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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

From a strictly “reliability” perspective it’s not a good look for Google. Their reputation for developing high uptime systems has been endangered by the recent series of outages and service interruptions. When I signed on to GCP, I assumed that the same people who wrote the SRE handbook were in charge here... how could this stuff happen?

However, as an engineer... I can empathize with their situation. GCP has less public cloud experience than AWS. They’re somewhat transparent about outages (so much better than being gaslit by AWS). Shit happens and at least the same problem doesn’t happen twice, which is what I really care about.

However my non technical manager won’t think this way and neither will other companies considering Google Cloud. GCP is in a tough spot from a marketing perspective if they get a reputation for being unreliable due to these incidents.

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Is GCP actually less reliable than AWS or Azure, or is that only HN effect where everything bad about Google gets voted to the top?

I'm hearing a lot of talk from my contacts about AWS just simply denying and hiding any outages until they're undeniably proven - so perhaps the issue is just the fact that GCP is too honest?

Curious about this as well. Google hate here can be palpable

Wind back 5 years or more and this place was a Google love fest.

Somehow it seems that Google has managed to disappoint a lot of people.

I am afraid you would need to rewind further than that.

I mean... they have. Remember when they pledged to "don't be evil"? Remember all of their cool initiatives that crashed and burned and were killed quickly?

> Somehow it seems that Google has managed to disappoint a lot of people.

Yeah, and those people aren't wrong - it's not like Google didn't do their own share of messups.

Still, the upplaying of Googles' faults and downplaying of other companies faults (even when they're the same!) has not been the best outlook of this community lately.

While totally unscientific, my personal experience would suggest that GCP is less reliable than AWS. Our team has run into a few bizarre GCP networking issues that we've managed to work around, but I've still got some intermittent problems that I haven't been able to isolate or document for a ticket.

I have encountered one instance of "AWS just simply denying and hiding any outages until they're undeniably proven" so far this year, so I suspect it does happen. But overall, I do feel like I've had less unexpected behavior or service interruptions on AWS.

Although this is sort of like talking about which telco carrier is best, I suspect many have had a bad experience, and there are some who have never noticed a problem with whichever service they're using.

> I have encountered one instance of "AWS just simply denying and hiding any outages until they're undeniably proven" so far this year, so I suspect it does happen. But overall, I do feel like I've had less unexpected behavior or service interruptions on AWS.

Fewer spurious niche "affects only you" problems per customer, times far more customers, may still equal a greater total number of spurious niche problems, though.

For an awkward analogy, it's like being friends with a con artist. They might have conned you once, or maybe even never. But they might also have 1000 other friends that they've conned zero or one times. It may add up to a lot more conning than the average person gets up to!

Experience may differ but my first app with some modifications still working good, I think since 7 years.

Most evaluations from 3p sources like Gartner put Amazon a nose ahead in a virtual tie with Google regarding uptime and reliability with Azure pretty far behind. The latest numbers I saw were for 2018:

AWS - 99.9987

GCP - 99.9982

Azure - 99.9792

Source: https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-may-cloud-computing-...

There's a huge anti-Google groupthink here and negative news about Microsoft seems to be pretty muted.

One thing to consider with AWS is that a lot of the services are designed with multiple levels of isolation and independence beyond the region/availability zones. So a service that fails even 100 % for one customer may not fail even once for another. In such cases it is possible they do not post a general availability drop for the entire service since it may affect only a small number of customers. It may be posted to the specific customer’s personal health dashboard. It took years of operating such systems for Amazon to understand deeply how large scale systems can fail and incorporate those into the designs and even then it is an ongoing effort to make them ever more reliable. Now I don’t know how Google’s services are designed and if they don’t have same or higher layers of isolation then it is possible a failure affects most customers in a region thereby requiring a global status update.

Disclaimer AWS engineer.

GCP marketing needs to get on the ball and make AWS gaslighting a meme. It's very real, and it kills me to see them get away with it again, and again, and again.

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