Compare AWS and Azure Services to Google Cloud
cloud.google.com
cloud.google.com
But I really don't understand what edge google offers other products. If anything, I am always really wary about google and their products. People might say that enterprise services are different, and it's different from free services where if you're not paying you can't expect anything, but there's been paid services by google that have been absolutely terrible like stadia. There's something wrong with Google as a company that I can't think of much that they've done recently that seems solid. There's a reason why managers get paid high salaries, because it starts at the top and flows down.
At the very least the marketing for gcp could make it clearer what exactly it's offering that's better: price, ease of management, etc. Because nobody is going to get fired for choosing AWS so there has to be a real clear incentive other than some small technical improvements that don't matter at scale.
What you should be comparing Stadia to is GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, Shadow, which provide the computing power as a service. Stadia eschews Windows to run the games, making it cheaper ( their free tier gives you 1080p/60fps for free, you just have to buy the games on the Stadia Store) but limits what games they can run ( they have to be made for Vulkan). The downside is that you have to buy the games for it, but it supports ubisoft+ ( with an addon on the Ubisoft side). But you don't complain when you have to buy games anew when you buy a new platform ( be it a PS, Xbox or PC), and the same logic applies here.
GeForce Now and Amazon Luna are still a Windows server box behind the scenes, with the associated slowness and a bit clunky integrations ( e.g. GeForce Now requires you to re-login to Uplay or Epic or Steam every so often, which is painful with a random password and MFA, and no copy-paste available).
Shadow provide you full access to a Windows box, with the associated issues ( game updates and downloads are up to you, disk space is limited, etc.).
Stadia has some downsides, but IMHO fares very decently against the competition. I have both it and GeForce Now, for different games, and IMHO Stadia's UX is slightly better.
I also worked somewhere where we made a million dollar commit. We had to get support through a VAR because Google basically doesn’t offer support. We basically paid someone else to file tickets that got dismissive responses while we had prod meltdown.
They’re also price competitive. I was going to go there again in my current position in a very small org. We have GSuite and to get GCloud working we had to turn on Cloud Identity. We didn’t see the free tier in GSuite, so I went to ask GSuite support. The only accessible support was a bot. When I asked the bot how to talk to a human, it helpfully referred me to a bunch of forum posts of people complaining you can’t talk to a human at Google.
We’re now with Azure.
> I think in many ways they have the best product.
They didn't say that Google had the best product. They said that in many categories, it was the best. That doesn't mean it's the overall best product. In fact, from their post it seems pretty clear that they ended up deciding that Google Cloud wasn't the overall best product.
> if you had a prod meltdown and couldn't get support
Presumably, they were implying that customer support _wasn't_ one of those many ways.
Given the experience they had in the ways they were bad, it could be difficult for others to justify them despite the ways in which they might have the best product.
I love their GUI, the way projects are organized and RBAC is handled across them. Creating custom cpu/mem ratio machines.
Little things like VMs in a kubernetes cluster being viewable as VMs (they’re obscured in Azure I’ve learned).
Pricing!
Like, there are very few ways they’re not my favorite cloud provider. Which speaks to how unspeakably horrible their support is that at my current org I am not going with them.
Because at the end of the day, a pretty good infrastructure product that you can get support for wins every time over an excellent one that when it breaks is catastrophic and nobody listens.
I’m spending this week rebuilding all my Azure infra because I learned about 10 different ways they hide ridiculous price increases in what you build and my infra costs twice what I thought it would. But I literally can’t get ahold of someone at Google to help me become a customer.
Meanwhile I’m not even paying for support at Azure yet and when I sent an email about the pricing I got a response from a human who checked up on my satisfaction, and then from her boss, who was checking on my satisfaction with the first email.
Google's edge (for us) is reliability. Over our ten-year tenure (heh), there have been a handful of incidents when our service was down, most early on before the NDB datastore. I seriously can't remember how many years it's been since our service was down.
And when Appengine does break, they do a brutally honest report about exactly what happened, and how they are going to make sure it never happens again. If you've got the interest and time, it's worth searching for articles/videos about Google's SREs. They are fanatics.
I know this is anecdotal, but AWS and Azure seem to have multiple outages a year. Every time I'm immensely relieved to be on Appengine.
(Can't speak for GCP or Azure, I run limited production stuff there since historically we just happened to get a ton of AWS credits first. But, I try to stick with open-source instead of Amazon's proprietary just so that migration or multi-cloud remains an option for us)
GCP is a major player in the cloud space. Number 3 last I looked. I fail to see how that compares to Stadia, an expensive experiment that may or may not succeed. Do we judge AWS on Amazon Prime Video's mediocre service? I sure hope not. Let's be clear - GPC is not an experiment. It has massive capital backing
> At the very least the marketing for gcp could make it clearer what exactly it's offering that's better: price, ease of management, etc.
Okay, but you (I assume) can read beyond marketing. Marketing should not influence your decision (very much)
> Because nobody is going to get fired for choosing AWS so there has to be a real clear incentive other than some small technical improvements that don't matter at scale.
I don't use GCP but there are many clear advantages. If those do not help your biz case, fine, move on. But if you can't see the advantages, read more
Google Bigquery is head and shoulders above the competition, a really impressive work of engineering. It moreover sidesteps Google's poor API design culture by using SQL instead of something home-grown.
I am not saying that Google is going to kill core product offerings like K8S... what I am saying is that they lack focus, and change direction without regard for their customers. That, coupled with their famously bad support means that I can't sleep at night with the confidence that I can build a complex product on top of their offering. I'll always be worrying that I have to rip out or re-architect large parts of my code to deal with their lack of product stability.
Also, as part of Google Cloud for Startups we were assigned a local (as in: operating in our country) account manager that periodically checks in to see how we're doing and connects us to Google's partners where applicable.
We're actually very happy with Google Cloud Platform, and have been for the past ~3 years.
And given how easy it is to e.g. trick the Youtube algorithm to believe a video is hot using fake engagement, I very much dislike the worldview they have that algorithms can solve everything in 2021.
I was initially worried GAE wouldn't survive but finding out that Khan Academy is hosted on GAE [1] gave me confidence of its longevity.
I once tried looking at AWS and it took me awhile to figure out they had a PaaS and trying to set it up essentially gave me a headache (keep in mind that I'm not a 9-5 programmer).
Beanstalk ain't it, and they cloned DO's "create a VM wizard" (Lightsail) but still no simple GitHub oauth webhook build/deploy.
PaaS is such a great and convenient model. It seems a major oversight to me on AWS's part.
For a commercial project I would probably go with AWS, since I’ve heard a lot of horror stories about GCP support.
I’ve been scared away from Azure after using it for a couple of courses at university. It just seemed half-baked: lots of GUI glitches/bugs (e.g. reliably needing to press a button exactly twice). It just seemed like one of those Microsoft products that only exist because the best product in the category isn’t owned by Microsoft already.
They've bet the future of the company on it, it's definitely not a product that only exists because the best product in the category isn't owned by them.
Short of Microsoft as a company going under, Azure won't be going anywhere. There are countless companies that will not do business with Amazon due to them being direct competitors and Azure tends to be the place they land. As others have noted, while there may be some technical gaps between Azure and AWS, they more than make up for it with their legacy enterprise domain knowledge and support (in my experience).
GCP under Kurian appears to be trying to cater to that same subset of customers, but the culture of Google still seems to be a pretty major uphill battle when it comes to being "enterprise friendly".
Uh. Really, no Anthos on AWS equivalent on Azure? Or AWS? Boy, they're really missing that managed Kubernetes cluster game.
Maybe I'm just dense, having only been doing this cloud thing for a decade or so, but this table seems...misleading or just wrong in so many ways.
The Anthos point is that other clouds don't offer their k8s stacks as supported options on other clouds.
If you see things you find wrong in the table, let me know.
Disclaimer: I work in product management at Google Cloud
Azure Policy to me seems like a tech demo more than a polished product. Even for common tasks such as enabling Diagnostics they just provide some "sample" policies, and then authoring the other 275 distinct policies for each resource type that can be monitored is your problem.
Does anyone have any real-world experience with it?
Edit: not GA yet
AWS does have these offerings.
guess it should be CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
So you can get Google managed k8s on azure with Google support (ie: none?) rather than managed k8s on azure with ms support (ie: some?)?
It is legit
Can Google just delete stuff from the wayback machine?
Just stay away from Azure. If death by a thousand needles was ever true then it must be for Azure. The hidden caveats, pain points, down times, subtle bugs, Portal issues, confusing documentation pages, and so on are a HUUUUUGE time sink. Honestly the cost of Azure is irrelevant when you spend 5x more expensive developer time in getting simple stuff working.
Don't say I haven't warned you...
For example, Azure Event Hubs and AWS Kinesis both say you can pick a shard key (eg CustomerId) in your messages to have processing order for each customer.
However, Azure Event Hubs notes (and my experience was that) using this feature is subject to downtime because each shard is not highly available so you can't really use it as the first step, but it is reliable on Amazon.
Azure was not as good as GCP in terms of data offerings , but with ADX and CosmosDB etc is really getting par with other clouds really well.
Coupled with strong Azure IoT , these data products may be a real winner
The last time I was subjected to azure, I wanted to drive a stake through my head out of sheer frustration.
Curious to know about your experience with Cosmos though, when I last looked it was eye wateringly expensive and reports were that performance was...slow at best.
I think Microsoft know this and know they come a long way without having to compete.
It felt easier to navigate from one service to another.
I'm not sure how azure and aws score - but better than Google?
[ed: as a side note - I've yet to try and get support from azure or aws (we use both) - but we did get prompt reply/action from digital ocean the few times we've needed to reach out]
Honest question: which of the limits in https://cloud.google.com/run/quotas#cloud_run_limits do you find “severely restricted”?
And, laughably, for any workload just a bit out of reach for Cloud Run, GCP docs immediately recommend switching to GKE (and even Anthos).
Imagine having a high RAM workload that is just a simple RPC service. Many (probably most) machine learning services fit this model. Many routine ML models require more than 8GB RAM just to load the model, bit it’s a good use case for serverless non-lambda infra because it runs out of a very unique Docker image and does nothing but serve stateless model predictions.
Needing to bring in all the machinery of GKE or pay out the nose for Anthos just because you need exactly the same operational model as Cloud Run just with high RAM or CPU is a really poor customer experience that feels deliberately set up to push you towards more expensive Kubernetes products.
It is opt in.