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Comment by tdhoot | Hacker News Reader

Doubt Calendar is hosted on GCP. Generally Google does not run first-party systems on GCP, instead putting them on Borg (internal cloud).

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Which, IMO, is actually a big problem.

AFAIK Amazon are running a lot of actual production loads on AWS. Dogfooding can be extremely valuable, especially if a massive portion of your staff have the same profession as your target market.

I've been using Google Cloud in a new role I started recently. There's definitely some parts of GCP I like, but whenever I use the Web Console I get the distinct impression nobody at Google actually uses it. If they did, I'm fairly sure all the annoying little warts I encounter would not exist.

It took amazon over over 6 years to do so though.

EC2 was released in 2006. Amazon.com last non ec2 server was 2012. But a lot of features of amazon.com still don't run on the main AWS offerings.

GCP has not been out for that long. Also, quite easier to run an e-commerce site than to run the web's largest search engine as well as the largest email provider, as well as the largest maps provider. Each of these has an order of magnitude more traffic than amazon.com

I'm sure they'll get there though, just not the same scale. Not even close.

Large parts of AWS don't run on AWS either, due to issues with circular dependencies and similar problems. Similarly, if all of AWS onboards to use your AWS service, suddenly that's the business. Your 'real' customers and their traffic are dwarfed by the rest of AWS, making it hard to keep those real customers at the forefront. There's also an issue with those deps of cascading failures; having two separate fabrics/strata for internal and external offerings is similar to having a multi-regional offering in that it's more robust to random failures and such.

> I get the distinct impression nobody at Google actually uses it. If they did, I'm fairly sure all the annoying little warts I encounter would not exist.

For what it's worth, the internal-only systems also have warts ;)

I agree, it's a huge problem. It also leads to divergence between internal variants of systems and external where in many cases the internal variants are leagues better than even what competitors have. But unfortunately since they're not on GCP they don't drive cloud adoption for Google.

I'm curious - what are some examples of the warts you encounter?

Things like:

* filtering traces by services has been broken in App Engine flex environments for more than a year. * copy/pasting identifiers between places is a nightmare * their IAM design is somehow worse than AWS. It’s so impressively bad I can’t even be mad. My favourite part of their IAM approach is how they have consolidated a majority of the IAM controls in the IAM page, but then random services like GCS have it defined elsewhere. * not able to do basic time zooming of metric grafs on App Engine dashboard. * multi-account paper cuts. Almost everyone on my team has their personal and work google accounts logged in. Whenever I send them a link to a dashboard or whatever, they end up getting a permission denied, without fail.

These are all just off the top of my head. Many of them seem silly and minor (and they are!) but there’s enough of them that I kinda dread doing anything in the Cloud console now. I need to take more time to get productive in the gcloud CLI I guess...

> > * multi-account paper cuts

Google multi account support within a single browser is a pain. It kinda works until it doesn't. I'm sidestepping this issue by using distinct chrome profiles for work and personal.

In the other hand, I've not found Amazon multi-account situation to be cozy either. IIRC you literally have to logout and login again or use assume role and the switch applies to all the open tabs.

> * multi-account paper cuts

I always considered the Google Cloud approach of a "single account, multiple projects" a lot cleaner than the AWS "hundreds of accounts" approach. Do you not find this the case?

Oh the multi-project stuff is definitely nice. I'm referring to the ability to keep multiple distinct Google accounts logged in.

yeah. With google maps I ran into this little bug when trying to get a new key/update my payments info like they forced all google map users to do.

The UI was maddeningly obtuse. This is from the second time I tried.. They did fix it eventually.

Very complex system for distributing new keys taking payments.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/124188941