If you are willing (and of course have the time), we would love to hear other issues you - or anyone else who reads this thread - are having with TF documentation on GCP as we try and make things better.
Don't you have feedback buttons on the docs? What happens to the feedback from those? Please prove you consider feedback before asking people for more of it.
AWS docs are the opposite. They are often very long and verbose, but once you read the whole manual, you can be guaranteed to have a good understanding of the service.
My advice for the Google team would be that if you are ever writing documentation and ask yourself “does the customer really need to know about this?”, the answer should always be yes.
For example, managing a spot fleet in AWS via terraform is filled with features and levers I can pull. It's easy to manage basic scale-out/scale-in procedures and allows me to set thresholds.
In GCP, as I understand it, I can only manage a node pool at a basic level.
EDIT: Also, yell at the people who manage the python library.
https://cloud.google.com/python/docs/reference/container/lat...
Generated samples suck - take a look at the boto3 docs and see if they tell you to go look at code generated samples.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/batch/docs/create-run-job-using-ter...
[2] https://cloud.google.com/batch/docs/reference/rest/v1/projec... [3] https://cloud.google.com/batch/docs/create-run-job-storage#u... [4] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/batch-samples/tree/ma...
how would any reasonable person know what https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... to enable without (a) trying it and squinting at the error message (b) clicking on the API documentation <https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest/v2/projects...> then realizing it, also, does not mention run.googleapis.com, click on "supported service endpoints" <https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#rest_endpoi...> and only then learning about https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#service:-ru...
Repeat for https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... although in both cases I guess the astute reader may have spotted the run.googleapis.com in the forbidden service labels and cloudidentity.googleapis.com in the example
Since, to the best of my knowledge those bindings are auto generated <https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules#magic-m...>, I would hypothesize it is not insurmountable drop in the seemingly existing declaration of APIs required: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d... https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d...
However, over the last 5 years or so, AWS docs have gotten worse.
So I guess now that they are both bad I can't complain?
It was totally our fault and these were also no "hidden" docs.
There are often no examples at all, and when there are they only cover the "hello world" case.
Last I tried, the documented examples for Cloud Functions v2 simply did not work.
From a documentation perspective, AWS is still the best.
Google could have the best products on the market but no one is going to use them if the support isn't there.
I was sad when Looker got bought by google. I remember having issues with setting up looker and using their chat functionality and having the CEO of Looker answer my question.
5 minutes later, the "technical writing manager on GCP", makes a helpful comment on this thread.
Google do actually offer great support, I pay like $30 a month for it and I can speak with real engineers who give super detailed answers.
It’s just not free. But the paid offering is great in my experience.
At least it isn't (paid) Azure Support - that one is noticeably outsourced to people that sometimes lack basic comprehension for the problem. I once asked about their VPN Gateway and got a random API Gateway response, then nothing for a week, and then a new rep.
Honestly, it boggles my mind. Bad marketing seems to be the driving force here.
“Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM.”
If you've actually spent time building on their platform though, it feels like you're in some sort of inner circle of knowledge. The stuff works, and works really well.