Comment by shakkhar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shakkhar | Hacker News Reader

Don't despair. Despite common perception, most AWS products are half-baked and clunky. (I don't have much experience with other Amazon products.) A while ago when GCP appeared in the scene, the team I was in performed a series of tests to evaluate it. In all our tests, GCP came out ahead of AWS. On top of that, their documentation and UI was better and prices were lower. That's part of how Google managed to get a foothold in the cloud services space.

AWS premium support doesn't help much when you are fighting fire because the first line support staff is clueless. It will take you days to reach a person who can actually help you.

IMHO, if you are offering a standalone product, you can always do better than Amazon (AWS). Whether you can beat them depends on variables other than the quality of your product.

I worked for a company that was in 50K/ month spend in AWS there is basically 0 service. Now I work for a company with serious monthly spend in millions we pretty much can get access to competent eng. immediately.

And the worst of both world. Work for a company that spent tens of millions on their own datacenters only to get neither half of the services nor half the quality.

It's all about who your TAM is. A good TAM will have your back from the jump. A bad one...not so much.

TAM == Total Addressable Market

TAMs are technical account managers. You get them with the enterprise support that you should be buying if your livelihood depends on AWS.

Small things about AWS suggest it's a load of different products held together by duct tape.

Case in point - I was fixing an issue today, so had iam/s3/ec2 open. They have different favicons. I had the situation we all know where I had 40 different tabs open whilst trying to work out what was going on, thought I didn't have an AWS tab so opened another one purely because the iam favicon is completely different to the rest.

I know it sounds silly, but it is indicative of the entire thing - their ECR doesn't support going back in the browser for one. I'd run to GCloud, but unfortunately the company i'm contracting at won't move.

> because the iam favicon is completely different to the rest

I can easily imagine this being a deliberate decision to make it easier for someone who uses AWS a lot to click the right tab when they have 40 tabs open.

I agree with the point that GCP feels like it has better docs and API than AWS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com