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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure.

I can count the times google has burnt my hand though...

Yeah Amazon (especially AWS) is pretty decent with customer service all things considering.

I've heard of people getting hacked and having huge bills because they stared up bitcoin miners with their account. I think AWS actually refunded the charges.

Scary to think if Google would do the same as easily.

The "hacking" is often reading access keys out of public repositories, so not exactly nation-state stuff here.

I can confirm that we had that happen to a developer account (who did exactly that <doh>) and AWS refunded the charges with zero hassles.

I know one person that is using Google Cloud for his company. He used to work at YouTube, so it's very handy for him since it works very similarly. But otherwise I don't know anyone using it for any production workloads.

Isn't it much cheaper? Seems that would be attractive to many.

I'm surprised to hear the Google experience is so poor and risky that no one is using it for fear of losing everything.

Welp, today you get to meet one, hi, I'm klardotsh!

Don't get me wrong - I hate it and wish we were on AWS for a multitude of reasons, but we use Google Cloud at Lumen5 and despite my personal distaste for it, it mostly "just works" most of the time, even if almost zero of the setup is intuitive. Their Kubernetes offering is a stronger sell than AWS's (IMO) which is a big reason we've stuck with it.

> zero of the setup is intuitive

that is true on the other side too.

If you are hoping that moving to AWS will give you access to "intuitive" setup, I have some bad news for you.

so why do you hate it? what are the reasons you'd rather be on AWS?

At this point it's hard to quantify the likelihood of being ruined by Google arbitrarily banning you, but at some point that needs to factor into the calculation just like an SLA or major disaster insurance. If there's a 0.01% chance you'll get screwed by Google, but the service is 10% better/cheaper, maybe that's a worthwhile risk? But the numbers are not moving in the right direction.

Hi there are dozens of us using Google Cloud. We’re using it for a variety of NLP work alongside on prem systems. Fun stuff.

>I literally know zero people using Google Cloud. Everyone is on Amazon or Azure.

Snapchat uses Google Cloud. So does Pokemon Go.

They have a dozen or more "hero companies" that they advertise.

The big question is are those organic customers or attracted onto the platform for big discounts in order to be adverts?

> Pokemon Go

The poster child of unplanned outages and scalability issues. Ouch.

Bear in mind that Niantic (company behind Pokemon Go) was originally an incubated project within Google. So they have plenty of reasons to stick with GCP for the hosting. As for Snapchat they were originally on Google App Engine so that incentivised them to stick with the platform as well. But for new companies starting today it'd be a tough sell to use most of GCP.

Companies who see Amazon as a competitor are very often going to GCP instead of AWS.

There is also a growing trend of multi cloud deployments - using those that are best for your particular use case or increasing your fault tolerance.

Do you host your own k8s for multi-cloud? Rancher?

I moved all my deployments to google cloud. I've started to use it originally because BigQuery was light years ahead of any foreseeable competition (Athena didn't even exist). I've stayed for awesome firebase. gcp has great offerings.

Google Cloud looks fantastic, but I could never trust it for anything beyond hobby projects: Google's policy of minimal support and seemingly-arbitrary algorithmic decisions regarding customers makes for more risk than I am willing to accept from a single component.

If Google's leadership were self-aware at all (they're not), they'd spin Google Cloud out from under their anti-customer super corporate.

GC should be aggressively isolated from the stupidity in the larger company when it comes to how they incorrectly deal with pretty much anything that involves humans. They'd need to put someone in charge of it that has vast experience building very customer-focused enterprise businesses. They need to de-Googleify the whole business top to bottom. This would also go a long way toward eliminating the well-earned fear about how Google loves to kill off products/services.

If they don't do that, they will never stand a chance competing with Amazon or Microsoft in cloud. They'll be a far smaller, permanent #3 in the US market, best case scenario.

their kubernetes offering is miles ahead of anyone else.

I just started using BigQuery, and I have no idea how people tolerate it. Can't delete a column. Can't rename a column. Can't change a datatype of a column. If I added a wrong column, I have to recreate the whole table (via SELECT * EXCEPT).

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