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I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to mo

by hosh 7y ago

I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away. There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers. I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't. If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP. I have never worked for Google or Amazon.

m0zg 7y ago
I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too. Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making. AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.

by hosh 7y ago

m0zg 7y ago

I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too. Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.

Spooky23 7y ago
Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making. AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.