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I didn't realize AWS didn't have this already! I've been working exclusively in GCP for the past few years, and I assumed the two platforms were at parity. Is A

I didn't realize AWS didn't have this already! I've been working exclusively in GCP for the past few years, and I assumed the two platforms were at parity. Is AWS starting to lag behind in new features?

nhumrich 6y ago
They both have features the other doesn't. If you count up the number of features, AWS is way ahead. But yes, GCP has features AWS doesn't have.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  I have less experience with GCP than AWS, but counting the number of features/services on AWS is definitely misleading. So many of the AWS services are effectively abandoned and missing critical features that makes them completely unfit for production usage, and it can be really hard to find this out before you run into the problems yourself. And then out of nowhere 3 years later they'll pick up development on an old thing again and finally fix that critical issue and make it much better. So I'm not sure I'd call that being way ahead. My impression is that the stuff that GCP does have tends to be more capable and production ready (although I'm curious if others would disagree with that).
  - psanford 6y ago
    What AWS services do you consider "abandoned"? The only one I can think of that might be in this category is SimpleDB. AWS recommends you use DynamoDB instead of SimpleDB for new applications. However, I wouldn't call SimpleDB abandoned. SimpleDB continues to work as it has for may years. One thing that AWS is amazingly good at is not breaking existing customers and their applications. Did you build an application 10 years ago based on SimpleDB? All the APIs you used 10 years ago are still there and available to your application today. Its really quite amazing how dedicated AWS is to not breaking existing customers.
    - tehalex 6y ago
      Data Pipeline is abandoned - it is also miserable to work with. Otherwise yeah, there might be too many ways to do the same thing, but AWS generally has a stellar track record of supporting everything else they have made.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Data pipeline has been superseded by Step Functions.
        kubanczyk 6y ago
        Did AWS announced it or are you announcing it? I'm searching just now over *.amazon.com and nothing comes up. The product pages also bear zero indication of that.
        ForHackernews 6y ago
        SimpleDB is also not officially deprecated, but neither does Amazon ever work on it: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ Amazon are like the anti-Google: rather than killing products, they're happy to have them limp along forever.
        scarface74 6y ago
        No one “announced it”. Why would they? If Data Pipeline meets your needs, it still works. But, if you keep track of AWS and where all of the new features are being added, it’s clear that Step Functions is getting all of the new and shiny and can do everything Data Pipeline can do. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-etl-pipelines-using-aws-step-functions/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-et...
    - cactus2093 6y ago
      Abandoned as in not being updated, and therefore falling behind all its competitors. Fair enough that services often continue to work the way they always have, but I'm thinking more of the case where you're actively developing something, and the AWS service has major bugs or is missing significant features that all the alternatives have which makes your job harder building on top of it. Elasticsearch was a famous example, it went years without any updates during which time upstream Elasticsearch itself improved dramatically. Then they picked it back up again once the elastic.io hosted product got good enough that it was a much better alternative. Another example is ECS, which was out in the wild for a couple of years with a very limited feature set while GKE was completely eating its lunch and upstream Kubernetes got a lot of major improvements. Then AWS released EKS which sort of seemed to replace ECS for a while, but they have gone back and forth now for a bit with ECS having some features that EKS didn't have (e.g. fargate for a long time) and vice versa. There are all sorts of other support bugs I've stumbled across in their forums, too many to recall. Often years old threads that have never really been addressed. Edit: another one that comes to mind is cloudwatch/the entire monitoring & logging stack. It's very basic, not really a viable alternative at all to something like splunk. As such an important thing, I always kind of expected it to get better but it just didn't, you had to export your own logs/events to a separate ES cluster, or to Redshift via S3, or something else, etc. Whereas GCP Stackdriver is a much better solution out of the box.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - StreamBright 6y ago
    I agree. We usually limit ourselves to a small subset of features we are using from AWS. The newer services tend to be less reliable, reasonable. I think part of it is the APIs being too complicated. Have you tried to use Kinesis low level API? You know what I am talking about. Ok, lets use the high level API. Well it is written in Java (and Java only) so you are going to be running a JVM on your end regardless. If you think I am joking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throughput-kcl-consumers.html#shared-throughput-kcl-consumers-overview https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throug... I would classify this as a critical issue, and this is part of the reason why we stopped using Kinesis entirely.
  - irrational 6y ago
    Is this true? That isn't typically the Google way. Traditionally they build something and then let it linger for years before killing it. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
matchagaucho 6y ago
AWS LightSail has always supported a cloud shell. However, those instances get used in more of a "pet" than "cattle" context.
- psahgal 6y ago
  Are you talking about the button in the LightSail interface to open up an SSH session in a browser window? Cloud Shell on GCP is slightly different, in that it gives you a preloaded, preconfigured machine to perform tasks on the command line that you would normally do with the GUI.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > AWS LightSail has always supported a cloud shell. The difference being that you have to launch & maintain the server yourself (and pay for its runtime).
hpoe 6y ago
I've generally seen that AWS produces new services quickly but features is a little bit different. From my understanding each service team within AWS is run pretty much as it's own little startup which sometimes make features across services, i.e. tagging, be inconsistent. It also leads to why the UI seems to be so fractured.
- psahgal 6y ago
  One of the first things I noticed when trying out GCP after working on AWS for a few months was how clean and consistent the user interface was. Your comment definitely explains the poor UX on the AWS console!
  - lstroud 6y ago
    AWS has always made the expert “UI” first priority by providing APIs and tooling. The on boarding experience for those who hadn’t transitioned to devops yet seem to be a much lower priority for AWS. I find the opposite to be true for Azure and GCE.
    - amscanne 6y ago
      This is a confusing sentiment to me. GCP APIs also come first. I don’t even think the UI is possible without them. Can you name a product where this is not the case?
Aperocky 6y ago
AWS does have aws cli, which is what this essentially is, except this shell is on the cloud and not another posix shell running locally on your machine. This probably abstract away the .aws profile? I can't see much reason to use it since I use aws cli just fine in the however many terminal tabs I have.
- nsandell123 6y ago
  What do you mean by posix shell?
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    Sorry I mean just shell running on presumably your local computer.
- psahgal 6y ago
  I have found the Cloud Shell on GCP to be much more convenient for a few reasons: - You have to install CLI components piecemeal on GCP, and sometimes need to opt into beta features. With the Cloud Shell, it's all preinstalled for you. - You have to "log into" the CLI if you're running it locally, which can be a minor annoyance. (I know the AWS CLI doesn't have this issue, as it doesn't use OAuth for authentication with the console.) - All of the data transfers in Cloud Shell are happening between machines in Google's data center, so you get gigabit speed file transfers in the Cloud Shell. For example, this is super useful when you need to download a large bucket to a working directory to make edits to multiple files, or if you need to run scripts that pull and push to/from Cloud Storage. I think a Cloud Shell for AWS is a net positive! It can make some workloads easier and reduce the amount of configuration you need to do.
GordonS 6y ago
Azure has had this since forever too. You can use either Powershell or Bash (my preference), and it works really well.
zokier 6y ago
AWS has Cloud 9 as a separate service, which includes this kind of terminal-in-browser thingy. This is basically lightweight version of that concept
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
redkoala 6y ago
Azure has had a cloud shell for a while as well
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  Psssst, we also had transactional consistency in Azure Blob Storage since 2011 too, but S3 only got it 2 weeks ago! https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-s3-now-delivers-strong-read-after-write-consistency-automatically-for-all-applications/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-s3... + https://github.com/gaul/are-we-consistent-yet/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/gaul/are-we-consistent-yet/blob/master/RE...
gundmc 6y ago
One of my favorite features of Cloud Shell on GCP is that for pretty much any action in the UI, it will provide the equivalent fully populated cloud shell command. I hope AWS does something similar.
- scarface74 6y ago
  There is a third party extension that does that and also creates CloudFormation code. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/console-recorder-for-aws/ganlhgooidfbijjidcpkeaohjnkeicba https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/console-recorder-f...
  - maddyboo 6y ago
    That extension is also available for Firefox. GitHub link: https://github.com/iann0036/AWSConsoleRecorder https://github.com/iann0036/AWSConsoleRecorder
StreamBright 6y ago
The question is not this but is this feature really needed. Maybe it is for the GCP user base, maybe it isn't for the AWS user base. I personally use AWS for ~9 years and I never needed such feature. I can achieve exactly the same (quite often do exactly that) by provisioning a small free tier instance with an instance profile that uses the same policy as the service or resource (lambda function for example) that I am debugging. If AWS lacks anything, it is a "why the hell this API call failing exactly" feature. It is horrendous to debug a resource that is using other resources and you do not have any means to get what _exactly_ is missing. Usually you get an error like "s3 throw a 403, bye" message. The closest to a solution is CloudtTrail with giant amount of JSON entries to go through or try to load it to Athena or other database, and because you do not know what exactly you are looking for it is very hard. I usually just ask the support to debug it for me because they have internal tooling that can do that. Most of our support tickets fall into this category.

nhumrich 6y ago

They both have features the other doesn't. If you count up the number of features, AWS is way ahead. But yes, GCP has features AWS doesn't have.

cactus2093 6y ago
I have less experience with GCP than AWS, but counting the number of features/services on AWS is definitely misleading. So many of the AWS services are effectively abandoned and missing critical features that makes them completely unfit for production usage, and it can be really hard to find this out before you run into the problems yourself. And then out of nowhere 3 years later they'll pick up development on an old thing again and finally fix that critical issue and make it much better. So I'm not sure I'd call that being way ahead. My impression is that the stuff that GCP does have tends to be more capable and production ready (although I'm curious if others would disagree with that).
- psanford 6y ago
  What AWS services do you consider "abandoned"? The only one I can think of that might be in this category is SimpleDB. AWS recommends you use DynamoDB instead of SimpleDB for new applications. However, I wouldn't call SimpleDB abandoned. SimpleDB continues to work as it has for may years. One thing that AWS is amazingly good at is not breaking existing customers and their applications. Did you build an application 10 years ago based on SimpleDB? All the APIs you used 10 years ago are still there and available to your application today. Its really quite amazing how dedicated AWS is to not breaking existing customers.
  - tehalex 6y ago
    Data Pipeline is abandoned - it is also miserable to work with. Otherwise yeah, there might be too many ways to do the same thing, but AWS generally has a stellar track record of supporting everything else they have made.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Data pipeline has been superseded by Step Functions.
      - kubanczyk 6y ago
        Did AWS announced it or are you announcing it? I'm searching just now over *.amazon.com and nothing comes up. The product pages also bear zero indication of that.
        ForHackernews 6y ago
        SimpleDB is also not officially deprecated, but neither does Amazon ever work on it: https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ Amazon are like the anti-Google: rather than killing products, they're happy to have them limp along forever.
        scarface74 6y ago
        No one “announced it”. Why would they? If Data Pipeline meets your needs, it still works. But, if you keep track of AWS and where all of the new features are being added, it’s clear that Step Functions is getting all of the new and shiny and can do everything Data Pipeline can do. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-etl-pipelines-using-aws-step-functions/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-et...
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    Abandoned as in not being updated, and therefore falling behind all its competitors. Fair enough that services often continue to work the way they always have, but I'm thinking more of the case where you're actively developing something, and the AWS service has major bugs or is missing significant features that all the alternatives have which makes your job harder building on top of it. Elasticsearch was a famous example, it went years without any updates during which time upstream Elasticsearch itself improved dramatically. Then they picked it back up again once the elastic.io hosted product got good enough that it was a much better alternative. Another example is ECS, which was out in the wild for a couple of years with a very limited feature set while GKE was completely eating its lunch and upstream Kubernetes got a lot of major improvements. Then AWS released EKS which sort of seemed to replace ECS for a while, but they have gone back and forth now for a bit with ECS having some features that EKS didn't have (e.g. fargate for a long time) and vice versa. There are all sorts of other support bugs I've stumbled across in their forums, too many to recall. Often years old threads that have never really been addressed. Edit: another one that comes to mind is cloudwatch/the entire monitoring & logging stack. It's very basic, not really a viable alternative at all to something like splunk. As such an important thing, I always kind of expected it to get better but it just didn't, you had to export your own logs/events to a separate ES cluster, or to Redshift via S3, or something else, etc. Whereas GCP Stackdriver is a much better solution out of the box.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- StreamBright 6y ago
  I agree. We usually limit ourselves to a small subset of features we are using from AWS. The newer services tend to be less reliable, reasonable. I think part of it is the APIs being too complicated. Have you tried to use Kinesis low level API? You know what I am talking about. Ok, lets use the high level API. Well it is written in Java (and Java only) so you are going to be running a JVM on your end regardless. If you think I am joking: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throughput-kcl-consumers.html#shared-throughput-kcl-consumers-overview https://docs.aws.amazon.com/streams/latest/dev/shared-throug... I would classify this as a critical issue, and this is part of the reason why we stopped using Kinesis entirely.
- irrational 6y ago
  Is this true? That isn't typically the Google way. Traditionally they build something and then let it linger for years before killing it. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

matchagaucho 6y ago

AWS LightSail has always supported a cloud shell. However, those instances get used in more of a "pet" than "cattle" context.

psahgal 6y ago
Are you talking about the button in the LightSail interface to open up an SSH session in a browser window? Cloud Shell on GCP is slightly different, in that it gives you a preloaded, preconfigured machine to perform tasks on the command line that you would normally do with the GUI.
mr_toad 6y ago
> AWS LightSail has always supported a cloud shell. The difference being that you have to launch & maintain the server yourself (and pay for its runtime).

hpoe 6y ago

I've generally seen that AWS produces new services quickly but features is a little bit different. From my understanding each service team within AWS is run pretty much as it's own little startup which sometimes make features across services, i.e. tagging, be inconsistent. It also leads to why the UI seems to be so fractured.

psahgal 6y ago
One of the first things I noticed when trying out GCP after working on AWS for a few months was how clean and consistent the user interface was. Your comment definitely explains the poor UX on the AWS console!
- lstroud 6y ago
  AWS has always made the expert “UI” first priority by providing APIs and tooling. The on boarding experience for those who hadn’t transitioned to devops yet seem to be a much lower priority for AWS. I find the opposite to be true for Azure and GCE.
  - amscanne 6y ago
    This is a confusing sentiment to me. GCP APIs also come first. I don’t even think the UI is possible without them. Can you name a product where this is not the case?

Aperocky 6y ago

AWS does have aws cli, which is what this essentially is, except this shell is on the cloud and not another posix shell running locally on your machine. This probably abstract away the .aws profile? I can't see much reason to use it since I use aws cli just fine in the however many terminal tabs I have.

nsandell123 6y ago
What do you mean by posix shell?
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Sorry I mean just shell running on presumably your local computer.
psahgal 6y ago
I have found the Cloud Shell on GCP to be much more convenient for a few reasons: - You have to install CLI components piecemeal on GCP, and sometimes need to opt into beta features. With the Cloud Shell, it's all preinstalled for you. - You have to "log into" the CLI if you're running it locally, which can be a minor annoyance. (I know the AWS CLI doesn't have this issue, as it doesn't use OAuth for authentication with the console.) - All of the data transfers in Cloud Shell are happening between machines in Google's data center, so you get gigabit speed file transfers in the Cloud Shell. For example, this is super useful when you need to download a large bucket to a working directory to make edits to multiple files, or if you need to run scripts that pull and push to/from Cloud Storage. I think a Cloud Shell for AWS is a net positive! It can make some workloads easier and reduce the amount of configuration you need to do.

GordonS 6y ago

Azure has had this since forever too. You can use either Powershell or Bash (my preference), and it works really well.

zokier 6y ago

AWS has Cloud 9 as a separate service, which includes this kind of terminal-in-browser thingy. This is basically lightweight version of that concept

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

redkoala 6y ago

Azure has had a cloud shell for a while as well

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Psssst, we also had transactional consistency in Azure Blob Storage since 2011 too, but S3 only got it 2 weeks ago! https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-s3-now-delivers-strong-read-after-write-consistency-automatically-for-all-applications/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/12/amazon-s3... + https://github.com/gaul/are-we-consistent-yet/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/gaul/are-we-consistent-yet/blob/master/RE...

gundmc 6y ago

One of my favorite features of Cloud Shell on GCP is that for pretty much any action in the UI, it will provide the equivalent fully populated cloud shell command. I hope AWS does something similar.

scarface74 6y ago
There is a third party extension that does that and also creates CloudFormation code. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/console-recorder-for-aws/ganlhgooidfbijjidcpkeaohjnkeicba https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/console-recorder-f...
- maddyboo 6y ago
  That extension is also available for Firefox. GitHub link: https://github.com/iann0036/AWSConsoleRecorder https://github.com/iann0036/AWSConsoleRecorder

StreamBright 6y ago

The question is not this but is this feature really needed. Maybe it is for the GCP user base, maybe it isn't for the AWS user base. I personally use AWS for ~9 years and I never needed such feature. I can achieve exactly the same (quite often do exactly that) by provisioning a small free tier instance with an instance profile that uses the same policy as the service or resource (lambda function for example) that I am debugging. If AWS lacks anything, it is a "why the hell this API call failing exactly" feature. It is horrendous to debug a resource that is using other resources and you do not have any means to get what _exactly_ is missing. Usually you get an error like "s3 throw a 403, bye" message. The closest to a solution is CloudtTrail with giant amount of JSON entries to go through or try to load it to Athena or other database, and because you do not know what exactly you are looking for it is very hard. I usually just ask the support to debug it for me because they have internal tooling that can do that. Most of our support tickets fall into this category.