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The complexity of AWS is exactly why it is so successful. It is being pushed by both outside consultants and employees who become the experts within the enterp

by aviv 8y ago

The complexity of AWS is exactly why it is so successful. It is being pushed by both outside consultants and employees who become the experts within the enterprise. GCP's ease of use is a disadvantage in the big picture.

marktangotango 8y ago
This is a pragmatic and astute observation. This scenario has played out several times in the past.
- archgoon 8y ago
  > This scenario has played out several times in the past. What examples come to mind?
  - sz4kerto 8y ago
    Oracle.
    - gaius 8y ago
      That is what makes Oracles cloud play such a mystery. They had a huge asset in a loyal corps of Oracle DBAs embedded in every large organisation on the planet. Now they are saying “fire those guys and we’ll host your databases”. But maybe those guys will say “nah, Postgres is actually all we need, see ya”.
      - nradov 8y ago
        Oracle had no choice. They had to disrupt their own business or someone else would do it to them.
        gaius 8y ago
        Right, but they could have upskilled/cross-trained the DBAs to be cloud guys, offered training, certificates, conferences, yadda yadda. Instead they chose to stab their strongest advocates in the back! A smart executive (ha!) would announce that next year’s bonus pool would be funded by savings on Oracle licences then sit back and let nature take its course...
  - hodgesrm 8y ago
    VMware Enterprises tend to buy full IT offerings including apps and services, not just IaaS. Having a big partner network, which VMware does, is a competitive advantage. Amazon and Azure likewise have large partner ecosystems. Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
  - dboreham 8y ago
    Netware
  - gaius 8y ago
    Bloomberg terminals
pishpash 8y ago
GCP is not less complex. It just appears (but is not actually) better organized and documented. You still need an operations army to fill in feature gaps or go beyond anything that is not default, which are the much bigger problems. At least on AWS you can hack it to do what you need, on GCP some things you just cannot do.
- archgoon 8y ago
  What's an example of an intractable problem you ran into on GCP?
  - pishpash 8y ago
    Maintenance windows that don't cause downtime? This was even discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871931 Read the last description: "amateur and unprofessional." The same thing happens for Kubernetes Engine. Does Google internally run their Cadillac infra like this? Of course not. The conclusion is either they don't care about their external cloud or that team can't ship basic features.
    - jpatokal 8y ago
      I'm not sure I follow you here: for GCE, there are no "maintenance windows", the vast majority of maintenance is carried out via live migration and the user doesn't even notice. Yes, on rare occasion there's an unplanned failure (host error) and the VM has to be restarted elsewhere, but this is the only option for maintenance at AWS. Mandatory disclaimer: I work at GCP.
      - asey 8y ago
        One example fitting GP description would be Cloud SQL maintenance windows. Unavoidable downtime as far as I know (even with HA)
      - pishpash 8y ago
        As asey correctly points out, the link I posted talks about the Cloud SQL maintenance window, not about Compute Engine. That there is unavoidable downtime even with HA has been a problem known for seven months at this point. A Cloud SQL TL even sought feedback here with people telling that person this is a "dealbreaker" and another saying it doesn't even make sense to have built HA for a low probability event (zone outage) before dealing with this much higher probability event: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=flamingcow https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=flamingcow This is pretty strong customer feedback. What happened with this feedback, anything? The bigger picture here about GCP, preceded by Google's long reputation, is that customer feedback means nothing. Googlers are probably still building what they feel like building, and that is why AWS continues to trot ahead despite being less polished. They ship things that work and they know what their customers want.
threeseed 8y ago
GCP is only easy to use because it has no features compared to AWS.

by aviv 8y ago

marktangotango 8y ago

This is a pragmatic and astute observation. This scenario has played out several times in the past.

archgoon 8y ago
> This scenario has played out several times in the past. What examples come to mind?
- sz4kerto 8y ago
  Oracle.
  - gaius 8y ago
    That is what makes Oracles cloud play such a mystery. They had a huge asset in a loyal corps of Oracle DBAs embedded in every large organisation on the planet. Now they are saying “fire those guys and we’ll host your databases”. But maybe those guys will say “nah, Postgres is actually all we need, see ya”.
    - nradov 8y ago
      Oracle had no choice. They had to disrupt their own business or someone else would do it to them.
      - gaius 8y ago
        Right, but they could have upskilled/cross-trained the DBAs to be cloud guys, offered training, certificates, conferences, yadda yadda. Instead they chose to stab their strongest advocates in the back! A smart executive (ha!) would announce that next year’s bonus pool would be funded by savings on Oracle licences then sit back and let nature take its course...
- hodgesrm 8y ago
  VMware Enterprises tend to buy full IT offerings including apps and services, not just IaaS. Having a big partner network, which VMware does, is a competitive advantage. Amazon and Azure likewise have large partner ecosystems. Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
- dboreham 8y ago
  Netware
- gaius 8y ago
  Bloomberg terminals

pishpash 8y ago

GCP is not less complex. It just appears (but is not actually) better organized and documented. You still need an operations army to fill in feature gaps or go beyond anything that is not default, which are the much bigger problems. At least on AWS you can hack it to do what you need, on GCP some things you just cannot do.

archgoon 8y ago
What's an example of an intractable problem you ran into on GCP?
- pishpash 8y ago
  Maintenance windows that don't cause downtime? This was even discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871931 Read the last description: "amateur and unprofessional." The same thing happens for Kubernetes Engine. Does Google internally run their Cadillac infra like this? Of course not. The conclusion is either they don't care about their external cloud or that team can't ship basic features.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    I'm not sure I follow you here: for GCE, there are no "maintenance windows", the vast majority of maintenance is carried out via live migration and the user doesn't even notice. Yes, on rare occasion there's an unplanned failure (host error) and the VM has to be restarted elsewhere, but this is the only option for maintenance at AWS. Mandatory disclaimer: I work at GCP.
    - asey 8y ago
      One example fitting GP description would be Cloud SQL maintenance windows. Unavoidable downtime as far as I know (even with HA)
    - pishpash 8y ago
      As asey correctly points out, the link I posted talks about the Cloud SQL maintenance window, not about Compute Engine. That there is unavoidable downtime even with HA has been a problem known for seven months at this point. A Cloud SQL TL even sought feedback here with people telling that person this is a "dealbreaker" and another saying it doesn't even make sense to have built HA for a low probability event (zone outage) before dealing with this much higher probability event: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=flamingcow https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=flamingcow This is pretty strong customer feedback. What happened with this feedback, anything? The bigger picture here about GCP, preceded by Google's long reputation, is that customer feedback means nothing. Googlers are probably still building what they feel like building, and that is why AWS continues to trot ahead despite being less polished. They ship things that work and they know what their customers want.

threeseed 8y ago

GCP is only easy to use because it has no features compared to AWS.