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Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure
- VHRanger 5y agoAll the providers are reliable if you stick to simple stuff (VMs, storage, DB, etc.) or as OP called it "cloud agnostic stuff".
- dilyevsky 5y ago“Reliable”. In addition to major outages that normal dcs have they also have dozens of small ones that never make it to the status pages. Even for simple stuff, more so for managed stuff. They are some good reasons to pick public cloud but if you’re picking it for reliability you will be disappointed
- jonas21 5y agoI see the Google hate on HN is strong enough that an article that just regurgitates the contents of a few articles and blog posts can be upvoted to #1 in short order.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 5y agoThe blog post actually just regurgitates HN comments, and now people are going to comment on that. The ouroboros has been perfected.
- 0goel0 5y agolove to learn from the brightest minds on the internet
- dilyevsky 5y agoThey made that bed... I’m sure there are more original stories to be told, people just upvote based on their personal experience
- ghayes 5y agoThe issue here is that the majority of criticisms apply to Google products and services _other than_ GCP. By and large, many commenters here (myself included) have had very good experiences with GCP. Less so with Google Reader.
- dilyevsky 5y agoA fish rots from the head down. I find it hard to believe same dynamics won’t make it down the cloud org given enough time
- cocoland2 5y agoMy experience with GCP has been quite small , most of which have been with GKE and I find that to be good! What i hate though is more about the company , is what they project they are vs what they are https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-drone-ai-pentagon-lucrative/ https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/google-leaked-emails-dro... ``` I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry,” she continued. “Google Cloud has been building our theme on Democratizing AI in 2017, and Diane and I have been talking about Humanistic AI for enterprise. I’d be super careful to protect these very positive images. ``` Not being judgemental about if defense is right or wrong , but its fair to say we are in the running for it. What is not okay is "we care for humanity and freedom of speech" and then do backchannel discussions on how dissent can be quelled with government agencies. So to me distrust is for the company possibly and probably not so much on the reliability of its services
- realityIsntHere 5y agoAnd the odd thing is that Google has been significantly better for consumers than other FAANG companies. Apple has historically been anti consumer and anti developer with a huge marketing budget to wash it. Facebook intentionally makes us sad. M$ and their anti competitive practices should be well known.
- pm90 5y agoGoogle owns YouTube.
- nemothekid 5y ago>Apple has historically been anti consumer What? Apple has been pro-consumer to the detriment of everyone else. Developers are still screaming that they aren't allowed to install malware on my iphone.
- ThatPlayer 5y agoThat works both ways though: I'm not allowed to install anything I want on my phone, which is anti-consumer.
- nikanj 5y agoAnd FBI is still upset that Apple won't install a back door for them.
- realityIsntHere 5y agoBut they will let Russia. And bend to china.
- Nevermark 5y ago"Let" Russia? I am pretty sure that Russia is the one firmly in charge of that decision, not Apple. It isn't inconsistent to push back on government overreach where it is legal to do so, but conform where they have no other legal choice except dropping an entire market. Or do you propose another solution?
- johncena33 5y agoThere's definitely some voting manipulation going on on HN last few years. At the same time number of irrelvant or barely relevant negative comments with no insight sky-rocketed. This trend coincided with the appointment of new mod dang. I guess the current mod is trying to make HN more popular and using the age-old outrage playbook to get to that end.
- de6u99er 5y agoI recommend to do as much k8s and try to avoid any vendor specific lock-ins as possible.
- colesantiago 5y agoDigitalOcean K8S solution isn't as production ready or reliable as Google's K8S offering.
- marcinzm 5y agoWhat left a bad taste in my mouth is any quota increase getting rejected unless you got on a phone call with sales and listened to an upsell speech. I'm trying to give you money and you're putting roadblocks in front of me.
- c_s_guy 5y agoI had a similar problem. We wanted to get on a call to resolve it quickly, but was instead forced into an email chain where I received a reply every 3 weeks.
- dewclin 5y agoMy experience has been very different: I update the quota in the console and it's approved very quickly.
- marcinzm 5y agoI had it happen three times on the same account including a hidden quota that the UI didn't even list. Sales person said that it might get better if we moved to invoice billing instead of a credit card (why?). After that I just gave up and moved back to AWS. edit: It's also not a new account, very consistently paying for some services (maps, etc.) for years before I decided to ramp up. edit2: It was also a tiny quota increase from the default one so not like we suddenly asked for five hundred instances.
- stevencorona 5y agoYeah this happened to me recently and it was obnoxious
- plantain 5y agoI don't know why all the cloud companies make you jump through so many hoops to get more quota - but Google has consistently been the fastest for me. Fill out some random Google Docs form (why does it have to be so dodgy?), receive quota within 24 hours. Contrast: Microsoft - flat out refused me more quota despite spending 10k/mo with them. Required me to convert to invoice billing, and then wanted a bunch of proof of incorporation and when my trading name didn't match my registration name they were unable to proceed. Oracle - took 3 months of escalations and deliberations, required me to explain on the phone to a VP why I needed the quota. AWS - frequently requiring me to write up a spiel about what I'm going to do with the quota before they approve it, increasing the RTT to 72hrs+ - do they actually verify this? How would they? Why do they care so much? We've spent 50k+ and always paid the bills, what's the issue?
- alessandroetc 5y agoStorj.io for the win. Move over Google!
- peppermint_tea 5y agoalthough not a complete cloud solution, I just read the "how it works section" and it is quite cool. price is awesome too.
- cmeacham98 5y agoI don't know, seems to be mostly filled with speculation and anecdotes. I can find similar anecdotes of bad behavior by Amzon, for example claims of using AWS to steal its users' business ideas[1]. Admittedly, the original author's title of "Why I distrust Google Cloud more than AWS or Azure" much better describes their position than the editorialized title of the HN submitter ("Why Google Cloud is less trustworthy than AWS or Azure"). 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929044
- astrostl 5y ago> Admittedly, the original author's title of "Why I distrust Google Cloud more than AWS or Azure" much better describes their position than the editorialized title of the HN submitter ("Why Google Cloud is less trustworthy than AWS or Azure"). Agreed. What is with the retitling?
- 1cvmask 5y agoSometimes it is because of the title length limitations. I guess HN can could extend it a bit more by say 25 characters or so.
- igorhvr 5y agoSubmitter (& author) here. I just changed the submission title to exactly match the original.
- johncena33 5y agoMay I ask why did you change the title to begin with?
- igorhvr 5y agoI thought the new title better but I did not want to change the original (because I had already shared the link with friends), so I just changed when submitting. Should've gone with the original...
- tarikjn 5y agoGoogle generally does not come off to me as having a great customer support culture. To appreciate the scale of the issue, take a look at the hoops and blackboxes merchants who want to be listed on Google Shopping have to go through and all the horror stories online. I did notice on Google Workspace and Google One that they do seem to be trying to improve the support experience.
- tantalor 5y agoCan you give an example or link? Not very useful comment otherwise.
- treesknees 5y agoGotta love a typical hackernews comment begging for links instead of just searching for it yourself. On the contrary I don't think your comment is useful either.
- Dylan16807 5y agoAsking for links is just fine for a comment that vague. Even for non-vague comments, it's often much better for one person to post links than to make 50 people repeat the same search.
- elchief 5y agohas GCP cancelled products? Or is that just Google
- smiley1437 5y agoGoogle cancels products so frequently that no matter now cool it may seem I rarely even bother checking them out - I can't stand becoming reliant and then having the rug pulled out from under me https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ Honestly the list hilariously long!
- asciimike 5y agoThat didn't answer the question ;) GCP does deprecate products (former App Engine PM here, deprecated many APIs), but it's definitely less frequent than the "Google deprecates everything" memers want you to believe, and there's a minimum 12 month deprecation period before literally anything is deprecated.
- shadowgovt 5y agoI'm not sure what the author (or Yegge, for that matter) expect a good timeframe to be for deprecating services. Anecdotally, Google announced the changeover of Cloud logging API versions in October of 2016, with a 5-month ramp (October to March) to switch from the v1 beta API to the v2 beta API. Five months is nearly two quarters, which is quite a long window for a beta API IMHO. That having been said, Google's habit of leaving things that are pretty much mission-critical in beta is unwise, but it should be unwise for them, not end-users. End-users that need reliability and low churn shouldn't be developing on beta-anything.
- 8note 5y agoI'd want 5 years at the minimum? Giant changes like that are worth capturing in long term planning processes, and then you need time to get ramped up on the new stack, design and implement the replacements, run all your backfills, and also, still have a couple years to figure out the parts that don't migrate nicely. With enough time available, you also don't have to drop actual business related improvements, even if your progress slows down a bit
- mod 5y agoI thought Yegge was rather specific about what he thought. He specifically mentioned a bunch of things (Java, emacs, AWS, Android, browsers) that take the approach to deprecation that he wished to see. I would sum up his ideas as: "If you offer a service I pay for, and deploy code on, you should not break my code while you still offer the product." I also don't think he'd have bothered to mention one or two minor things. His examples were rampant and incredibly bad, like breaking their own offerings.
- igorhvr 5y agoAbout deprecation: the gold standard is what AWS is doing with SimpleDB: essentially, never. The thing here is that if you run hundreds of services in production - many of which work smoothly and you don't need to touch often, you will find that Google's habit of forcing you to change how to use their tooling will generate a huge burden... They discourage you from using it and make it clear that for every use case some other tool at AWS would be best, and have been doing so for several years now... They wont even list it anymore under https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ .. Still, they support it ( https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ ) because there are customers with legacy systems that depend upon this service.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoSeems pretty thin. A handful of price hikes that made the news is not something that would bother an ordinary company. Maybe a little mom and pop that's running on tight margins, but they would be better served by squarespace anyway. Everyone in business understands that sometimes you raise prices.
- Lucasoato 5y agoThe only reason I didn't try Google cloud is payment. I can't even run a couple of VM, some test db without using the credit card. This means that if someone hacks me, if the documentation isn't clear enough or if I make a mistake I will fully pay for it (and immediately). This is incredibly haunting for beginners and people that cannot afford such scenarios. With AWS at least I can use a prepaid card: if something bad happens for any reason, at least I know I can afford to eat the day after.
- mdtusz 5y agoThis seems like a particularly strange reason to not try their service and to me is akin to saying "I won't use CarRentalCompany because they require a credit card. What if I'm new to driving and total the car by wrapping it around a tree?" If anything, this is just AWS being overly generous and forgiving.
- asciimike 5y agoI'm shocked that any cloud provider lets you use prepaid cards... all of the major providers have problems with crypto mining and abuse, so it's crazy that AWS would allow prepaid cards that might be laundered, etc. And IMO, if you're a real customer, all the providers are fairly forgiving, provided you can get in touch with a real human who works there.
- mark-r 5y agoGoogle is infamous for making it impossible to reach a real human. Their DNA is all about automating all the things.
- xtracto 5y agoI hate google and would NEVER use GCP for anything remotely meaningful (I'd use Azure and even Oracle first). Nevertheless I had a domain issue (through google.Domain ) and I was pleasantly surprised by the customer support. Almost as good as AWs paid support. Otoh I find AWS quite straightforward, but I've been using it for several years now. Their support is worth their weight in gold.
- latch 5y agoI'm one of those "you'll get my baremetal and systemd out of my dead cold hands", kind of guy. But I have reasonable exposure to both AWS and GC and I can say that, by far, Google Cloud is easier to reason about. As a consequence, it's much harder to misconfigure. The 2 large AWS deploys I've seen have, at best, had billing issues no one really understood (incl AWS), and at worse, security issues. Complaining that maps prices went up re Cloud Hosting is, to me, like complaining that Amazon raised the price of the Kindle, e.g., not particularly relevant.
- slenk 5y agoFrom my side - I have never seen an easy Google Cloud deploy but have no problems working with AWS.
- throwaway894345 5y agoI just completed a migration from AWS to GCP. My experience was previously entirely AWS, but GCP has been really nice. GCP has fewer features (e.g., no scheduled filestore backups), but GKE is far and away better than EKS and the overall console UX is far better as well. There’s also generally less to understand and thus misconfigure, and far fewer half-baked features to wade through to find the happy path (I’ve spent way too much time using CloudFormation).
- slenk 5y agoI feel you on Cloudformation :S I haven't used Kubernetes on either platform - so there may be more to that. One thing I really dislike about GCP is how expensive it is for personal or hobby use. I burned through $300 for a simple vm on GCP in a few weeks because their cheapest instances are so expensive.
- throwaway894345 5y agoYeah, navigating either platform is tough for hobbyists. I can get more lambda invocations than I’ll ever use for free but a single load balancer is like $30/month, never mind instances.
- fortyrod 5y agoProbably would have been better for the author to have taken the "don't sell out to a single cloud vendor API" angle. But I guess no clicky-baits for that approach. I've been screwed over by both AWS and Azure, and never by GCloud, but that doesn't mean I trust any of them.
- XorNot 5y agoThe best (silliest) business model I've seen is the new thing of vendors promising to make you cross-cloud...via locking you into the platform offered by the vendor (which is usually entirely hosted on one specific cloud provider anyway). There's valid reasons to support multiple providers, but that is definitely not one of them.
- fortyrod 5y agoIndeed. The thing that caused me to actually move stuff off AWS to GCP was that you could deploy generic Node Express apps as Firebase Cloud Functions (and then Cloud Run). I knew I could move those anywhere if I needed to.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoK8s tends to work well as a basis for abstracting away the specific cloud provider to an extent.
- notamy 5y agoHonestly, it's kind of brilliant. Convincing people that they need to pay you outrageous sums to not change the fact that they're locked-in at the same level is really clever. Kinda scummy? Probably. But brilliant nonetheless.
- muttantt 5y agoTheir Wavenet Text To Speech is gold
- jeffbee 5y agoI'd like to hear arguments on this topic that aren't just moronic. If you'd launched your company on Google App Engine 10 years ago, what harm would have come to you in the meantime?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoTo be honest, since I've heard literally all of these stories/anecdotes, and in some cases have been affected by them, and yet there is still nothing new in this article to rehash, it actually makes me feel good having gone with GCP. I certainly have felt what I thought were missteps by GCP in the past, but over the past couple years have been an extremely happy customer, and I still feel I've architected my applications so that if worse came to worse I could migrate off GCP if needed.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mmahemoff 5y agoLook where the cash cows are. For MS and Amazon, their cloud platforms are top of mind for senior management. Even more so with Amazon's new CEO having been with AWS since inception. For Google, anything not driving search and ads is a side show. Does anyone think Sundar's staying up at night worrying about Asian egress pricing when he's about to spend the next day being accused by performatively outraged senators about censorship and election influcence?
- foxylad 5y agoCan HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame "Google cancels all the stuff" posts? Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever? If you pay for services from Google, then it's a completely different story. We've used Appengine for 12 years now, and every time they've decided to deprecate services, there's always plenty of notice, a superior replacement, and usually lower costs.
- marcinzm 5y ago>We've used Appengine for 12 years now, and every time they've decided to deprecate services, there's always plenty of notice, a superior replacement, and usually lower costs. That doesn't remove the cost and time of updating your code and migrating.
- dontblink 5y agoIn most? cases it should make up for that in lowered cost savings moving forward.
- marcinzm 5y agoThat should be a decision for the customer to make and not one that is forced on them. Many larger companies tend to have legacy systems that are basically black boxes to them. The cost of updating one can be orders of magnitude more than any cloud costs for running it.
- markmark 5y ago100% this. Deprecating things your customers use always sucks for your customers. No matter what. It doesn't matter how long the notice is. It doesn't matter how good the replacement is. You have made work for your customers that they wouldn't otherwise need to do.
- igorhvr 5y agoThe thing is they change/deprecate/retire paid-for services too (in a brutal contrast with the competiton). Two quotes from one of the posts referenced in the submission (from Steve Yegge): ...I know I haven’t gone into a lot of specific details about GCP’s deprecations. I can tell you that virtually everything I’ve used, from networking (legacy to VPC) to storage (Cloud SQL v1 to v2) to Firebase (now Firestore with a totally different API) to App Engine (don’t even get me started) to Cloud Endpoints to… I dunno, everything, has forced me to rewrite it all after at most 2–3 years, and they never automate it for you, and often there is no documented migration path at all. It’s just crickets. And every time, I look over at AWS, and I ask myself what the fuck I’m still doing on GCP. ... ... Update 3, Aug 31 2020: A Google engineer in Cloud Marketplace who happens to be an old friend of mine contacted me to find out why C2D didn’t work, and we eventually figured out that it was because I had committed the sin of creating my network a few years ago, and C2D was failing for legacy networks due to a missing subnet parameter in their templates. I guess my advice to prospective GCP users is to make sure you know a lot of people at Google… ...
- omar_kha 5y agoI thought this was going to be written by someone who uses it a large scale. from a customer service point of view, is Microsoft the best ? Is Google the most secure? Is Amazon the simplest to enter?
- RKearney 5y agoGCP doesn't really support IPv6 at all. Sure you can terminate IPv6 on a load balancer and then proxy the connections over IPv4 back to your instances, but you can't get native IPv6 on an instance. It's that type of shortcoming that leads me to believe Google does not see a future in this product.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- random5634 5y agoI’m on ipv6 at home and aws is finally pretty good on IPv6 for me - security groups / vpc/ instances - is a very nice feeling
- srj 5y agoThe network virtualization scheme and likely many other parts of the stack need to change in order to support v6. It's not that there aren't investments in this area, it's just a non-trivial effort. Source: Worked in GCP networking.
- bradleyjg 5y agoThe single biggest concern I have with Google cloud, bigger than Reader or the like, is Project Maven. What if some Google employees decide my company is bad? Will Google cave in and fire us as a customer? That’s an existential risk.
- yaacov 5y agoI can definitely see this being an issue if your product bombs funerals, helps regimes cover up human rights abuses, or deports undocumented people. Fossil fuels are a maybe. This really shouldn’t be a problem for 99% of customers though.
- bradleyjg 5y agoThis week it’s ICE and Exxon-Mobil. Next week, who knows. It’s not worth the risk when Google has a demonstrated history of catering to its employees demands to drop customers.
- Google234 5y agoMost of the people in the US support deportation. Most of the people in Japan too. Should they be worried?
- DistressedDrone 5y ago> The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft-currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share-or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter. If they pulled this off, they would be hailed as gods of marketing for eons to come.
- ethbr0 5y agoPull a page from Microsoft's book and count every Gmail user as a Google Cloud user.
- asciimike 5y agoThey sorta did that by counting GSuite as "Cloud", but I don't think it's reported quite the same as O365 == Azure.
- JMTQp8lwXL 5y agoTactically, what would this look like? Getting large numbers of AWS or Azure customers to move over? Companies have higher priorities than changing their cloud provider, they want to focus on growing their business.
- themolecularman 5y agoIndeed - in fact Microsoft recently tried to buy Pinterest just to get a large company that they can move from AWS to Azure: > The deal, which would have been Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date, confirms that the tech giant is continuing to pursue an acquisition strategy aimed at amassing a portfolio of active online communities that could run on top of its Azure cloud computing platform. Pinterest - which boasts more than 320 million active users - currently relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its infrastructure provider. source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlypage/2021/02/11/microsoft-reportedly-tried-to-buy-pinterest-for-51-billion/?sh=25ce6cbf595c https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlypage/2021/02/11/microsoft-...
- dddgob 5y agoThis is very real. After a production outage caused by excessive health check failures the day after a massive GCP outage (Sept 2020) -- where we quickly hit our already-oversized quota (quotas, another GCP issue) during a traffic spike -- we've moved all of our sensitive workloads to AWS. We continue to use GCP for less sensitive workloads and for GKE, but our entire ops team has unspoken distrust. This is totally an infra-specific opinion, ignoring the fact that we've had to rewrite apps entirely after breaking changes from Google products. GCP has a great UI, the project structure makes much more sense, and billing is way easier, but after having a massive outage during a pretty standard scaling event, we just can't justify the risks.
- stevetodd 5y agoI’ll never use Google Cloud as long as I’m using Gmail. I don’t want either one to trigger shutting down the other for “suspicious activity.”
- mark-r 5y agoThat was worth it just for the link to the brilliant Steve Yegge.
- goodcjw2 5y ago[DISCLAMER: I used to work at Google in general, but not at Google Cloud] I'm not sure whether this has been discussed here before, but I'd love to take this forum to share an angle from the tech side of things: IMO, Google is _cursed_ to keep deprecating its products and services. It's cursed by Google's famous choice of mono-repo tech stack. It makes all the sense and has all the benefits. But at a cost: we had to keep every single line of code in active development mode. Whenever someone changed a line of code in a random file that's three steps away on your dependency chain, you will get a ticket to understand what has changed, make changes and fire up every tests (also fix them in 99% of the cases). Yeah, the "Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore." is kind of true story for internal engineers. We once had a shipped product (which took about 20-engineer-month to develop in the first place) in maintenance mode, but still requires a full time engineer to deal with those random things all the time. Would have save 90% of that person's time it it's on a sperate branch and we only need to focus on security patches. (NO, there is no such concept of branching in Google's dev system). We kept doing this for a while and soon realized that there is no way we can sustain this, especially after the only guys who understand how everything works switched teams. Thus, it just became obvious that deprecation is the only "responsible" and "reasonable" choice. Honestly, I think Google's engineering practice is somewhat flawed for the lack of a good solution to support shipped products in maintenance. As a result, there is either massively successful products being actively developed; or deprecated products.
- macintux 5y ago> somewhat flawed That sounds like a significant understatement.
- avodonosov 5y agoWhy isn't the failing tests the problem of the person who changed that line? What you describe is very strange. If someone changes a shared module, and some tests fail in result, his changes simply should not be merged. > you will get a ticket to understand what has changed, make changes and fire up every tests Do you fire tests manually?
- cbushko 5y agoI am using GKE, buckets, cloud SQL, pubsub and IAM, big query. Our costs are 1/3rd of what AWS was. Their support isn't as good as AWS. I use terraform for everything and Google authors that provider and I find that their resources are very consistent. IAM is a bit of a mess but at least it is a consistent mess.
- garciasn 5y agoI’m always considering the potential for Google to deprecate GCP but, for us, it’s the best option today. We’re heavily invested in GCP but aside from BQ, I feel we can lift and shift to another provider if need be with some pain. Even our BQ work, while extensive, is mostly SQL and would likely work with effort but nothing earth shattering. That said, I still prefer GCP to AWS by far, but there’s no way they’re going to surpass AWS by 2023 unless something big changes.
- bassdropvroom 5y agoWhile I'm not arguing the general point of the article, I will counter point one thing. > Will Google Cloud even exist a decade from now? This seems wildly speculative, and the likelihood of GCP, or its core offerings, not existing any time so soon is next to zero. Google has to royally fuck up for this to be the case, but even if it ends up being case, there will be a string of lawsuits lined up that will likely cost the company more than keeping the product. I've worked at billion dollar companies that aren't shy to drop a lawsuit who have gone all in on GCP, with contracts worth millions of dollar. To force such a company off their product seems reckless at best, malicious at worst. Such a big decision would drive Google into the ground, maybe not from the consumers, but certainly from the lawsuits that will inevitably ensue.
- booi 5y agoThere were multiple companies forced off Google Maps because of a pricing change. This could absolutely happen and has happened before.
- Clewza313 5y agoThat's very different from Google deciding to shut down Maps.
- Dylan16807 5y agoIf a big chunk of the companies that are using it have to stop, I wouldn't say it's all that different.
- XorNot 5y agoCloud computing hasn't existed for all that long though - eventually a cloud provider is going to fold for one reason or another, and that'll change the industry pretty thoroughly when it does happen. Lots of stuff "won't happen" until it does and the big speculation at the moment is that Google might eventually convince itself that the adtech business is the only business worth being in.
- plorkyeran 5y ago
- sleepydog 5y agoI've been in GCP support for over 4 years. My opinions are my own. I try to stay as impartial as I can about my employer. I know there are a lot of valid criticisms to be made about GCP. As one of the people often bearing the brunt of the fallout whenever there is a painful outage or deprecation, I share some of them. But it never gets easy to read posts like this. This one appears to be a collection of old hacker news posts. And I can't help but think about all the posts that are never written, submitted, or upvoted about every time someone had a good experience with support. No one talks about their GCE VMs with years of uptime. I'll spend hours on video calls with customers, going through logs, packet captures, perf profiles, core dumps, reading their code, conducting tests. Unpacking the tangled web until the problem is obvious. It's always a good feeling when we get to the end, and you get to reveal it like the end of a mystery novel. For me, that's the good part. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours. Sometimes weeks. Months even. And then the customer goes on with their life, as they should. That's how it always should work. But no one talks about when a process works the way it's supposed to. People want to read about failures. And trade their own analyses about why that failure happened and how Google is fundamentally broken for these N simple reasons. I don't want to diminish the negative stories as they are about people who went through real pain. I also realize that I'm just one person, and I can only work with so many customers in my time here. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I guess what I'm trying to say is, keep an open mind. This is a highly competitive field. There are strong incentives for GCP to listen to its customers.
- tpetry 5y agoI am on GCP, the greatest fear is not they increasing prices or disabling a product it‘s getting flagged and not being able to do anything. The support has been helpfull, that‘s true. I guess having this fear is mostly people on hn reading these stories so often and how it is resolved: knowing someone at google. I don‘t know anyone and i should not have to. There should be some contact for disabled accounts you can reach. I am all the time looking at aws which does not have this problem but gcp is so much easier to use.
- nikanj 5y agoThe only viable alternative to knowing someone at Google, is getting your story to the front page of HN / Slashdot / similar, and hoping someone from the other side of the wall reaches out.
- seriousquestion 5y agoThey might cancel a service you rely on, they might even censor your documents in storage (https://twitter.com/BreesAnna/status/1384763150109716481 https://twitter.com/BreesAnna/status/1384763150109716481). It might be time to move away from Google.
- alwayshasbeen 5y agoThe best argument against GCP is indeed the unpredictability with which Google turns down services. On the other hand you have Microsoft which still supports - let me give an extreme example - Silverlight (!). If Silverlight would be a Google product, all support would have ended years ago.
- inoffensivename 5y agoif I didn't keep writing new solutions to solved problems, how would I get promoted?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hairicane 5y agoI recently switched from AWS to Google due to the complexity of managing AWS. However, I am not willing to use ANY proprietary GCP services or any tools at any level. Firebase looks amazing, not a chance I’ll use it. GCP is great if you’re going to stick to containers and Cloud SQL. You can pick up your toys and leave if Google tries some stupid shenanigans. But for the time being I am saving money directly by hosting on GCP, and saving even more money by not needing as much DevOps investment. Honestly I think people are so used to AWS that they don’t realize how much of a complicated mess it’s become.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago> Most business can't rationally avoid picking a cloud provider option - and that often means choosing between AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. It looks like this lie has been repeated long enough it became a reality for some people. Yes, you can perfectly avoid using a "cloud provider", as millions of businesses worldwide already do, from small companies to largest tech businesses (for drastically different reasons though).
- ravedave5 5y agoI have little experience with GCP, but AWS does an AMAZING job supporting old products. When they need to deprecate/remove something you get 12+ months notice and lots of support.
- kfold5 5y agoThe only advantage of Google Cloud is the TPUs--if you're not running massive machine learning workloads, AWS is almost always the better choice on features, service, and reliability. The *link between compute and storage* is not even officially a production product: "Please treat gcsfuse as beta-quality software. Use it for whatever you like, but be aware that bugs may lurk, and that we reserve the right to make small backwards-incompatible changes." https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse/ https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse/ If a supposed cloud platform can't even produce a reliable way to access your data, then they have no basis being used in any halfway serious setting.
- isquaredr 5y agoThis definitely applies to Google's PaaS offerings. Google App Engine looks like a great solution except your app is now entirely stuck on a constantly changing platform. The drop-in components they offer are constantly getting deprecated and re-architected with no clear upgrade path. For example many of their original drop-in components were custom (Memcache, Taskqueues, NDB) and are now deprecated with no interoperability with the now recommended 3rd party components. If you depended on these components you now are either existing in a precarious purgatory or you need to rip out and replace all uses of those libraries which completely reneges on the PaaS value proposition