Ask HN: Does anyone actually Use GCP?
My co-founder has been sold on the pain-points on GCP, but the question becomes: why does anyone even bother? We believe there is some scale and inflection point at which GCP makes sense, but GCP products are disconnected from hobbyists. This month, we've received 10k visits and paid $120 on CloudRun (app server) and CloudSQL (Postgres). We used the lowest cost configuration including 1 CPU each. Yes, $120 for 2 x 1 CPU, 10GB SSD, 5GB ram total. It's not even been a month, actually. We had to pay an additional $30 for GCE VMs because:
1) CloudRun and CloudSQL can't talk to each other out of the box, so you have to provision a "Serverless VPC connector" which is backed by minimum of 2 VMs. It's also a single point of failure and bottleneck, which it has already failed over this month.
2) there is no UI to query CloudSQL. Even CLI querying is not possible because CloudSQL has a private IP and GCP's CLI's have no way to authenticate around this. As a workaround, we had to spin up "bastion" VMs which are the only thing that have a connection to CloudSQL. In which case, it seems GCP's CLI could be implemented to create a tunnel to a private CloudSQL.
This sort of snowflake behavior and devising workarounds in no person's land is a perpetual battle customers face with GCP. Other than documentation/DevRel, there isn't one particularly thing with GCP that is outright broken. It's just dozens and dozens and dozens of broken bits that add up. Our questions are these:
1) are GCP "serverless" (there's a lot of pain to get things working) just overpriced, or well fleshed our serverless products from startups just underpriced?
2) for people who seriously operate GCP do they just run VMs?
3) in 2022, is there anyone actually moving to GCP? If so, why? Obviously everyone knows Snapchat committed $2b in their S-1, but was that a mistake?
4) for larger businesses, could you share the kind of discounts/incentives you receive from GCP to make all of this make business sense.