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I’m my experience and based on writeups like this: Google hates having customers. Someone decided they have to have a public cloud, so they did it, but they wa

I’m my experience and based on writeups like this: Google hates having customers. Someone decided they have to have a public cloud, so they did it, but they want to keep clients away with a 3 meter pole. My AWS account manager is someone I am 100% certain would roll in the mud with me if necessary. Would sleep in the floor with us if we asked in a crisis. Our Google cloud representatives make me sad because I can see that they are even less loved and supported by Google than us. It’s sad seeing someone trying to convince their company to sell and actually do a good job providing service. It’s like they are setup to fail. Microsoft guys are just bulletproof and excel in selling, providing a good service and squeezing all your money out of your pockets and you are mortally convinced it’s for your own good. Also have a very strange cloud… thing. As for the railway company going metal, well, I have some 15 years of experience with it. I’ll never, NEVER, EVER return to it. It’s just not worth it. But I guess you’ll have to discover it by yourselves. This is the way. You soon discover what in freaking world is Google having so much trouble with. Just make sure you really really love and really really want to sell service to people, instead of building borgs and artificial brains and you’ll do 100x better.

motorest 2y ago
> Microsoft (...) have a very strange cloud… thing. Risking a going off on a tangent, this is something I rarely see discussed but is perhaps one of the main problems with Azure. The whole cloud service feels like something someone oblivious to cloud computing would design if all they knew was renting bare metal servers. It's cloud computing in a way that completely defeats the whole concept of cloud computing.
- yeahwhatever10 2y ago
  Can you be more specific?
  - motorest 2y ago
    > Can you be more specific? To start off, read up on the ass-backwards concept of an app service plan. That nonsense is the ultimate anti-cloud computing approach to cloud computing. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview-hosting-plans https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview...
- oneplane 2y ago
  Same feeling here. It's like they wanted a way to "play datacenter in the browser", but then asked 30 different teams to do it on their own, and only have them come together after they are all done to put the pieces together. Then find out it's not good at all and go "oh well, I guess we'll polish it over in the UI" (not knowing that no serious scale works with a UI). If I can't have AWS I'll make do with GCP. But if someone wants to go full Azure, I'll find work elsewhere. Screw that. Life is too short to work with bad technology.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Seriously wondering what you guys experienced with Azure. Never had an issue and prefer it over AWS.
    - DrBenCarson 2y ago
      Same here, I prefer Azure to AWS and I’ve spent multiple years with each
      - oneplane 2y ago
        I suppose it depends on what you do with it and what you need.
    - oneplane 2y ago
      Most of it is not an individual experience or 'event', just bad design with bad results. I'll try to describe some global ones: One of the most bizarre things is the crazy bad resource hierarchy. There are multiple overlapping and incompatible ones. Resources, networks, storage, IAM, billing and org, none of it in a single universal hierarchy. It seems to mirror the idiosyncrasies of legacy enterprise organisations with their fiefdoms, instead of a cloud. The next useless thing is how you just cannot use what you need when you need it in whatever way you want it. Almost all services are hyper-segmented requiring various premium tiers instead of them being universally available. I get it, it's a great way to bundle things people don't want and extract as much money out of them, but that only really works if people have no alternative. And those two form the bad architecture/bad technology trifecta with this third one: a lot of services, maybe most of them, seem like some sort of 2005 model where a resource is backed by nothing more than some random managed VM in the backend, with all the problems (failure modes, inconsistent behaviour etc) that come with that model. Perhaps the reason for those things is simple: Microsoft wanted a way to extract more money from their customers and lock them in even more. Moving workloads to Azure meant something different for them than it did for the rest of the world: you used to have a lage army of common windows sysadmin jobs where there was a lot of local control and local management loops, but when you move that to a common template in someone else's datacenter (Azure, essentially) you can ditch most of those loops and people. Granted, they created those local controls/loops themselves to get a school-to-work microsoft client pipeline (same as say, Cisco or oracle), but I doubt there is any new markets to cater to in that way. Since people tend to be the most expensive and most risky part of a business, being able to take more of them out of the loop, making more of them optional or making them more expendable/remote is a (short-term) positive thing in the spreadsheets of most MBAs, which is who most large companies cater to after all. This did of course backfire and we now have the same quantity of jobs but instead of sysadmin you get 'azure engineer' which is more of a crossover between operational helpdesk and technical application manager. But everyone wins: during your exodus you can sell it as modernisation, when you remove that on-prem burden you can shift your CAPEX and OPEX around, your quarter looks better when you can reduce headcount, and once your bonus is in, you can put some job postings out for the people you are now missing. Technology-wise, the only thing that really changed was the ways in which people could cut corners. Some corners are pre-cut, while others are uncuttable. API-wise, it's a crapshoot, a turd attempted to be polished by a webui that hides the maelstrom of questionable residue below the surface.
ttul 2y ago
My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend. I don’t sense they would roll in mud with me, which is kind of incredible. I wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory?
- cj 2y ago
  AWS support in general is extremely good in my experience. (We pay for whatever the tier below Enterprise is called, I think it costs 10% of your spend) I’ve been on 4 hour screenshare with AWS engineers working through some infrastructure issues in the past, and we only spend $100k/yr. Even at the $100k/yr spend level, AWS regularly reaches out with offers to try new services they’re launching for free. We’ve said “sure” a couple times, and AWS shows up with 4-6 people on their end of the call (half of them engineers). In the past 10 years, we’ve had maybe 2-3 emergency issues per year, and every time I’m able to get a really smart person on a call within 5 minutes. This is the #1 thing I’d be concerned about losing if we did colo or bare metal with cheaper providers.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    My experience with AWS support has been downright freaky. With other vendors, when I call a support line with an obscure issue that maybe only I hit in the whole world I fully expect to explain it to an overseas call centre drone with a poor voice line and rudimentary English. Then I expect to have to repeatedly escalate over months and be told “We can’t reproduce this glaringly obvious bug, closed.” That’s ignoring the series of very closely related family of issues I dug up in the process of troubleshooting. Which they continue to ignore because it’s “out of scope” for the ticket. “Open a new ticket and go through the pain again, peasant!” With AWS my experience has always been “I’ve fixed that right up for you, is there anything else you’d like help with?”. Often after mere minutes! I’m usually left speechless, ready to go on a well-practiced tirade of how “We’re spending millions on this crap and none of it works properly!”, but instead I just sit there gawping like a fish out of water, stammer “No, thank you, that was it.” and hang up in shame. I just don’t understand why no other enterprise on Earth seems to have support this good. What’s the thing holding them back!? Maybe they assume that good support works only for this tiny upstart org called Amazon that will clearly never amount to anything!
Agingcoder 2y ago
My potential aws account manager told me I was stupid, and that if I listened carefully to him, I would understand he was right and I was wrong. I’m quite happy I’m not using aws - in my case (hpc, spot instances don’t work ) they don’t work.
icedchai 2y ago
It's sad, because I legit found my experience working with Google's "serverless" stuff (like Cloud Run) to be superior to the AWS equivalent. The GCP command line tools ("gcloud") also feel better designed.
- whizzter 2y ago
  That's the thing GP is saying, Google might excel in engineering and even build superior products, but the issue bringing them down these days is that they can't manage customers/partners/etc for shit and if they fumble on search it could be over. Most telling example was how iirc Terraria was a launch highlight for Stadia to show awesome indies, then somehow their magic systems lock down the developers account and despite internal pressure from Stadia devrel people they don't get it back in time until the developer just cancels development of the Stadia port. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lf7iie/terraria_on_stadia_cancelled_after_developers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lf7iie/terraria_on_s...
neeleshs 2y ago
I'm probably an outlier here. My experience with GCP support has been nothing but stellar, like I described in another comment down below
xhrpost 2y ago
As a dev I recently sent my first AWS support request. Received a non useful response featuring factually incorrect statements about their own platform. Replied to support ticket, no reply. Sent email to two AWS reps, never got a reply.
osigurdson 2y ago
Having something work right is worth 10 account managers rolling in the mud in my opinion.
p_l 2y ago
No account manager can help when the support is so bad it would have been better if they admitted they had no idea and superb if they admitted the feature we were sold didn't exist and had no plans of existing. Would save me months of lead time. Personal experience goes that Google Cloud support treated us quite well even when called by small 3 person team doing minuscule spend, in another company Microsoft treated us very well but our spend could be probably tracked by nationwide powergrid monitoring of their datacenters. And AWS lied about features and ultimately never responded back. I figure the account managers talking to high level management about contracting mandatory multi-million spend on AWS know how to talk with said management. But at the end, what comes to actually developing and delivering products for others, we were left in the dust. To make it funnier, part of what made it so hard was that the feature they lied to us was supposed to be critical for making sure the UX for end-users was really stellar.

motorest 2y ago

> Microsoft (...) have a very strange cloud… thing. Risking a going off on a tangent, this is something I rarely see discussed but is perhaps one of the main problems with Azure. The whole cloud service feels like something someone oblivious to cloud computing would design if all they knew was renting bare metal servers. It's cloud computing in a way that completely defeats the whole concept of cloud computing.

yeahwhatever10 2y ago
Can you be more specific?
- motorest 2y ago
  > Can you be more specific? To start off, read up on the ass-backwards concept of an app service plan. That nonsense is the ultimate anti-cloud computing approach to cloud computing. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview-hosting-plans https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview...
oneplane 2y ago
Same feeling here. It's like they wanted a way to "play datacenter in the browser", but then asked 30 different teams to do it on their own, and only have them come together after they are all done to put the pieces together. Then find out it's not good at all and go "oh well, I guess we'll polish it over in the UI" (not knowing that no serious scale works with a UI). If I can't have AWS I'll make do with GCP. But if someone wants to go full Azure, I'll find work elsewhere. Screw that. Life is too short to work with bad technology.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Seriously wondering what you guys experienced with Azure. Never had an issue and prefer it over AWS.
  - DrBenCarson 2y ago
    Same here, I prefer Azure to AWS and I’ve spent multiple years with each
    - oneplane 2y ago
      I suppose it depends on what you do with it and what you need.
  - oneplane 2y ago
    Most of it is not an individual experience or 'event', just bad design with bad results. I'll try to describe some global ones: One of the most bizarre things is the crazy bad resource hierarchy. There are multiple overlapping and incompatible ones. Resources, networks, storage, IAM, billing and org, none of it in a single universal hierarchy. It seems to mirror the idiosyncrasies of legacy enterprise organisations with their fiefdoms, instead of a cloud. The next useless thing is how you just cannot use what you need when you need it in whatever way you want it. Almost all services are hyper-segmented requiring various premium tiers instead of them being universally available. I get it, it's a great way to bundle things people don't want and extract as much money out of them, but that only really works if people have no alternative. And those two form the bad architecture/bad technology trifecta with this third one: a lot of services, maybe most of them, seem like some sort of 2005 model where a resource is backed by nothing more than some random managed VM in the backend, with all the problems (failure modes, inconsistent behaviour etc) that come with that model. Perhaps the reason for those things is simple: Microsoft wanted a way to extract more money from their customers and lock them in even more. Moving workloads to Azure meant something different for them than it did for the rest of the world: you used to have a lage army of common windows sysadmin jobs where there was a lot of local control and local management loops, but when you move that to a common template in someone else's datacenter (Azure, essentially) you can ditch most of those loops and people. Granted, they created those local controls/loops themselves to get a school-to-work microsoft client pipeline (same as say, Cisco or oracle), but I doubt there is any new markets to cater to in that way. Since people tend to be the most expensive and most risky part of a business, being able to take more of them out of the loop, making more of them optional or making them more expendable/remote is a (short-term) positive thing in the spreadsheets of most MBAs, which is who most large companies cater to after all. This did of course backfire and we now have the same quantity of jobs but instead of sysadmin you get 'azure engineer' which is more of a crossover between operational helpdesk and technical application manager. But everyone wins: during your exodus you can sell it as modernisation, when you remove that on-prem burden you can shift your CAPEX and OPEX around, your quarter looks better when you can reduce headcount, and once your bonus is in, you can put some job postings out for the people you are now missing. Technology-wise, the only thing that really changed was the ways in which people could cut corners. Some corners are pre-cut, while others are uncuttable. API-wise, it's a crapshoot, a turd attempted to be polished by a webui that hides the maelstrom of questionable residue below the surface.

ttul 2y ago

My AWS account manager took me fishing. That’s what you get for a >$1M/yr spend. I don’t sense they would roll in mud with me, which is kind of incredible. I wonder how much you need to spend to get into mud rolling territory?

cj 2y ago
AWS support in general is extremely good in my experience. (We pay for whatever the tier below Enterprise is called, I think it costs 10% of your spend) I’ve been on 4 hour screenshare with AWS engineers working through some infrastructure issues in the past, and we only spend $100k/yr. Even at the $100k/yr spend level, AWS regularly reaches out with offers to try new services they’re launching for free. We’ve said “sure” a couple times, and AWS shows up with 4-6 people on their end of the call (half of them engineers). In the past 10 years, we’ve had maybe 2-3 emergency issues per year, and every time I’m able to get a really smart person on a call within 5 minutes. This is the #1 thing I’d be concerned about losing if we did colo or bare metal with cheaper providers.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  My experience with AWS support has been downright freaky. With other vendors, when I call a support line with an obscure issue that maybe only I hit in the whole world I fully expect to explain it to an overseas call centre drone with a poor voice line and rudimentary English. Then I expect to have to repeatedly escalate over months and be told “We can’t reproduce this glaringly obvious bug, closed.” That’s ignoring the series of very closely related family of issues I dug up in the process of troubleshooting. Which they continue to ignore because it’s “out of scope” for the ticket. “Open a new ticket and go through the pain again, peasant!” With AWS my experience has always been “I’ve fixed that right up for you, is there anything else you’d like help with?”. Often after mere minutes! I’m usually left speechless, ready to go on a well-practiced tirade of how “We’re spending millions on this crap and none of it works properly!”, but instead I just sit there gawping like a fish out of water, stammer “No, thank you, that was it.” and hang up in shame. I just don’t understand why no other enterprise on Earth seems to have support this good. What’s the thing holding them back!? Maybe they assume that good support works only for this tiny upstart org called Amazon that will clearly never amount to anything!

Agingcoder 2y ago

My potential aws account manager told me I was stupid, and that if I listened carefully to him, I would understand he was right and I was wrong. I’m quite happy I’m not using aws - in my case (hpc, spot instances don’t work ) they don’t work.

icedchai 2y ago

It's sad, because I legit found my experience working with Google's "serverless" stuff (like Cloud Run) to be superior to the AWS equivalent. The GCP command line tools ("gcloud") also feel better designed.

whizzter 2y ago
That's the thing GP is saying, Google might excel in engineering and even build superior products, but the issue bringing them down these days is that they can't manage customers/partners/etc for shit and if they fumble on search it could be over. Most telling example was how iirc Terraria was a launch highlight for Stadia to show awesome indies, then somehow their magic systems lock down the developers account and despite internal pressure from Stadia devrel people they don't get it back in time until the developer just cancels development of the Stadia port. https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lf7iie/terraria_on_stadia_cancelled_after_developers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lf7iie/terraria_on_s...

neeleshs 2y ago

I'm probably an outlier here. My experience with GCP support has been nothing but stellar, like I described in another comment down below

xhrpost 2y ago

As a dev I recently sent my first AWS support request. Received a non useful response featuring factually incorrect statements about their own platform. Replied to support ticket, no reply. Sent email to two AWS reps, never got a reply.

osigurdson 2y ago

Having something work right is worth 10 account managers rolling in the mud in my opinion.

p_l 2y ago

No account manager can help when the support is so bad it would have been better if they admitted they had no idea and superb if they admitted the feature we were sold didn't exist and had no plans of existing. Would save me months of lead time. Personal experience goes that Google Cloud support treated us quite well even when called by small 3 person team doing minuscule spend, in another company Microsoft treated us very well but our spend could be probably tracked by nationwide powergrid monitoring of their datacenters. And AWS lied about features and ultimately never responded back. I figure the account managers talking to high level management about contracting mandatory multi-million spend on AWS know how to talk with said management. But at the end, what comes to actually developing and delivering products for others, we were left in the dust. To make it funnier, part of what made it so hard was that the feature they lied to us was supposed to be critical for making sure the UX for end-users was really stellar.