob has also removed the ability to create native ads.

surajrmal 8y ago
This is to push you towards CDNs. The main data centers cannot scale appropriately to serve high bandwidth applications, and aren't meant to.
- krn 8y ago
  I am not sure why this was downvoted. Isn't it true, that cloud storage service is supposed to be used for cloud storage, and content delivery service is supposed to be used for content delivery?
  - tejohnso 8y ago
    Media content storage and delivery is an advertised use case [1] > ...highest level of availability and performance is ideal for low-latency, high QPS content serving And the cost using Google Cloud CDN isn't necessarily going to be a major improvement over Google Cloud Storage. Egress cost is similar depending on usage, plus you pay for cache fill and api calls. [1] https://cloud.google.com/storage/use-cases/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/use-cases/

a012 8y ago

I got hard time while trying to figure out searching and filtering Stackdriver logs. I'd rather streaming logs with EFK and search with Kibana, Stackdriver is very basic comparing to it. And also visualizing instance metrics is such a pain, comparing with with AWS Cloudwatch.

fernandotakai 8y ago

honestly, stackdriver is the worse. monitoring, as the author said, is absurd. but their logging solution is even worse, specially when compared to solutions like kibana + elasticsearch. i wouldn't recommend stackdriver to anyone.

fierro 8y ago

article needs a date

dantiberian 8y ago
Thanks, I've updated this.

deanCommie 8y ago

I'm always surprised that comparisons like this with AWS miss the fundamental philosophical approach of the cloud offerings. AWS is "infrastructure as a service". Hosts, network switches, load balancers - things that historically cost an arm and a leg, but they could virtualize. Add some elasticity and auto scaling, and you've got the foundation to build anything else on top. The hyper-specificity of SQS vs Kinesis, for example, comes out of the same philosophy: Provide the infrastructure, and let customers figure out what to build on top of it. Google, meanwhile, started with AppEngine - run your apps in the cloud without concern for the hardware. AWS's equivalent is Elastic Bean Stalk - more than one layer of abstraction higher than the default offerings.

atombender 8y ago
Google may have started with AppEngine, but that's not how it is today. Google now has a line-up of products directly competing with equivalent AWS services: VMs (Compute Engine), queueing (Pub/sub), key/value storage (GCS, which even has S3 API compatibility), SQL databases (CloudSQL, Spanner), Redis, document storage (Google Datastore), distributed file system (Filestore, like EFS), big data store (BigQuery), etc.

ksajadi 8y ago

This is a very good evaluation. We were running on AWS for 3 years before moving to GCP and have the same experience. To make up for some of the shortages we replaced some parts with the following: - Monitoring with Datadog - Container build and deployment with Cloud 66 Skycap and Habitus - Support: well, I simply wish if Google Support was better or at least they had a more proactive status page update policy.

penland 8y ago

I've been jumping between AWS and Google Cloud ( with a bit of Digital Ocean sprinkled in ) for the last several years. I chose Google as our cloud platform when we founded our company last August. I could War and Peace a bunch of things but that article does a very nice job in the details. Instead, I'll give a one liner: AWS is to Linux as Google Cloud is to FreeBSD. "Rock solid performance and everything is exactly where you think it should be"

skywhopper 8y ago
Your analogy is confusing me. On GCP, none of the tools have all the features you expect?

scarface74 8y ago

I keep hearing how great Terraform is because it allows you to treat infrastructure as code in a cloud agnostic manner. But every time I see a Terraform script, it's tied tightly to AWS's infrastructure -- including Hashicorp's own examples.

sethvargo 8y ago
Hey there - Seth from Google here. We have a dedicated team of Google engineers who contribute to Terraform as their full time job. We are constantly looking for ways to improve. We added a lot of examples to our Google provider documentation, and we are working on a project that will enable us to add support for new GCP features in Terraform faster. I can’t speak for HashiCorp’s own examples (I mean, I could, I used to work there), but we have a lot of documentation and examples in the Google bits. If there’s a specific thing you think is missing, I’d be happy to help address it.
- scarface74 8y ago
  That wasn't meant as a critique on either GCP or Terraform. Given a choice between Google creating another bespoke framework for infrastructure as code like CloudFormation and using Terraform, I think choosing Terraform was a great choice. I am huge fan of Hashicorp's other offerings - Consul, Nomad, and Vault. It was meant more as a critique of people choosing Terraform over CloudFormation for AWS to prevent "vendor lock in".
- briffle 8y ago
  We use terraform to create our new projects, but with them not supporting kubernetes deployments it would be very difficult for us to continue to use them after standup. (I then script kubectl commands to create our deployments, etc.) Their own github repo issue list said they wouldn't support deployments when it was in beta (hashicorp won't do anything that is in beta, another problem with google cloud and its long, stable betas).. Kuberenetes deployments have been out of Beta for at least 6 months, and no movement on the kubernetes provider
  - 8y ago

sethvargo 8y ago

Hey there! Seth from Google here. Thank you for writing up this article and providing this valuable feedback - we really appreciate it. I’m personally taking this feedback and making sure it’s shared with the relevant teams (both positive and negative). On the DevRel team at Google, we often write friction logs (my colleague just authored a post about friction logs in detail: https://devrel.net/developer-experience/an-introduction-to-friction-logging https://devrel.net/developer-experience/an-introduction-to-f...) to help our product and engineering teams identify and fix any rough or unexpected edges in our offerings. This feedback will be valuable to our teams the same way a friction log is valuable. Thank you again for taking the time to write this up!

optimusclimb 8y ago
Had to use the cloud storage python API yesterday to retrieve the sizes of many blobs I have stored there. First time using said API. Creating the client was straight forward enough...oh look, there is a section of the API docs on Blobs, cool - create a blob...and there's a size property. And it has no data. Scan through ALL of the docs on the page...ahh, there's a "reload()" method, and sure enough, calling it retrieves the data. Though...why doesn't constructing the object fetch the properties? And if it doesn't, why don't you just write some sentences somewhere telling people the general flow they should expect for how to interact with the API? From my experience with all other GCloud docs, the answer is - because Google couldn't care less if their customers can figure out how to use their products. You write some minimal API docs on functions, MAYBE give one example of doing one specific activity, and then it should be OBVIOUS how to do the rest. Having used both - would never, ever choose to use GCP over AWS if given the choice - and the main reason, aside from any technical differences - is that one company seems to care about what the experience of using their product is, and the other just doesn't.
- bduerst 8y ago
  Can you point to which docs were you using? On github it says that if it reports 'none' then you need to load the resource. https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-python/latest/storage/blobs.html#google.cloud.storage.blob.Blob.size https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-python/la...

Thaxll 8y ago

I think the GCP LB is way better than anything you can get on AWS.

nvarsj 8y ago
It's also more limited in some ways. People like integrating with Akamai/Cloudflare for instance, in which case there is little point to GLBs.

ciguy 8y ago

The article mentions Terraform workspaces and their limitations (Not Google Cloud related at all). The way we get around this is to have separate variable files for each environment. The master file contains sensible defaults and then those get overridden by the environment specific files. This is the only sane way to manage variables in terraform right now IMO. It does require that you specify a file when you run it, but that's somewhat of a bonus as it forces you to be explicit about the environment you are running against. You shouldn't really be running Terraform locally anyway so it's all handled by the CI server in most situations.

sethrin 8y ago
Why should one not run Terraform locally?
- outworlder 8y ago
  Not the parent, but I share the same opinion. You totally can run locally, provided you are a single developer in your project. Once you start collaborating, you need this to be in a CI server or similar. Make it in such a way that the code is guaranteed to be properly versioned, taking the latest from your 'production' branch, as you can run into a situation where you are running terraform based on local changes which are not in version control, by accident or on purpose. Which now means that the state no longer conforms to the latest TF scripts, and this will come back to bite you. This also forces you to provide any settings as part of your CI job, not a one-off command in the CLI. It also give you auditing, and many other benefits. But the most important piece of advice I can give is: no matter what your particular circumstances are, what your project size is, your Terraform skill, or whatever other variable, always use a Terraform remote state, with whatever backend you are most comfortable with. No exceptions. Even if you are running locally, I don't care. Unless you are doing testing while developing the scripts (and I'd argue even then), there is no reason to use a local state, ever.
  - ciguy 8y ago
    Agree 100% with all this.

neya 8y ago

Although the author mentions they haven't had experience with AppEngine, it's the reason why I love Google Cloud SO much over anything else. If you're a startup running something on Elixir (or even Rails), AppEngine's experience is hard to beat. Not many people do know: * You can run multiple microservices on AppEngine under one application. * Each of these can have many versions serving different percentages of traffic. * There is an on the fly image resizing service, which means, you don't need to run complex imagemagick setups on your machine, instead you can simply call your image with parameters appended Eg. - /my.jpg?size=120x80 and it will be resized on the fly. And it's pretty damn fast, too. * If you're also using Cloud SQL, you can directly let your app talk to it without whitelisting IPs or even using the proxy, just using sockets. * You can lock your app under what google calls IAP, a login layer that allows only authorized users to access your app. IF you're building prototype for clients, it's a no brainer and saves you from adding custom auth. (https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/app-engine-quickstart https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/app-engine-quickstart) * The development experience is superb, and has gotten better in the last 2 years. For the record, I tried AWS ElasticBeanstalk recently and it has a lot of bugs, especially with the new interface changes, so I kept coming back to AppEngine. Seriously, if you're doing a startup in 2018, there is no reason to not use AppEngine.

dantiberian 8y ago
I looked long and hard at App Engine, but I wasn't able to use it as I needed to be able to accept file uploads that were larger than the upload limit on the App Engine load balancer. Otherwise it likely would have been my choice. I'm looking at using it for some internal applications soon though.
- amorphid 8y ago
  I haven't tried this myself, but could you have your client(s) get around this via multipart upload?
  - QuercusMax 8y ago
    I don't think you mean multipart upload - that's a single request that contains multiple files. You're talking about some kind of resumable uploads.

magsafe 8y ago

One thing I didn't see mentioned in this article is Firebase. It feels like a hidden gem lurking within the overall GCP offering, and may be overlooked by devs who're not doing mobile-specific work. For me, Firebase was the gateway drug that got me into GCP. I successfully built and hosted the backends for a couple of iOS apps using Firebase. The best parts were cloud functions and built-in sync (including offline/occasionally connected sync scenarios). Firebase Cloud functions allowed me to convert an AWS Elastic Beanstalk project into a 100% serverless architecture, which basically runs itself with no ongoing maintenance or scaling required. It took a significant amount of work off my shoulders. Once I had a positive experience with Firebase, I started poking deeper into the Cloud Console. I realized I could use App Engine, Compute Engine and various other services, which all made perfect sense as "upgrades" to the core Firebase project. I've now migrated the backends of 2 existing, popular iOS apps from AWS to Firebase+GCP. Kudos to the Google team for making Firebase perfect for my needs, and the overall Cloud platform.

sethvargo 8y ago
Thank you for the kind words. I'll make sure the firebase teams receive it :)
bobbydreamer 8y ago
Yep. Firebase + GCP(app engine) is awesome.
Jonovono 8y ago
Ya, we love Firebase! Use Firebase functions heavily and i've been very pleased. That tied with redux works so smoothly. It's a different way of thinking about things but I find it so much easier to maintain and reason about than your conventional rest service. Couple things I wish it had: 1. Ability to `keepalive` certain functions. Cold start is real. We have gotten around this via app engine cron that triggers certain functions. 2. Schedule them on cron. We have gotten around this using app engine. If curious, this is what we are building off of Firebase (and React native) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bunch-group-video-chat-games/id1294869021?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bunch-group-video-chat-games...
8y ago

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tonglil 8y ago

> Another service that would be very handy is a hosted etcd/Zookeeper service for service discovery, consensus, leader election, and distributed cron jobs. Look at GKE :)

bazza451 8y ago

My main bugbear with GC is the fact their api’s seems to be written with no regards to usability/consistency/stability from a dev perspective. For instance I wanted to create a project progmatically a few months ago - so check out the docs. Ok v1 of the api has it...wait there’s a v2, it’s been completely removed. where has it been moved to...absolutely no clue. so what am I using now? A deprecated api?

whoisjuan 8y ago

Most of the AWS complexity issues that the author mentions are actually enterprise / high-scale features. Sure, they are too complicated and unnecessary for small operations, but many large organizations wouldn't even consider a cloud infrastructure provider without those things (comprehensive permission and identity model, discernible region and inter-region model, breadth, and depth in computing types, highly auditable security model, etc...) I get his points, but all the things he claims are great about GCP are only great for a one-man shop and not for an enterprise operation.

azurezyq 8y ago
Easy-to-use permission control doesn't mean simple. For example, you can always use off-the-shelf IAM roles provided by GCP, but you can also mix-match permissions and create your own custom roles. Also network configuration can be complicated if you track down for the detailed form. Any specific feature you're looking for is missing in GCP?

jjjjoe 8y ago

Hey, I work on public-facing support for GCP. Given the point that it's hard to see what mailing lists are available I wanted to point out https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/groups https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/groups It's definitely not as well-integrated as AWS' forums, but it's a starting point.

dantiberian 8y ago
Thanks! I've just updated the post with that.

pow_pp_-1_v 8y ago

Reading the comments here a persistent theme seems to be that the documentation is lacking. Something that might help is creating a "dog-fooding" team mostly filled with interns. This team will be responsible for creating samples with the public APIs. Why Interns? Because they will move on to better things around the time when their brains learn the patterns required to navigate the Google cloud API efficiently.

wikibob 8y ago
Yes! The documentation problem is NOT complex to solve. I would love to use GCP on more projects but the docs are embarrassing. Are they trying to get engineers to write the docs rather than hiring professional technical writers? Truly baffling.
- oblio 8y ago
  Isn’t Google using engineers for everything? They’re famous for piss poor support, for example, because they want engineers to build AIs to do support for them.
- bus_error 8y ago
  [I'm a technical writer at Google working on Cloud documentation] Thank you for the constructive comments regarding GCP and in particular documentation; we are working on addressing the points raised. GCP has a dedicated tech writing team which is growing (we're hiring!) and the documentation is written by tech writers. We work with our colleagues in developer relations (developer advocates, developer programs engineers), UX and the software engineers who created the product. All that said, we know our documentation is not perfect and are constantly working to improve. To that end if you see something that is broken/incorrect, please file a bug (the "SEND FEEDBACK" link in the top right of the documentation page is a bug submission form). We love to hear from users and I can assure you docs bugs do not get routed to /dev/null (we have a bug SLO, just like our SWE colleagues). As a more general tech writing comment, documenting large, fast growing distributed systems such as public clouds is tricky. There's a lot more to documentation than just writing up instructions, such as thoughtful information architecture. It's a challenge that we, and I'm sure our counterparts at AWS et al., are grappling with. As tech writers, we wince when we see errors in our work and feel pain when users are not able to enjoy the product/service as intended due to issues in documentation. The whole developer relations team (DAs, DPEs and tech writers) proactively try and catch these mistakes but of course, we miss some. It is nice to see users feel so passionately about documentation, so please let us know where we have made mistakes and we will fix them and try harder next time.

fredliu 8y ago

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

csmiller 8y ago
Just a wild guess, but I think the people who use Azure use it for its compliance/security features, and people who need those may not be the most forthcoming about their applications. (Governments, Banks, etc)
exhilaration 8y ago
I have a feeling that most of us working with Azure are employed by large corporations outside of Silicon Valley / FAANG. And we're poorly represented on Hacker News. Microsoft's bread and butter was always the Fortune 500's and I have the impression that's where they're making most of their Azure sales.
halbritt 8y ago
I've used Azure a bit and it's been pretty painful for the most part. There are three, maybe four identity management systems (Azure native, MS Live, Hosted AD, others?). Working with the SDKs and doing programmatic authentication was painful. I did a fair bit with AKS. It had a lot of shortcomings that would take a while to go into. They ended up suggesting I use ACS-engine. There are some products that are neat, that I haven't really used at scale, but seem good. Most of the bigdata stuff is pretty legit based on my limited usage. The customers of my employer are large enterprises. Azure definitely has penetration there. I only have a small sampling, but many of them end up leaving Azure for AWS. None of them are really considering GCP.
- nunez 8y ago
  Could you go into it? I’ve kept hearing good things about AKS, but my experience with their VM service left me skeptical of those claims.

gingerlime 8y ago

This was one heck of a rundown of different GCP options and problems. I haven't used as many services as the OP, but definitely most things that did overlap pretty much echoed my own experience. Specifically, support and billing. We've used Gold support for a while, and our experience wasn't great. Pretty much the same as the OP described with Silver. Perhaps response times were slightly faster I imagine, but I would be surprised if quality was any different. Regarding billing, we've been going through some kafkaesque cycle there trying to set invoiced billing. I've filled a form on their invoiced billing page, a sales contact talked to me on the phone and I explained everything. She then sent an email asking me to fill another form, which I did, and then got contacted by another billing team who basically sent me to the original page. I explained the situation and they just didn't really seem to care or understand what's going on. They then tried to arrange a call, but missed two schedules that I've set, called the wrong number, wrong country code... Not sure where this phone call would lead. Absolutely mind boggling experience there. Teams don't talk to each other. They send the customer around running in circles. It's amazing that it's happening with one of the most sophisticated companies in the world in the 21st century.

Drdrdrq 8y ago
I am in a process of choosing between AWS and GC, and the reason I'm leaning towards AWS is that this is Amazon's primary business. They care about it and they know how to deal with customers. Google on the other hand... They could decide tomorrow that GAE is no longer something they want to deal with, and shut it down. Not likely, I agree, but their incentives and mine are not aligned.
- swozey 8y ago
  I'm not with GCP but I'm fairly closely connected to its technical staff and user community and a heavy consumer and have been so for about 4 years. It gives me a somewhat unique perspective where I'm happy to give them lip when they need it and they have at times and they also ask for my input fairly frequently. In my opinion they are all in on GCP and it's definitely going nowhere but up. They've been on massive hiring sprees and it's to the point that when I visited them at the Googleplex a few months ago a bunch of their campus buildings were now labeled as Google Cloud buildings. Obviously logos can be removed and maybe it will say Android/Allo/whatever in 3 years but the team is incredible and they seem laser focused on growing the platform. You can go through their blog https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/ and the improvements they're making and the pace at which they're making them is pretty great. I've used them for ~4 years so I've definitely had frustrations, especially prior to them reorganizing their Support/Account Management structure about 6-12 mo ago (I do k8s so I interact with this side of things as infrequently as possible). This is a huge money maker for them and I think they're doing a great job albeit they still need to focus on their soft skills (support, billing pains, etc). I have migrated a few companies from AWS to GCP and they've all been happy. If the day ever comes to leave GCP I have no problem making that call; I'm not handcuffed to them. Hopefully they just continue to improve.

djhworld 8y ago

I've not used GCP outside of GCP training courses yet (the quality of these is another matter....), but I did come away thinking the console UX and 'Cloud Shell' thing was absolutely brilliant. This post was interesting to me as the training course presenters seemed to make out that StackDriver was the best thing since sliced bread, but I guess they have to being Google partners...

bobbydreamer 8y ago

App engine - it would be good to have a button to delete app engine instead of deleting a project approach.

gingerlime 8y ago

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

ssambros 8y ago
> we were looking for a solid redis hosting service in the EU, and latency is key obviously. There are virtually none with GCP Google Cloud recently released public beta for Memorystore Redis (https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/ https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/) which is a hosted opensource Redis on GCP. It is availabe in europe-west1 region so it might suit your needs. disclaimer: I am an engineer on Memorystore Redis team.
- ex1710_01 8y ago
  I apologize for bringing up something that is offtopic here but I am really glad to have read your comment. Last I read in the docs, Memorystore was not accessible through the AppEngine Standard Environment, which was rather disappointing to me. I was wondering if just providing the App Engine Standard Environment with the Redis instances address and credentials, along with a service account or IP whitelist for access, would not suffice to be usable there as well. If I'm not wrong, something similar is done in Flexible Environment according to the docs. https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/connect-redis-instance-flex https://cloud.google.com/memorystore/docs/redis/connect-redi... Thanks so much!
  - ssambros 8y ago
    Unfortunately that is not possible at this moment. Without going into details: Flex is running on the same cloud infrastructure as Memorystore that it why it is possible to establish networking between them. This is not true for the regular AppEngine.

willcodeforfoo 8y ago

Seconding the issues on the Load Balancer and 502s. We moved our app there earlier this year to take advantage of GKE and just sort of put up with random 502s (especially during deployments, which are supposed to be zero-downtime). We contacted Google Support but they were unable to help and said that yeah, some percentage of dropped requests is fine. I suppose it's something with our Rails app or configuration, but no one was able to help and I decided to stop wasting time trying to fix it. They have more-or-less gone away now but several months later it leaves me with very little confidence in GLBs and quite scared to change anything around.

Havoc 8y ago

I really like the fact that 1x micro VPS is included in their "Always free" allowance. A free *nix VPS in the cloud is a pretty awesome deal no matter how you look at it. I'm currently hosting websites with it & despite being underpowered it seems to be hanging on thanks to cloudflare caching.

madrox 8y ago

I've been running a production project in Google App Engine for three years with six figure active users and can mostly agree with this. A few comments: 1. Stackdriver gets a bad rap. Maybe there are better solutions out there, but it hasn't been our weakest link. It's gotten very expensive, though. 2. Google recently deployed a new HTTP load balancer that is way better than the old one. 3. Instance usage on app engine is a little opaque and very hard to tune. A lot of it is trial and error. 4. Cloud SQL is garbage and the author is being generous if anything. Haven't had a chance to try Spanner, but it seems a lot better. App Engine + SQL has a lot of little hidden gotchas that are impossible to debug. I'd never recommend anyone use it in production. Google Cloud has come a LONG way, and one of the biggest reasons we continue to invest in it is they keep improving based on feedback. Their product team is very engaged. Their IAM additions, improved load balancing, and additional availability zones have been huge for us.

sipos 8y ago
Can you elaborate on what is wrong with Cloud SQL? I have next to no experience with it GCP Cloud SQL, but use AWS RDS a lot.
- madrox 8y ago
  Cloud SQL itself is fine...it's just hosted SQL. That said, there is a lot of google-bespoke code for interfacing various parts of their cloud with it. Cloud SQL Proxy has a lot of gotchas and hard to debug. For example, the per-instance connection limit between app engine and cloudsql is 5, and it's impossible to know how you're bumping against that. Tuning is a frustrating process, and google support hasn't been too helpful.
  - laixer 8y ago
    The limit was never 5. It used to be 12 and now it's 60.
- manigandham 8y ago
  GCP is 2 years behind in versions and the funky setup around connections is a hassle to deal with. The number of connections is limited and not configurable, and the default way to connecting is to use the Cloud SQL Proxy which is a separate binary/service you have to run to connect. Public IP access is available but that means going through the public internet, and also means you have to whitelist each individual IP accessing it, which is hard or impossible when trying to use ephemeral or private-ip-only instances.

yandrypozo 8y ago

Another Bad/Ugly: impossible to remove AppEngine data and application without removing the whole project, shame on you GCP :(

nvarsj 8y ago

This is a great article! I've used AWS extensively, and GCP moderately. If you take the thoughtworks style approach, I would classify AWS as "Adopt", GCP as "Trial". Google is investing very heavily in GCP, both internally and in sales and marketing. But, it still feels very much like patchwork. At least when you compare to AWS - which, while complex, is very consistent, very well documented, very stable, and performs very well. GCP is also, I believe, a combination of acquisitions, and this bleeds through with differently skinned UIs and URLs. I'd say the big exception to this is GKE. If you're happy with a managed K8S, there is no comparison to GKE right now. GLB+GKE and you're pretty much set to handle anything with little ops work, and probably more affordable than AWS+Kops. Although, I'm not sure what the support story is like.

char_pointer 8y ago

Can't stress enough how great Compute is compared to EC2. A lot of the (enterprise) companies I work with are weary of going all-in on a particular cloud and prefer to hand-roll open source solutions instead of consuming cloudy services; the most they'll use is VMs, basic networking and storage (although GKE seems quite popular as well nowadays). GCP nails this use case IMO. It's fast to provision, reliable, rarely if ever fails during setup, and you don't need a separate start-up company to predict your costs. It's very much quality over quantity though, so whilst this is great and manages to capture a particular market I do think they need put out way more (perhaps lesser quality) stuff to stay competitive with AWS and to a lesser extent Azure.

dfischer 8y ago

+1 Loving Firebase + GCP

ernsheong 8y ago

GCP wins hands down when you need to ssh into your server via mobile on the go. It has a mobile app. I'm not aware of an AWS mobile app!

nunez 8y ago
There is one, but it doesn’t do much

lemming 8y ago

One thing I would love to see is root domain CNAME support (or ALIAS, or ANAME, or whatever) so I can host a static website on a root domain. It seems like there's a workaround using CloudFlare, but it would be really nice if GCP itself supported this.

folli 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but does this help: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website

manigandham 8y ago

This is a good perspective from a smaller user. As said before, the core platform is technically fantastic with the fastest and easiest compute, storage, and networking around. Some downsides mentioned already have options in alpha/beta (like more updated UIs, products like memorystore, filestore).

lucasjans 8y ago

Ugly: no VPC secure access to Cloud Functions basically making it worthless to connect with legacy database systems hosted on GCP.

skywhopper 8y ago

Interesting take. In my job, the idea that cross project connections would be rare or that it’s good for all resources in a project to have access to all others seem a little crazy. I agree it’s a far safer default that AWS’s, but it’s not _good_. The biggest wall for me in setting up GCP is that the resources and accounts are all so tightly tied to personal Google identities. This is unworkable for me, but I don’t see any clear way around it. We’ve set up our billing account on a shared account but it becomes hard to work with around personal Google accounts (even moreso when they are corporate Google Apps accounts). The AWS IAM identity model makes much more sense to me, but perhaps I just need a new paradigm for thinking about it. Are there any good resources for relearning how to think about resource ownership in the GCP model for AWS heads?

gizmodo59 8y ago

Okay Google, I would like to report an outage in GKE. Thanks for contacting Google AI support. We can't escalate this to a human because we don't have enough skilled support team but our AI can solve any problem and we use you as a training set. /s (I know its harsh but I'm sure people here can relate to it)

estevaovix 8y ago

Having multiple accounts as best practice has nothing to do with IAM being complex, it’s about organization and security. Would you run all your workloads in a single account? A bit messy if you have tons of resources and people collaborating. And what if this single account gets compromised?