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Comment by vayarajesh | Hacker News Reader

Google cloud - I have recently been working on setting up our company's entire infrastructure on google cloud and we were up and running in no time (very happy currently).

- Great pricing

- Great API (command line, REST)

- Nearly perfect documentation

- Awesome support (I had requested to allow more static ip addresses to be reserved and they resolved my ticket in less than 4 hours)

- Very intuitive interface

They give you $300 free credits before setting up billing account for you to try the entire cloud for free. You can play around with google cloud with up to 8 VMs

They also have App engine and Container engine to manage your applications / containers at scale.

Other simple cloud features include - storage buckets, snapshots, VPNs etc.

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  Nearly perfect documentation

I've Google Cloud's documentation pretty awful, at least when it comes to authentication - which you need to do to get started with almost anything.

AWS starts out simple (Paste your access key and secret key here) and you can adopt very complicated practices as your needs evolve; Google Cloud's design and documentation, on the other hand, seems to jump to very complicated from the start (scopes, service accounts, user accounts, projects, application default credentials, PKCS12, access tokens, refresh tokens...)

I haven't found the documentation very helpful at all - or perhaps the system is just too complicated for the documentation to ever be much good.

They have a in-app interactive tutorials which guides each step necessary to get you started which was pretty cool.

We currently use more of compute engine and the documentation for it was really clear for us. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/

May be needs more clarification in general I guess

> - Nearly perfect documentation > - Awesome support

Two things never said about google products

This thread will give you an idea of how far Google's support will go to make a customer succeed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12606995

(work at GCP)

You meant to say "a customer that is pumping tons of money into Google succeed". Your average customer gets no such treatment.

Sorry, Google has some great stuff, and is great at a lot of things, but customer support is not one of them.

Perhaps the reputation you speak of transfers over from the B2C side, where Google makes services for billions and can't offer the human touch as easily.

Have you had bad experiences with Google Cloud platform support specifically?

I can only offer some customer voices:

- Quizlet calls out support as a major reason for choosing GCP over AWS (among other things) [0]

- "Paid Support is top notch" [1]

- Spotify calls out the human side specifically [2]

[0] https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp

[1] https://lugassy.net/why-we-moved-from-amazon-web-services-to...

[2] https://news.spotify.com/au/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in...

My experiences differ from that, as well as everyone I know. I know this is anecdotal, but I have never met anyone who has said good things about google support, including a google support rep. Maybe I'm just an outlier, but I also wouldn't use someone like the above example as a typical experience, as they are also an outlier.

Sorry to hear that. Again, are you specifically discussing Google Cloud support? It's a very different model.

> Have you had bad experiences with Google Cloud platform support specifically?

Yes, and cancelled our account as a result.

Sorry to hear that. Certainly not what we strive for.

May I ask you to send me your specific experience to my email? (username at google dotcom). I would be happy to share it with our support teams and get a postmortem going?

(I work at Google Cloud)

Thanks for the offer. I'm swamped and we moved off of GCE last spring, so I don't have the info readily available.

If we consider GCE in the future, I'll ping you before we do so we can ensure what happened to us then doesn't happen again.

Thanks!

"great pricing" it is not. None of the major cloud providers have great pricing with the exception of some niche cases.

Look at Hetzner. Look at the cheap VPS options. Google/AWS don't come even close.

Pricing of compute on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing (which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads. Similarly, our custom shapes means you don't end up paying for twice as many cores (16 => 32) when you really want something in between.

Where I do agree is networking egress. The big three providers all have metered bandwidth rates that are way above the "all inclusive" fee you pay to Hetzner, OVH, DO, and others. The cheapest way to host an ftp server that serves 20 TB per month is certainly on one of these (today). None of these providers will let you serve 1 PB / month this way, but if you're in their sweet spot and they can make it work out on average, it's a good fit.

But if you're looking to just have a simple "VPS" in the cloud, our f1-micro is just over $4/month (the AWS t2 series is also super cheap). Again, you're right if you're talking about networking egress, but not everybody needs to serve multiple TB per month.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so I'm trying to take your money in exchange for services.

"Pricing of compute on GCE is extremely competitive. The per-minute billing (which Azure matched) really adds up for tons of workloads."

To the extent that a developer uses GCE for only part of a month? Or to the extent that a developer uses GCE for 100% of a month? I would think that GCE is not extremely competitive (relative to dedicated offerings) if used on a 24/7 basis.

I think Hetzner is more of a hosting provider than a cloud services provider. If you are looking for a single server VPS for hosting then sure Hetzner is great in terms of pricing

Google / AWS cloud is more for running applications at scale and dynamically creating VMs and load balancing across servers with storage, logging, snapshots etc as a service.

Yeah Hetzner is nice if you just need VMs and set up everything yourself. The big plus of GCP and AWS is the Platform. If you don't need hosted MySQL (because you want to set up that stuff yourself) or PubSub, Storage etc. go for Hetzner.

Hetzner is very much a budget host with mediocre support, etc. Most of their servers are built with desktop-grade hardware. You're comparing apples and oranges.

The only thing stopping me from using Google Cloud atm is hosted Postgres.

Would you be willing to talk to one of our Product Managers about what you need in a hosted Postgres to come over? ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Hah, my requirements are very minimal right now. I would say that in the greater context that one of the important things for people using postgres would be plugin support for e.g. postgis and logical replication(which is not a builtin for postgres https://2ndquadrant.com/en/resources/pglogical/).

Never having to worry about vacuuming manually would be pretty sweet, and having some level of access to the host to install e.g. vividcortex would be nice.

Not having to worry about pgbouncer would also be nice (though that means postgres pooling on your web hosts, sort of separate from the hosted postgres bit).

Also, I suppose obvious warnings when I'm near IO or storage limits would be swell

What about this? https://cloud.google.com/solutions/set-up-postgres

I know how to run it myself, it's just easier to not. I prefer the set-and-forget solution for smaller projects.

My biggest complaint is different rates for network egress. https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing egress for world and then there is China and Australia. It is unpredictable and you can't include it in your price models.

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