5 ms·

Yeah, say all you want about AWS pricing, but damn if Amazon doesn't go out of their way to support things for a very long time.

frognumber 3y ago
What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time. If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer. Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google. The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over. I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is: - Free tier, quick one-off hack - Legacy - Literally no other options Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.
tedivm 3y ago
Not only that but they actually provide real support. I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day. In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start). It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.
- nottorp 3y ago
  It's not support if you have to complain on a public forum though.
  - tedivm 3y ago
    That was due to my own whining and impatience. Going through the normal support channels tends to be pretty solid through. I will say though that companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      > companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well. Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.
  - nijave 3y ago
    Twitter probably isn't official but some companies have official social media support channels. Azure has an issues-only GitHub repo for Kubernetes (AKS) and you generally get a project team member instead of fighting through layers of support.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    You don't need to, there are proper support channels. I think that parent post was just implying that AWS cares about it's image and will provide support even if you don't go down the correct channels. Google doesn't give a shit regardless of the method of request.
  - m_0x 3y ago
    They do have support channels depending on your account type. I've used the enterprise support and they respond well. They even go into your cloud architecture and tell you where you fucked up.
oefrha 3y ago
Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC. Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.) - Former ACD customer who got burned.
- hedora 3y ago
  They also banned encrypted files, effectively kicking off everyone using it for backup. I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.
    - MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
      Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
      - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
        >Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed. If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.
      - DiskoHexyl 3y ago
        Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1. So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much
moralestapia 3y ago
To add to that, and related to, >I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error I once just stopped paying an AWS bill on a small website I abandoned (few USD/month), came back to check after a long while and I was surprised to find out how long does it take for AWS to actually shut you down. Also on AWS, on two different occasions I screwed up and got a high ticket bill: * Got a lot of data out of Glacier and bill spiked to a couple thousand $$$ (this one'e explicitly mentioned several times in their docs but my mind just didn't register it). * Forgot to turn off some expensive spot instances and left them running for ~2 days (where it should've been minutes). Again, some thousand $$$. Both times I opened tickets, told them it was an honest mistake and they just wrote them off, :O.
- tedivm 3y ago
  During covid the company I worked at had their Series A fall through- we had a signed term sheet and everything, but the venture company lost their shit and pulled out of the deal. We only had a few months runway left at this point. I reached out to our account rep at AWS and asked if we could delay our bills for three months. They laughed and said that if we didn't pay our bill for three months their system would just send us a bunch of emails, but that they wouldn't even start the process of closing the account until at least three months had passed- and even then they'd delay it further for us. We got a new funding round and paid all of our bills, but we would not have been able to make payroll if AWS wasn't so lenient about it. That was 2020, so almost three years ago, and that company is still regularly featured at AWS talks and product announcements.
pjmlp 3y ago
Same applies to Azure, they also have their issues, but not Google bad.

frognumber 3y ago

What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time. If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer. Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google. The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over. I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is: - Free tier, quick one-off hack - Legacy - Literally no other options Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.

tedivm 3y ago

Not only that but they actually provide real support. I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day. In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start). It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.

nottorp 3y ago
It's not support if you have to complain on a public forum though.
- tedivm 3y ago
  That was due to my own whining and impatience. Going through the normal support channels tends to be pretty solid through. I will say though that companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well. Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.
- nijave 3y ago
  Twitter probably isn't official but some companies have official social media support channels. Azure has an issues-only GitHub repo for Kubernetes (AKS) and you generally get a project team member instead of fighting through layers of support.
- happymellon 3y ago
  You don't need to, there are proper support channels. I think that parent post was just implying that AWS cares about it's image and will provide support even if you don't go down the correct channels. Google doesn't give a shit regardless of the method of request.
- m_0x 3y ago
  They do have support channels depending on your account type. I've used the enterprise support and they respond well. They even go into your cloud architecture and tell you where you fucked up.

oefrha 3y ago

Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC. Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.) - Former ACD customer who got burned.

hedora 3y ago
They also banned encrypted files, effectively kicking off everyone using it for backup. I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.
  - MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
    Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
    - NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
      >Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed. If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.
    - DiskoHexyl 3y ago
      Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1. So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much

moralestapia 3y ago

To add to that, and related to, >I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error I once just stopped paying an AWS bill on a small website I abandoned (few USD/month), came back to check after a long while and I was surprised to find out how long does it take for AWS to actually shut you down. Also on AWS, on two different occasions I screwed up and got a high ticket bill: * Got a lot of data out of Glacier and bill spiked to a couple thousand $$$ (this one'e explicitly mentioned several times in their docs but my mind just didn't register it). * Forgot to turn off some expensive spot instances and left them running for ~2 days (where it should've been minutes). Again, some thousand $$$. Both times I opened tickets, told them it was an honest mistake and they just wrote them off, :O.

tedivm 3y ago
During covid the company I worked at had their Series A fall through- we had a signed term sheet and everything, but the venture company lost their shit and pulled out of the deal. We only had a few months runway left at this point. I reached out to our account rep at AWS and asked if we could delay our bills for three months. They laughed and said that if we didn't pay our bill for three months their system would just send us a bunch of emails, but that they wouldn't even start the process of closing the account until at least three months had passed- and even then they'd delay it further for us. We got a new funding round and paid all of our bills, but we would not have been able to make payroll if AWS wasn't so lenient about it. That was 2020, so almost three years ago, and that company is still regularly featured at AWS talks and product announcements.

pjmlp 3y ago

Same applies to Azure, they also have their issues, but not Google bad.