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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison

• randlet 6y ago
  Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding Comparison for YC companies". Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's hard to draw too many meaningful conclusions for the rest of us when the first line of the AWS bullet points is "reach out to dedicated YC email".
  • tapoxi 6y ago
    This is also pretty specific about needing more free credits than GCP provides out of the box. If you just want to get started with GCP, you just sign in with your Google Account for $300 in credit. When you run out you can just start paying with a credit card.
    • jjoonathan 6y ago
      Exactly. Google: gives me $300 of credit no questions asked and tells me what things will cost upfront. AWS: makes me apply to a program to get credits and if I want to price out anything it's almost a full-blown research effort where I have to dig through documents and cross reference tables between different services and I still probably miss something important. Free tier is opaque enough to frustrate even "use it at small scale and see," because you still have to do the research to see if they are pulling a "your first hit is free but try to scale and WHAM." Oh, but they're customer obsessed, so after much begging and pleading they'll refund half of WHAM, one time.
      • coder543 6y ago
        I don't really agree with that comment. I think all of the megaclouds have undesirably complex pricing structures, but they also all provide pricing calculators. AWS has one here: https://calculator.aws/ https://calculator.aws/ If I punch in the services I want to use, I can quickly see how much they will cost, and it's easy. I recommend clicking "Advanced" inside services on the calculator if you want to be sure you're not going to run into an edge case that costs lots of money unexpectedly. If you use any of the megaclouds without first understanding the price structure, good luck. Personally, I think a lot of companies would be better off using DigitalOcean or some other medium-size cloud. The pricing is much simpler, and pretty much all medium-size clouds charge $0.02/GB for egress bandwidth, either globally or in the US, depending on the provider. In contrast, the megaclouds make shocking amounts of money off of their extremely pricey egress bandwidth, among other highly profitable aspects of their business. Even still, AWS is a solid cloud platform, and they really do seem customer obsessed compared to what I've seen happen on GCP.
        • jjoonathan 6y ago
          I don't really agree with this comment, because we've gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about cross-referencing. If you're willing to put in a lot of effort across tools, you can get a complete picture, but it really does take a lot of effort and foresight into the exact structure that your solution is going to take (which involves cross-referencing documentation). Amazon doesn't make any effort to quote you a price once they have enough information, they always make you work for it. If a price transparency tool is gated behind enough effort, is it really a price transparency tool? That said, I'll grant you that AWS is not the only megacloud leveraging opaque cost structures. They just leverage them more. AWS support is genuinely a cut above, though.
          • coder543 6y ago
            > pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and seems to be consistently worse than other clouds. Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? I honestly can't remember ever being surprised by what things on AWS cost, and I don't think I'm that shockingly good at detecting hidden costs.
            • jjoonathan 6y ago
              Cloudwatch costs have been the ones my coworkers complain about. The one that got me was sagemaker -- the console had a bug where if you went to a region without endpoints, it would pop up a tutorial screen and the tutorial screen would "stick," hiding endpoints in other regions. Which led to hanging endpoints, which were covered by free tier for a few days before costs exploded. We had alerts active, but they alerted when we span up the resources, which was expected, and didn't make it obvious that paging through all the regions ensuring there were no running resources (itself painful) and watching daily costs for a few days was insufficient to ensure that we weren't going to have a $700 bill at the end of the month (or maybe $1400 -- I forget if $700 was the half refunded cost). When I shared this anecdote at Re:Invent, the sentiment at the table was "lol that's cute, here's my story with an order of magnitude higher price tag." There were 5 or 6 of us, and my story was the smallest surprise cost except for one other person who was even greener than I was. > Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for? Can you tell me how I should have used AWS calculator to prevent my surprise charge? You can't, because AWS calculator assumes you know exactly what you're asking for, and the problem with opaque pricing structures is that you sometimes don't. Other clouds tend to be much more upfront about "this will cost X," "this is costing X," "you're out of free tier," etc.
  • dpedu 6y ago
    Why? Why can't Google offer the same thing?
    • randlet 6y ago
      Of course Google could offer the same thing. My proposed title change would be even more recommended in that case. My point is that obviously AWS thinks that on average being in YC is going to result in more revenue for them and therefore they prioritize support for YC companies. As a non-YC company I won't get the same treatment which makes any conclusions from this article less useful.
      • dpedu 6y ago
        I don't think it's surprising at all that an article posted on a Ycombinator.com subdomain about news talks about Ycombinator-related topics.
    • recursive 6y ago
      It wouldn't help much if they did, seeing as how that would be specific to YC. As such, it's not representative of the general experience.
      • blackoil 6y ago
        Not a general experience but common for many incubators, even for some with bootstrapped companies.
  • tyingq 6y ago
    Yeah, that was weird to me also. It just sounds like YC companies collectively use enough AWS to get some premium tier support. I assume GCP has something similar, but YC companies don't spend enough there to get it. Apples and oranges.
    • ttul 6y ago
      AWS has, for a few years now, had a team dedicated to ensuring that AWS wins all of the successful startup business, which they know may turn into huge amounts of revenue for the few startups that succeed. The team was headed up originally by Paul Zimmerman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); he may be a good person to reach out to if you're hoping for some credits.
  • doomslice 6y ago
    I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.
    • aroman 6y ago
      Did you apply via https://cloud.google.com/startup https://cloud.google.com/startup? I'm in a similar position and those credits would be lifechanging.
      • doomslice 6y ago
        Yes, exactly. The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k) -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got $100k. Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was within the $300 free credits that I started with so I didn't pay out of pocket).
        • alberth 6y ago
          What does GCP get in return. If they give you free credit, do you have to give then equity in your company, do you guarantee them X spend, etc?
          • faeyanpiraat 6y ago
            If you have enough funds, you might not care about building an efficient architecture, and when the credits run out, you’ll spend more? Also good PR.
          • omarhaneef 6y ago
            If you hit it big, you’ll spend on their platform for a long time. You don’t have to explicitly promise anything because you’ve built everything around their platform for months/years.
  • syshum 6y ago
    Based on other stories though, the customer experiance between the 2 companies appears to be simliar even if not a YC Company. Google has never had a good reputation for Customer service, they believe they can solve all Customer Service with bots and Automation, this will ALWAYS lead to a lower level of customer service. Amazon started in retail sales where customer service is king, so it naturally has batter customer service philosophy than Google. Google has shown zero signs it even desires to have a customer service philosophy that is remotely similar to Amazon, or even Microsoft Software which is somewhere between Amazon and Google on the customer service scale
  • wdb 6y ago
    Yeah, I think having a YC dedicated mail address at AWS helps. As I am still waiting for a response from AWS regarding joining one of their programs while GCP response was within the day. All access sorted the next day.
  • balls187 6y ago
    We got hella (official size) AWS credits by using Carta to manage our captable/409a.
  • aeturnum 6y ago
    I definitely raised my eyebrows at "access to AWS YC slack" It's really nice to hear from high-prestige companies about their experience because it gives outsiders a sense of what prestige might fix. If you're a small startup looking for help using AWS, finding someone to introduce you might really help! Not so much with GCP.
  • estreeper 6y ago
    For what it's worth, as a non-YC company, I found the GCP onboarding process to be far superior in every way, and my experiences were essentially reversed. For context, we started with GCP for Startups 1.5 years ago when we were just getting beyond a demo, and with AWS Activate 1 year ago, when we had almost no revenue and just about 1,000 users. We were based in the Santa Fe Business Incubator (NM, USA). All in all, it had taken our incubator at least 1.5 years to get enrolled in AWS Activate, and 4 days in GCP for Startups. When we applied for GCP for Startups, we were approved in a week, and were contacted right away by an account manager and a support engineer who offered us help with anything we needed. When we applied for Activate, it took a month with lots of followups, and being shuffled between 4 support team members who were communicating with the Activate team (there was no way to contact them directly). It definitely felt like our business was important for GCP, and for AWS, it wasn't. It was an easy choice.
• dataminded 6y ago
  I'm not at a startup but this resonates. AWS crushes it with customer service. Google is a PITA.
  • random5634 6y ago
    As I've said elsewhere, the $29 and $99 support plans for AWS have to lose AWS money. At least a (fairly long) while ago the support was nuts through these. Total expert level / out of scope. Frankly I'd encourage them to hold scope a bit more but its obviously working for them.
    • NathanKP 6y ago
      AWS employee here. When I was an AWS customer I was also often surprised by the quality of the support answers. Now from the other side I can explain why: even on the cheaper support plans it isn't uncommon for difficult questions to make their way back to the relevant team and the answer you are getting was often written by an engineering manager or engineer on the team that built and operates the thing you were asking about. Obviously there is a balancing act here to avoid slamming the engineers with too much load answering support questions, but it is not uncommon for customers to be getting answers from the people who built the thing. And on my team at least we always try to use support questions to know where we need to improve documentation with more troubleshooting steps, etc.
      • temp667 6y ago
        Very interesting. This would explain the response I got (backstory - I am a contributor to a number of open source packages / not totally clueless, but was coming in from a micro personal account). I was like, how the heck do they afford this response for $99! (or whatever it cost back then - this was a long time ago). I kept my support plan active for a year as a courtesy though I never had another question aside from the first two I put in. That said, as a programmer I like time to focus so being asked customer questions would drive me nuts, hopefully they filter out the idiots who just can't setup things right (80% of issues are not bugs but customer setup issues).
• PaulKeeble 6y ago
  Google's business model is to have no customer service and have customers discard-able without notice when Google chooses. Why would a business want to do business to business with Google and actually pay them at this point? They do 'free' sort of well but they are a terrible option for dependable partner whether you pay them or not.
  • janosett 6y ago
    I was involved in a mid-sized software company migrating from AWS to GCP. My experience was that the GCP team was very hands on, and that enterprise support was very responsive. The support isn't perfect, nor is the product -- but I would say the level of customer service for GCP can't be compared to other Google products.
    • bilal4hmed 6y ago
      maybe they are confused between Google & GCP
    • llbeansandrice 6y ago
      Why did the company choose to migrate from AWS to GCP? Just curious.
      • cbushko 6y ago
        Not the original poster but we migrated to GCP because: 1) AWS was extremely expensive 2) Our GCP bill is about 1/3 of what AWS was 3) The Kubernetes offering is top notch 4) Google giving us credits and offering us consulting were the triggers that started us talking.
        • llbeansandrice 6y ago
          Seems like k8s is a big seller for a lot of companies. We don't use it currently on our team and the larger company is whole-sale in on AWS I'm not sure they'd ever be able to make the switch. Always like to see why people make these big changes though, thanks!
• nkingsy 6y ago
  Confusing title, quick read. This is about sales/cs not product.
• kyloon 6y ago
  I can confirm the same experience too (my company uses both AWS and Google Cloud) where most of the human touch points related to startup credits are with the sales team for Google Cloud instead of an account manager (we still don't have one after about a year now) if you manage to get pass their usual generic responses.
• chromatin 6y ago
  > told rep about infrastructure we were thinking of using but they needed a dollar monthly amount since they were in sales and didn't have an understanding of the infrastructure I am in computational genomics and this was exactly my experience with Google as well.
• smithcoin 6y ago
  It's not much better if you end up being a GCP customer. My company has gone through 4 reps in 3 years. Every time we get a new GCP rep they just want to talk to us about "expanding our use of GCP offerings". The only thing they want to talk about is starting to use BigQuery - not my business at all. I signed up for a Google Cloud Security summit, and afterwards a sales rep reached out me. It was obvious from the start they had no idea I was a gsuite or GCP customer. They then directed me to a NEW account manager (#4) even though I had been working with a different one. I had worked with the prior account rep going over our architecture to make sure everything was kosher (sustained use discounts etc). I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at their request. Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence. It's really insulting, and to me obvious they don't care about my company at all. We're looking at other options. I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this post leads to me getting an email from another rep "Wanting to start over and doing things right", which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I use BigQuery.
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    Honestly given how good BigQuery is, I don't blame the sales rep for keeping their eye on their wallet. I know a lot of companies who are primarily AWS but use Google Cloud exclusively for BigQuery analysis. (no, I'm not and have never been a Google employee)
    • dominotw 6y ago
      why not just use snowflake though if they aren't on gcp already?
      • mr_toad 6y ago
        Why use Snowflake over BigQuery?
        • dominotw 6y ago
          don't have to move data to another cloud?
• k__ 6y ago
  Half-OT: Anyone knows how hard it is to come by AWS (Activate) credits when you are building something and not have founded a company yet?
• iamgopal 6y ago
  Does top google management listen/read HN ? Not that it failed for me ever, but negativity is mesmerising
  • ngokevin 6y ago
    That might be one of the only effective ways to impact change at big tech companies, embarrass their engineers on HN.
    • gorjusborg 6y ago
      If history serves as an example, embarrassment doesn't necessarily spur improvement. It could instead convince them it isn't a core offering, resulting in the decision to shut it down.
      • ngokevin 6y ago
        True, they can down the YouTube route and wipe out any humans in the loop for moderation and customer service.
• stevencorona 6y ago
  I used to be a huge fan of GCP and bet on it to power my startup, and have come to greatly regret it. Recently, I needed to increase a CPU-limit quota from a small number (like 16 vCPUs to 64 vCPUs) - nothing crazy. In the past, the quota increase system was more or less automated and would only take a few minutes to process. This time, however, GCP denied my quota increase and forced me to schedule a call with a sales rep in order to process the quota increase. It was the biggest waste of time and kind of goes against the entire point of instant cloud resizing. It also feels like the velocity of new features, instance types, etc has slowed down dramatically in the past year. Also, while I'm ranting, Google Cloud SQL is probably the worst cloud service I've ever used (and it costs an arm and a leg for the pleasure!)
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    Is the call just so they have a window to upsell you?
    • stevencorona 6y ago
      100% upsell. Felt like sitting through a high pressure timeshare sales pitch to get the free gift at the end
      • marcinzm 6y ago
        I got the same treatment but I think I came off as annoyed enough in my message to sales (with an implied threat of just moving to AWS) that I didn't get an upsell conversation.
  • eyal_c 6y ago
    I just started using Google Cloud SQL – the allure of a managed Postgres service was strong. Can you share some of your experiences with it?
    • stevencorona 6y ago
      Sure. - No way to upgrade major postgres version without full export and import into new cluster. - Incredible delay between postgres versions. IIRC, it took nearly 2 years for them to add postgres 11 after it was released. - HA is basically useless. Costs double, still has 4-5 minute window of downtime as it fails over, doesn't avoid maintenance window downtime (both primary/standby have same maintenance window) and you can't use it as a read replica. Honestly, feels like a borderline scam since I'd imagine a new instance could be spun up in the same amount of time a failover takes (but I haven't tested) - With default settings, we experience overly aggressive OOM-killer related crashes on a ~monthly basis during periods of high utilization. On a 32GB instance, OOM killer seems to kick in around 27-28GB and it's incredibly annoying. - Markup over raw instances is almost 100%, with no sustained use discount outside of a yearly commit. It's just a lot of money to pay for a crashy, outdated version of Postgres.
• jedimastert 6y ago
  Marginally related as always, but here's a repository of user onboard teardowns I've always found really interesting https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/ https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/
• musha68k 6y ago
  From personal experience in multiple startups I can confirm that with regards to customer service and sales processes AWS is light years ahead of GCP. That said I have heard even better stories about Azure actually - apparently it is yet in another league of its own in terms of perks and actual service game.
  • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Similar experience here. AWS has had many years to build and polish their sales process, and it shows. GCP felt like the engineers built a good platform and then tossed it over the wall to some old school VP of sales type people to pitch it in whatever way maximizes their commission checks. Azure feels like a finely honed enterprise sales org that understands what they need to do as underdogs in this market.
    • adflux 6y ago
      Azure the underdog?
  • bitbuilder 6y ago
    The Azure service game is indeed incredible. Every experience I've had with them has been excellent. A client once requested we file a support ticket with Azure to help deal with a performance issue my team was working through. It wasn't really all that urgent, but the client requested we use the highest urgency level anyway. So I filed our ticket. In less than a minute I felt like my phone was being blown up by every engineer at Microsoft. And the messages they left made it clear that the fate of humanity hinged on resolving our issue within the next five minutes. On top of that, the depth and intelligence of the support was downright humbling to this fellow engineer. (At the end of the day, it turns out we'd screwed up and left debug logging on.)
    • politelemon 6y ago
      Glad to hear your logging issues didn't turn out to be Fatal for the rest of us.
  • deleted 6y ago
• blackoil 6y ago
  With AWS you can be confident that when you need help at anytime you can get one phone a person who knows his shit. Also another interesting thing with AWS, there representative give you honest suggestion on how to reduce your bill.
• jayp 6y ago
  Hi Kevin ;-) I am founder of another YC backed company. We based our startup on GCP infra. They have great tech (for the most part) but I regret it so deeply for two reasons: Support or desire to help customers is non-existent. For any questions, they want us to upgrade to paid support and pay them at least 10% more every month for that (we ask like 1-2 questions a year). What? We are already paying you thousands of dollars every month! I get included support for all my software subscriptions - so this is my biggest beef. Also, when they do help, they keep passing you around from team to team and dont resolve issues as well I’d like. It is just not a company I can love as a customer. Their status dashboard is a joke. They dont even report minor outages, when they do, they start after a huge delay and update very slowly. And worst of all - when it only affects a single zone or a single region, they remove it from historic reports so everything looks green/great. I’ve experienced both these times multiple times. I have to assume AWS is better.
  • kevinslin 6y ago
    Appreciate the additional insight. I really wanted to like GCP - they have good people and good tech. This whole onboarding felt like some caricature of what I thought were exaggerated stories of how bad the support was.
  • sitharus 6y ago
    Eh. It’s similar in AWS-land. Basic business hours support is $29/month or 3% of your service spend, whichever is greater. 24/7 is $100/mo or 10%, which also includes outage assistance. I’ve also worked for places with enterprise support ($15,000/mo or 10%) but of you’re bringing in millions per month it’s definitely worth it. The AWS personal health dashboard is also pretty reliable. The public status page is the source of many jokes.
    • dmlittle 6y ago
      While you do pay for AWS support, I must say that in my experience AWS support is pretty top notch. I don't particularly like the (somewhat) recent changes where the priority of your ticket is based on your support plan but I'm guessing it's because everyone always chose "critical" when making small support ticket.
• amichal 6y ago
  Alternate datapoint from outside YC: We've had pushy account reps trying to upsell from both vendors (and not knowing that we already talked to another rep). We've also had reps get actual engineers on the calls early who advised us fairly on which of their products to avoid and how to exploit various savings options or soon to be released features. We are a consultancy and so these reps were sometimes interacting with us as a direct customer/potential customer and sometimes via our clients (both larger existing customers of AWS/GCP and totally noob unknown startups) I'm my experience, there is no pattern other than some CS reps are good and some are aren't. Getting credits in both cases has always been a PITA at the start and than easy when the right person to make the call was reached.
• joduplessis 6y ago
  AWS has been amazing, even for someone who doesn't spend beyond 1,000 EUR. You always get a human on the other side of the line. GCP / Google I have no time for.
• legionof7 6y ago
  I've started using Zeet (https://zeet.co/ https://zeet.co/) to host my startup's website, apps, bots, etc. Found it super easy to use and to quickly deploy things. Replaced our usage of Heroku and Vercel.
• streblo 6y ago
  I've used GCP to great success (with some speedbumps) at 3 companies I've worked for (small and large) over the last 5-6 years. I have a lot of learnings from the experiences to pass on, and one of the key ones is this: work with a reseller. If you've lurked on HN over the past decade you'll have seen tons of stories about how bad Google's customer support is. I don't think GCP's support is anywhere near as terrible as it is for Google's consumer products, but it does have a lot of room for improvement. If you work with a reseller, you'll get much much better results. There are several GCP resellers that are really good and knowledgeable, and often are staffed by former Googlers that worked on GCP. The very first thing you should do if you've chosen GCP is to find one.
  • dataminded 6y ago
    This feels like working really hard to solve a problem that isn't yours. Why not just get your services from a company that will support you? Why is GCP worth doing this for?
    • streblo 6y ago
      For what it's worth, it doesn't involve really hard work, and it costs nothing. Google pays the reseller, the cost to the 'resellee' is $0.
    • pid_0 6y ago
      Because GCP has objectively better data services than AWS, and GKE. EKS sucks. AWS data offerings outside of RDS are not as good as Google's. AWS hierarchy also sucks. GCP projects/folder mechanism is vastly superior, also org policies.
      • streblo 6y ago
        I'll echo this reasoning as one for choosing GCP. Many of the offerings are fantastic on their own - BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Firestore, Cloud SQL, GKE - they're all (IMO) great products that my teams have used to work wonders. On top of that, they're all well integrated and more seamlessly work together in my experience vs AWS services. I've also found integrating access controls via IAM to be really powerful and also pretty user friendly. In one experience, this helped us scale the sales process and allowed us to easily address sales push-back on data security and compliance. Also, engineers really seem to enjoy using the cloud console, even at later stages when it was mostly just read-only and had a lot of access controls. The UX is just way better than AWS. As mentioned, I've experienced issues with GCP and there are reasons to choose AWS instead. I can expand on these if anyone is curious, but wanted to list out the reasons to use GCP, as I feel like most of the posts you see about GCP on HN skew more negative than my own experiences.
• cougarcan 6y ago
  Where is Azure here?
  • ChicagoDave 6y ago
    Expensive and not at all startup friendly. Most startups are doing containers or serverless and Azure makes you pay for straying away from their PaaS business model. Not to mention the way Azure handles networking and security is atrocious, bolted on to Active Directory. I don't know GCP at all, but I do know that AWS Serverless is brain-dead simple to implement and very low-cost even when you begin to scale.
  • yawniek 6y ago
    personal opinion: absolute pain. everything is very complicated due to being connected to AAD and other services. lots of features but most of them useless. the legacy that they dragged along really is hindering.
  • geogra4 6y ago
    Not really startup friendly. Their market is almost exclusively the enterprise. "Oh you have office365 and adfs? just move your monolithic enterprise java app to azure and save!"
  • 300bps 6y ago
    Azure has amazing free benefits for startup. I formerly went through their Bizspark program which gave me a huge credit that let me have multiple VMs, relational database servers, etc for free FOR THREE YEARS. I'm pretty tied to AWS at this point because that's who my employer uses but Azure was really great and their startup benefits were very generous. https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/
  • ZeroCool2u 6y ago
    I had to evaluate the big 3 for a company I worked at a few years ago. We were a G-Suite shop, so GCP was already in the running, but folks were also interested in the Office 365 option (We still used AD for local auth and had file servers etc, so not fully Chromebook style G-Suite), so I decided to start with Azure as it was the one I had the least experience with. Long story short, on my first day I couldn't get the console to log me out, even after explicitly logging out, etc. I thought I was going crazy or just doing something wrong, but I absolutely could not get Azure to log me out. I had to create a support ticket and it turned into an incident. It was honestly all a bit ridiculous. I wasn't going to veto Azure purely on that, though it obviously was not going in Azure's favor, I did have to explain my experience and it was effectively banned based on that experience, because we were a small/medium business subject to HIPAA and more senior folks didn't like the idea of us going bankrupt due to HIPAA violations from our data getting exfiltrated. It ended up being a pretty straight forward choice between GCP and AWS. GCP was already easy for us, because of G-Suite, but also our primary product encapsulated a TensorFlow CV ML model and TPU training was very appealing from both a cost and speed perspective.
• smartties 6y ago
  GCP ? No thanks, I've had enough trouble with google to know they don't care about having a real support.
• devops000 6y ago
  Google has truly lost the ability to innovate in front of Amazon. Its business is based on online advertising which has many problems: bot clicks, ad blockers, privacy issues and users don't like it. The cloud business as we see from this article is not the best and will hardly take market share from AWS.
• benjaminwootton 6y ago
  The overly commercial approach by the GCP rep is so short sighted but not uncommon. I recently worked on a project which had a potential vendor spend in the millions if not tens of millions when it went to production and scaled. Without exception, all of the vendors we spoke with early doors were horrible. Only interested in qualifying the size of the opportunity and when it would sign, not giving us access to the right people and playing horrible politics with our client. I won't list them all, but the worst of the bunch was Snowflake. They were a nightmare and completely shot themselves in the foot. If these vendors would have just helped like a partner with even a medium term focus, any one of them could have signed an enormous deal within a year. Instead, we ended up going open source and AWS native, just because they are so much easier to deal with than many other vendors. Having ran an AWS partner and seen them up close hundreds of times, I agree they are generally very nice and easy to deal with. I did see a recent cultural change when I had a problem in my own startup, but suspect they are still nice to the big boys.
  • mr_toad 6y ago
    The only reason that I can think of as to why you would want to talk to a sales rep (because you don’t actually need to to use cloud services) is to try and wrangle some sort of discount. But the sales rep knows that their job isn’t strictly needed, because the customer can sign up and use services without talking to anyone. They only exist to upsell services. There’s almost no intersection between what a customer wants and what the salesperson provides, so why wouldn’t it be a bad experience for everyone?
• Kassius509 6y ago
  dendron looks slick. not personally an early adopter when it comes to note taking apps, but might try this out.
• dpweb 6y ago
  Enterprise Technology Sales and Technology are two entirely different worlds
• woodgrainz 6y ago
  "AWS: reach out to dedicated YC email" How is this an apples-to-apples comparison at all? Very disingenuous. You have a special support tier for your YC company.
  • marcinzm 6y ago
    Nothing is stopping GCP from doing likewise but they don't. Thus for a YC startup AWS is ahead in terms of customer service.
• pluc 6y ago
  I've been working for startups for 20 years and I was never able to get an AWS Account Manager, much less a "Startup Rep". They must only care about spending, your email domain, the fact that you're an ex employee or likely to write about the experience. Cause it's always been "you're on your own" for me.
  • klohto 6y ago
    Then I would advise you try again. Our AWS bill is between 4 and 5 figures and we got dedicated startup account manager while on development within a week of asking. No internal contacts, literally pinged support team and got it.
  • wyck 6y ago
    I literally just started a new sass on AWS and only have spend about 80$, today I got a call from a rep from their primary headquarters (unlike Google) , and he applied a 300$ initial credit and I can email him for a questions/support. No pressure just all around nice. I've had similar calls from google in the past that were disasters, just someone hammering the up sales button, I actually had to block a google rep on my phone.
• jcims 6y ago
  Bit of an absurd question, but is anyone in here spending 6-7 figures a month at GCP? Does it get better?
• deleted 6y ago
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• directionless 6y ago
  This feels like a somewhat narrow and biased comparison. It is focused around getting startup credits, and while that's important, I think it's a very limited view of onboarding. Better would be to think about what the general initial usability of these services are. How easy is it to spin up the compute load? Create reasonable IAM policies? Debug problems? My own experience (and bias) is that while AWS has vastly more features, GCP is much more usable. The latter feels like a coherent setup with projects and IAM. AWS always has a surprisingly amount of work around org accounts and IAM setups. So maybe it's faster to get AWS credits, but it's much harder to make use of them.
  • epiphytegreg 6y ago
    I agree, post is very focused on customer support and getting the credits, not at all on product usability. I didn't start building on either AWS or GCP with the expectation I'd have a human to talk to, and from that perspective, GCP was much, much more usable. I found (and find) AWS's interfaces and documentation to be a maze.
  • tidepod12 6y ago
    >The latter feels like a coherent setup with projects and IAM. AWS always has a surprisingly amount of work around org accounts and IAM setups. AWS Organizations is atrocious compared to GCP projects. I truly do not understand how/why AWS is doubling down on the awful user experience of Organizations, cross-account access, creating multiple accounts, etc. It's truly the antithesis of customer obsession and yet they show no signs of moving away from that model. And not only is the user experience bad, it also just feels hacky. AWS Organizations and Control Tower feel like poorly applied band-aids rather than real solutions. I actually prefer AWS to GCP in most respects, but the AWS Organizations shitshow is something I can't personally get over.
• faitswulff 6y ago
  Just another Google Cloud vs AWS anecdote, but I have been trying to use Google’s cloud services to translate snippets of text here and there for personal use. I specifically went with Google because their translations are a cut above other translation services. I recently switched over to translating with AWS because Google. Keeps. Breaking. There’s a decided lack of focus on user experience in Google Cloud services, from invalidating my credentials, upgrading the tool chain (and invalidating my credentials), to the usability of the gcloud CLI tool itself. With AWS I was up and running in literal minutes.
• dboreham 6y ago
  Hmm...I've never even thought to talk to a human at a cloud hosting company.
• lazyant 6y ago
  Startup idea for ex-googlers: backdoor access to GCP support (frozen accounts etc)
• Yabood 6y ago
  We've been using GCP for a couple of years now and have nothing but good things to say about it. We also used Azure and AWS before migrating to Google, and the whole GCP platform feels a lot more intuitive. Lacking in some areas, sure, but more than makes up for it in other areas like Kubernetes. We had to use support a handful of times for various issues ranging from technical to general billing questions to long term commitments, and all incidents were handled quickly and professionally.
• fossuser 6y ago
  This is a good example of why I’m long Amazon and short Google. Though Jeff Bezos stepping down worries me a bit. Google doesn’t care that much about their customers. They mint money from their web ad monopoly. They don’t have aligned incentives, they don’t have a customer focused culture.
• te_chris 6y ago
  This feels like they’ve been lead astray. They should be talking to Google Cloud for Startups, not the numptys in GCP’s accounts dept.
• marcinzm 6y ago
  I recently joined a new company to start a Data Science team. They had an existing GCP account for years that they had small usage on and had a long term valid form of payment. I request a tiny increase in our GPU quota (ie: 8 T4s in one region) on GCP and was denied and told to talk to a sales person. I literally said in my message to sales that AWS doesn't make it this hard to give them money. Every quota increase still seems to require escalation to our sales person and all they could offer as advice was to switch to invoice billing.
• Havoc 6y ago
  On the plus side you managed to speak to an actual human at google!
• hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Just another anecdote, we are a startup that got GCP credits last year which fully funded our first year, and it was an extremely simple process. So far we've been extremely happy with GCP (and Firebase), but in fairness haven't needed much tech support.
• loceng 6y ago
  From the comments in this thread it sounds like Google doesn't have much internal communication or accountability going on?
• croes 6y ago
  Maybe that is the reason why Google's cloud business doesn't make profit.
• pnathan 6y ago
  I've been extremely happy with GCP's GKE offering as a solo dev. They've regularly upgraded it and improved it. That said, the risks around customer support and occasional account termination worry me substantially. I'd be less worried if I had a corporate G Suite account with admin.corp@example.com with an invoice system and a corporate counsel on retainer to write grumpy letters as needed.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  AWS seems to realize that good service focusing on product needs will lead to more revenue in the long term. GCP wants to front load revenue concerns, making product usage secondary. Even apart from AWS's first-mover advantage, GCP should not be lagging as far behind as they are. Azure for example started a little later than GCP yet still appears to have more of the market.
• mamon 6y ago
  Pretty basic question: the author states in the very beginning: "I used to work at AWS". Is it possible that things went smoothly for him, because they still remembered him, and prioritized his requests because of personal relationship?
• deleted 6y ago
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• vhiremath4 6y ago
  We spend 100s of 1000’s of dollars a month on AWS. Our rep tried getting me to upgrade to paid support, and I said there was no way I was going to do that. I’m already paying AWS millions a year and will be giving them more and more business as Loom continues to skyrocket in usage. No way I’m paying for support at that scale. It’s a bogus model to charge your customers more when they’re continuing to accelerate in growth and pay you more money. I expect to get more support and attention over time automatically because I’m simply paying much more and my need for support hasn’t proportionally gone up in the least. That was it. Other than that one conversation, my experience with AWS has been _absolutely stellar_ every step of the way. We’ve struck deals with them for several products and have felt like they were fair for both parties. Instead of continuing to focus on getting me to pay for support, they focused on areas where we’d want to rely on other AWS products and have come back with some amazing suggestions. I am extremely impressed with the teams I’ve worked with at AWS - it seems like they really understand the customer, and that incentivizes me to stay and use even more managed services when the unit economics work out for us. For GCP I’ve had reps reach out. I tell them there’s no way we’ll go multi-cloud because it doesn’t make sense for our business goals and detracts from them. They respond as if they never even heard what I said. I get that you have to be persistent as a sales person, but the response wasn’t even talking about how _part_ of our infra would be worth hosting with them. There’s no conversation - it’s just what GCP wants me to do for them.
  • alwaysanon 6y ago
    The way that support is paid for within AWS is roughly like the way that tipping works in the US at a restaurant. The cost of the 'food' doesn't include the cost of your server/support person. Everybody knows that and so you pay the server separately in the form of a tip - usually as a % of the bill.
    • vhiremath4 6y ago
      Does AWS not pay their support staff and engineers salaries?
      • 6y ago
• f430 6y ago
  This has been my experience so far: Scenario: Run some expensive resources by mistake during learning period AWS: Awww shucks, we'll refund you today. GCP: Sorry no refunds.
• radium3d 6y ago
  I'm curious, has anyone gone with Linode VPS or similar instead of the big two? How was that experience?
• zxienin 6y ago
  GC CEO, Kurian has enterprise sales genetics. Entire exec leadership he put in place, comes from SAP Oracle-esque sphere. They speak enterprise, even with startups. GCP‘s primary target and starting point is enterprise. OP‘s experience is no surprise.
  • jcims 6y ago
    And yet their engagement teams are remarkably ignorant of how enterprise works. Even after weeks of conversations I still hear a voice in my head saying 'oh you sweet summer child'.
• campac 6y ago
  Exactly same experience on our end. On AWS: fast, close to our needs and all setup in days. After our one year program cam to an end we still had around 50k in credits. One email asking if they could extend for one or two months, they extended for 6. We also messed up the last month as we did not setup any limits and spend more than 17k in cloud computing - they offered us an 80% discount! On GCP: We got accepted very fast (2 days). But we struggled for 2 months to get GPU quota. The communication is not fluid and we were pointed from sales rep to support to sales rep. Also from the management perspective (but this is purely my opinion), GCP is a labyrinth. You need a phd in GCP to setup your users with permissions. And i still could not figure out how to create good usage reports out of it.
• halbritt 6y ago
  How does interacting with reps have anything to do with "onboarding"? This is more or less an evaluation of how easy it is to take advantage of credits. I'd be more interested in how easy it is to use a credit card and get a service off the ground. What is the relative quality of the products on offer by either vendor?
• no_wizard 6y ago
  I’m surprised that they didn’t include Azure. Microsoft is not without their faults and I know a few sprinkles of comments in this thread have definitely highlighted issues I know people have had with them, but in the whole I have to say this: - my previous company switched from AWS to Azure and had significant savings, their sticker price is not the price you pay, and we were not spending millions to get deep discounts either (they were more interested in us being in a contract instead which makers some sense) - the support we dealt with was really good for the most part, I felt it was pretty comparable to AWS - they have really good uptime for the services we used (blob storage, cosmos DB, mssql and postgres, container hosting) Biggest downside though is they seemed to always be going through SDK changes. I think this had a lot more to do with migrating everything to .NET core though, still was very annoying. Their non .NET sdks were a bit more stable though.
  • pid_0 6y ago
    >I’m surprised that they didn’t include Azure. I'm not. Nobody likes Azure.
    • no_wizard 6y ago
      Is that universally true? Especially given its the second largest cloud computing platform in North America (if not the world)
      • pid_0 6y ago
        Yes. The only people who like Azure are managers that get bonuses for their stupid contracts. Azure is not built for engineers. All of their offerings, especially the automation and tooling, are vastly inferior to AWS and GCP
  • lame88 6y ago
    My experience is that the support is shit. Azure has good parts but if the grass isn't greener elsewhere then I weep for the state of the field.
• subsaharancoder 6y ago
  Microsoft SQL Server on Cloud SQL is quite laughable in terms of feature sets, it currently doesn't support exporting your tables as JSON or CSV, you can only export as a .BAK file which is some MSFT proprietary trash and this bug https://issuetracker.google.com/u/0/issues/170026117 https://issuetracker.google.com/u/0/issues/170026117 was open for months with no ETA for resolution.
• jaimex2 6y ago
  I don't know why anyone would even consider GCP with Google's track record of no human escalation points and random product/feature/account culling. If you need a specific service like BigQuery then that's the only service you should have on there.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  Same experience. Google avoids human contact at all cost
• slt2021 6y ago
  I still don't understand why startups go through the hassle of using cloud, trying to get customer support for unknown and half-baked cloud products and spending enormous money - rather than focusing on building the ACTUAL product? just go rent some VMs/bare-metal and focus on building your product, everything non-product related is just a waste of time, money, and effort. it looks almost as if engineers forgot how to scale bare-metal applications (hint: still doable, pretty easy and damn cheap!)
  • Clewza313 6y ago
    Because startup credits are free money? Also, the basics on all major clouds are pretty baked at this point.
    • slt2021 6y ago
      they are free like when a heroine dealer will give your first two needles for free. cloud offerings are massively overpriced and their goal is to hook you up to their ecosystem and then eat into your margins once your startup lifts off
• antoncohen 6y ago
  Everyone's needs are different. To me GCP is easier to get started with. I don't want white glove service where they try to architect my architecture for me. Pushing me into cloud specific features (like everything in Lambdas stitched together with API Gateways). I don't need that level of help. Also, of the three startups where I have heavily used AWS (personally "owned" the AWS infra), I never had that level of service offered. The only time I've had that "we'll help you architect it" service from AWS was at a startup that used GCP, and there were high level (CEO and CTO) discussions with AWS about partnerships. Then AWS wanted to help us architect (with Lambdas and API Gateways). For me, GCP is way easier. Their products are more complete products. They work together out of the box. They are optimized for the 90% use case to just work. It is far easier to get a really good complete architecture working with GCP. Using their products push you to industry standard ways of writing and packaging applications (12-factor, Docker containers, etc.). The startups I've seen build on AWS often have very bad setups. Hand rolled and poorly managed EC2 messes. Bad logging and monitoring because AWS doesn't have good logging and monitoring. Having to manage everything themselves because AWS doesn't/didn't have good managed platforms (Elastic Beanstalk has enough problems that people don't use it, and EKS barely counts as a managed service). I've seen multiple startup with hand configured EC2 instances, running some generic web service. These systems create huge burdens and risks as the company grows. The app then grows and becomes locked into the special snowflake hand configured mess. One company I joined couldn't deploy for 6 months because their last deployment (a manual process) took 7 hours of downtime. When I see those systems I wish they started on Heroku or GCP App Engine (2nd gen). They would be way better off with a fully automated platform and 12-factor apps. Once you grow and hire people with infrastructure expertise you can take that clean 12-factor app and move it somewhere else. Non-experts trying to use AWS results in scary things. GCP gives you that easy on-ramp. You can start with App Engine. If you need something a bit more custom, you can use Cloud Run (same basic tech as App Engine v2 but with Docker containers). If you need to move to something even more customizable for growing special needs, you can use GKE for a fully managed Kubernetes. With all those services you can write normal apps that use environment variables and log to stdout/stderr. All three give you logs in an easy to use logging platform. All three give you metrics in an easy to use monitoring/metrics/dashboard platform. At every level GCP is easier. Cloud Pub/Sub is easier than SNS+SQS, Amazon Kinesis, or Amazon MSK (Kafka). It is multi-region and just works and scales. GCP VPCs and networking are easier because GCP VPCs are global (not regional), and subnets are regional (not zonal). No need to stitch VPCs together. GCP even has Shared VPCs so you can have a single address space shared across multiple projects (GCP projects == AW accounts). GCP authentication is simple and sane, even across multiple projects, no federation and role assumption needed. GCP IAM is far easier than AWS IAM. Cloud Datastore provides a really simple yet powerful NoSQL store, totally simple, no tunables, just works and scales, and even has some multi-region options available. Want a multi-region consistent database that spans large geographic regions? Amazon doesn't have an option, GCP has Spanner. Want a multi-region consistent blob/file store? Amazon doesn't have an option (S3 is single region), GCP offers GCS in multi-region, dual-region options that provide consistent multi-region file storage. Do you have some weird old app that writes to disk, and you would like it to be able to survive a zone failure? AWS EBS is single zone, GCP persistent disks can be regional, and because subnets are regional that means an instance in another zone can take over the disk and the IP. For me, GCP is way easier to get started with. And will result in a better system in the medium term. In the long term, when you have thousands of engineers and experts in infrastructure engineering, it probably doesn't matter.
• rmac 6y ago
  off topic but: that sidebar is huge. Can I resize it?
• rafaelturk 6y ago
  TLDR >>> The initial `GCP` onboarding call was entirely about how much money I was planning on spending with google (as opposed to the Amazon call where they wanted to help me architect my service)
• collaborative 6y ago
  I've based my startup (www.groupsapp.online) on GCP and so far so good.. their free tier is really good. If you design your arch so that you only need lower-end instances your monthly bill becomes a joke. Datastore is ridiculously cheap too (but stay away from SQL, that can be expensive). 8 months ago I migrated to GCP from another cloud provider and found it more stable
• mickeyben 6y ago
  I had similar experience with Google. We use Google for oauth, map and geolocation APIs for which we pay thousands of dollars every month and all my interactions with them have been very painful. I remember when we asked for a meeting to discuss price raise on Google Maps APIs; The raise was ~100x for us. They came with the head of the local market and 4 people. Basically told us to fuck ourselves and that from now on we'd have to be billed by a reseller instead of being billed by Google. And then they spent an hour trying to convince us to move from AWS to GCP. I had the impression I was at a car dealership. This is just an example out of many so even if I don't have direct experience with GCP I'm not keen to try. I've been managing the AWS company account and the collaboration with AWS for the past 7 years. And while not everything is perfect, my experience was great overall and I would do it again.
• mjgs 6y ago
  I like these type of posts that are self-admittedly biased but based on real world experience. Together with the comments in this thread they are very useful.
• theptip 6y ago
  More anecdata - I did 500 startups in 2016 and used GCP credits, and did not have any problems getting them applied in a timely fashion. To be fair I was already a paying customer at that point (had a small VM or two running) but I did not get a sales up-sell or multi-week delay.
• minikites 6y ago
  Given how often Google abandons products I don't know why anyone would build something important with their infrastructure. That alone should be a massive advantage to AWS.
• ernsheong 6y ago
  Google Cloud needs to hit the numbers. And the only way to do this is to hit the big boys. Dealing with 1000 small customers who are petty and spending small vs dealing with 1 big customer that moves the needle. That is what is going on here. Once Google Cloud manages to hit the numbers, you would expect things to be much better for the smaller players (this remains to be seen). Not excusing their support operations, but I did manage to get on chat with someone about a Billing issue (to understand my billing better), and I was pleasantly surprised at the response time (immediate). The slow and free support route is to use the Google Cloud issue tracker: https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/issue-trackers You tend to use this if you are not critically impacted and you are also a developer. By and large, things works as advertised. You can keep spamming that Feedback form in the Cloud Console. Product Managers do read it and address it.
• rswail 6y ago
  Think where the 3 major cloud operators come from: AWS: Eat-your-own-dogfood, consumer company Google: Eyeballs are our product, cloud,apps,services is a side-effect of our underlying ad business Microsoft: Developer first, keep people in our ecosystem, make it easy to adopt, hard to get out of. Google has good technical product inside GCP, nice fancy stuff like Spanner, etc. All spun out of their own requirements and needs, which is a scalable, invisible, processing engine. Their ad business has two sets of people, ad buyers that bid for their business and don't have alternatives, and anonymous viewers that google sells back to the ad buyers. They're rent-seekers that clip the ticket coming and going, using their search as the lock-in. No wonder they have trouble setting up a true B2B or B2C business. They're not built for it. Both AWS and Microsoft are at least either B2B or B2C and understand that it's not clipping the ticket, it's making margin over the cost of supply of goods and services. Microsoft has even learnt the lesson of losing your lock-in advantage of the desktop. Google has lost that fundamental trust to be able to both operate as a rent-seeker in the ad business while also delivering actual goods and services as a B2B/B2C business.
• manish_gill 6y ago
  I literally had the opposite experience - a couple of years ago I was leading a data team designing a cloud-based solution and migrating the company from bare metal. *AWS* - Lots of sales calls, but eventually redirected us to a "partner", who came up with basically a lift-and-shift. *GCP* - The Regional Business Head was in direct contact. We were provided almost limitless access to a very helpful and experienced Customer Engineer - who spent _weeks_ with us, designing architecture, doing presentations, giving us learning material and eventually was instrumental in my team's increased capability and skill level to do the new infra design. Both came to visit the office several times. Eventually more senior engineers got involved. We were also repeatedly given generous credit extensions. And best of all - there was a GCP summit in the country, during which I literally had a sit-down with PMs from a lot of GCP's product offerings - including Spanner, BigTable. 1:1 video calls with PMs from FileStore, Dataflow and BigQuery as well as early access to some key features. Worth noting that we were hardly a "big" customer, or a huge money spender. Perhaps it was the technical challenge that interested them, or perhaps the reputation of the company/founder in the region. Whatever it was, I've had great experience with GCP.
• JulB 6y ago
  Here is also interesting comparison of AWS, Azure and GCP https://www.n-ix.com/comparing-big-3-aws-azure-gcp/ https://www.n-ix.com/comparing-big-3-aws-azure-gcp/
• neop1x 6y ago
  After your free credits will run out it will start being pretty expensive. Then it may be too late to migrate to a different provider due to excessive egress costs.