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I haven't found GCP to be particularly expensive (besides for some subservices) - for indie projects, Firebase is top notch and, depending on your use case free

by Mo3 4y ago

I haven't found GCP to be particularly expensive (besides for some subservices) - for indie projects, Firebase is top notch and, depending on your use case free or almost free - I've always held the opinion that the markup on GCP, AWS, etc, is more than remediated by the savings in manpower requirement and cost of maintaining your own infrastructure. Don't get me wrong, I love playing with self-hosted k8s for non-production, but when it comes to production, there's no real room for mistakes, downtime, constant maintenance and whatsoever. If I had the time, or we had a dedicated SRE, sure - that might be a good path forward - but only if there is the chance of outgrowing the cost/profit ratio at some point. Unfortunately, what we provide at work is not a public offering, yet at the same time its being used by institutional money and has to have phenomenal availability and stability - I'd be hard pressed to sign off on a move to anything else in that case..

dinvlad 4y ago
Yep, I like serverless offerings too (although some services, like Firestore, still leave much to be desired). The problem is, big enterprise is "all in" on K8s and that becomes hard to reason about because when I tell them "use all of the optimizations available via GKE" they bark that that "ties them to GCP". But then when I wear another hat (as I did above) and suggest the opposite, folks in the other camp say we shouldn't rely on self- or semi-self-managed options. It seems there's no "win" here :-) Also, to put in context what I meant above re recent price increases on GCP: 1) Per-cluster fee when it used to be free. This hurts hobbyist projects in particular (and yes, I know about the free tier for one zonal cluster, but that's not enough for playing around with one prod and one dev cluster env...). 2) Regional VM to multi-regional bucket traffic when it used to be free. This one is a huge degradation - used to be one of the selling points for Google's "Global Network", and there appears to be no excuse for it other than money-making, as Corey[0] famously mentioned. This hurts us in particular because we process so much data that this matters - right now, our (already exorbitant) cloud bill is a time bomb that is expected to go up on the scale of 50% or some such. Yeah :-) Despite charging a lot even for internal traffic, AWS never increased pricing for any of their products, as far as I know (indeed, they decrease it over time..). That says something about GCP's reputation - it's a problem unique to Google Cloud, afaik. It breaks the fundamental trust in the platform. [0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/google-cloud-alters-the-deal/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/google-cloud-alters-the-d...

by Mo3 4y ago

dinvlad 4y ago

Yep, I like serverless offerings too (although some services, like Firestore, still leave much to be desired). The problem is, big enterprise is "all in" on K8s and that becomes hard to reason about because when I tell them "use all of the optimizations available via GKE" they bark that that "ties them to GCP". But then when I wear another hat (as I did above) and suggest the opposite, folks in the other camp say we shouldn't rely on self- or semi-self-managed options. It seems there's no "win" here :-) Also, to put in context what I meant above re recent price increases on GCP: 1) Per-cluster fee when it used to be free. This hurts hobbyist projects in particular (and yes, I know about the free tier for one zonal cluster, but that's not enough for playing around with one prod and one dev cluster env...). 2) Regional VM to multi-regional bucket traffic when it used to be free. This one is a huge degradation - used to be one of the selling points for Google's "Global Network", and there appears to be no excuse for it other than money-making, as Corey[0] famously mentioned. This hurts us in particular because we process so much data that this matters - right now, our (already exorbitant) cloud bill is a time bomb that is expected to go up on the scale of 50% or some such. Yeah :-) Despite charging a lot even for internal traffic, AWS never increased pricing for any of their products, as far as I know (indeed, they decrease it over time..). That says something about GCP's reputation - it's a problem unique to Google Cloud, afaik. It breaks the fundamental trust in the platform. [0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/google-cloud-alters-the-deal/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/google-cloud-alters-the-d...