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Comment by streblo | Hacker News Reader

I've used GCP to great success (with some speedbumps) at 3 companies I've worked for (small and large) over the last 5-6 years. I have a lot of learnings from the experiences to pass on, and one of the key ones is this: work with a reseller.

If you've lurked on HN over the past decade you'll have seen tons of stories about how bad Google's customer support is. I don't think GCP's support is anywhere near as terrible as it is for Google's consumer products, but it does have a lot of room for improvement. If you work with a reseller, you'll get much much better results.

There are several GCP resellers that are really good and knowledgeable, and often are staffed by former Googlers that worked on GCP. The very first thing you should do if you've chosen GCP is to find one.

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This feels like working really hard to solve a problem that isn't yours. Why not just get your services from a company that will support you? Why is GCP worth doing this for?

For what it's worth, it doesn't involve really hard work, and it costs nothing. Google pays the reseller, the cost to the 'resellee' is $0.

Because GCP has objectively better data services than AWS, and GKE.

EKS sucks. AWS data offerings outside of RDS are not as good as Google's.

AWS hierarchy also sucks. GCP projects/folder mechanism is vastly superior, also org policies.

I'll echo this reasoning as one for choosing GCP. Many of the offerings are fantastic on their own - BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Firestore, Cloud SQL, GKE - they're all (IMO) great products that my teams have used to work wonders. On top of that, they're all well integrated and more seamlessly work together in my experience vs AWS services.

I've also found integrating access controls via IAM to be really powerful and also pretty user friendly. In one experience, this helped us scale the sales process and allowed us to easily address sales push-back on data security and compliance.

Also, engineers really seem to enjoy using the cloud console, even at later stages when it was mostly just read-only and had a lot of access controls. The UX is just way better than AWS.

As mentioned, I've experienced issues with GCP and there are reasons to choose AWS instead. I can expand on these if anyone is curious, but wanted to list out the reasons to use GCP, as I feel like most of the posts you see about GCP on HN skew more negative than my own experiences.

Thanks for the tip. What I don’t understand is why GCP can’t get customer support right but resellers can. You’d think Google would have more resources than a reseller to provide better service. Is it the size of the company? Company culture?

Google is squarely a product company. They make products, they manage them as products, and users are a function of marketing, product performance, and support. Professional services firms are customer companies. They have no product other than solving business problems for their customers. Its likely that a VP at a reseller could name their top 15 clients and their relative spend from memory, whereas a Google VP could spout off 15 metrics that drive their division, but not have much awareness about customer spend or what’s driving it within their business.

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