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Comment by s-xyz | Hacker News Reader

I share the same experience and opinion. I cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services. GCP has so far covered 99% of my use cases, and I can testify that I have a lot of advanced cases linked to data management, information security, networking and more. I am open and do not judge AWS, and perhaps its also a matter of what you are used to. However my style and approach to problems is more in alignment with GCP. I am for example of the opinion that the cloud provider should take care of everything linked to infrastructure, maintenance and as well scaling. And all of that should be as simple as possible. There is no need to overcomplicate. In this way I can focus on what makes my product unique, rather than spending my time on over-engineering repetitive features with zero value added.

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For a fairly simple setup AWS automates a lot of things. If I just want an EC2 instance and a database, the VPC already exists and there is now even a button on an RDS that says something like "connect to ec2" which sets up the security groups on both for you.

However the argument against using GCP has already been stated in this thread multiple times.

- Will it exist in 3-5 years. Google has a reputation for a reason.

- Will the cost increase in the next year. Google (including google cloud) has a reputation for a reason.

- Here we have seen time and time again problems reaching support with Google Cloud.

Meanwhile my personal AWS account that I spend maybe $5 a month on... I emailed support about a billing problem and got a response about a day later.

I would not risk my job by using Google Cloud and being at the whims of Google being Google. The last thing I want is to have to go to my leadership and explain why the cost is going up or why suddenly we need to spend a bunch of engineering effort because google is discontinuing something.

If I really didn't want to support AWS/Amazon (which is fair) I would go Azure long before going GCloud. Hell I might be convinced to go IBM but thankfully I don't have to make that decision with Azure.

Nailed it. When we've had problems with AWS, I could drop our rep an email and be on a conference call with the engineers who run the service a day later. That not for a giant account, either.

They'd also periodically reach out to offer free consulting services that would cut our monthly bill. They were upfront about the motivation: they wanted us to integrate more of their services. The upside for us was that we could get better, cheaper service. If you're planning on sticking with them anyway, that's a very attractive offer.

Meanwhile, the support venue for our enterprise Google Workspace account was a mutual support web forum as far as I could tell.

Unless you've experienced both, it's hard to believe how radically differently the 2 companies handle customer support.

Interesting.

A previous client was all-in on GCP. They were not a huge operation and in fact were slowly migrating on-prem stuff to it. GCP support was pretty good. The account manager was always on point and whenever we needed we could have an actual engineer or two on a call with us to troubleshoot stuff and give us advice and general support.

Of course, for less urgent and less severe issues it would generally be done over the course of a couple days to a week in support ticket messages / email but that was perfectly fine.

I've been back to using AWS for a little while now and I miss how much simpler it is to set up things in GCP. Even IAM which I remember bitching about so much during those days, now I just miss how much simpler it was and I didn't realise.

Also if you need Kubernetes, no other offering compares to GKE.

The argument being stated multiple times doesn't mean it is valid.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all launched roughly as many products in the last couple of decades, and killed roughly as many of them unceremoniously after the products failed. (Amazon execs used to outright brag to the media about how many products they killed, since it showed that they were daring to take risks.)

AWS, Azure and GCP have also all launched roughly the same product portfolios, and each of them killed basically none of those products.

This isn’t my experience.

Amazon supports most stuff roughly forever.

Sure, sure. I totally get where you're coming from.

By the way, how's the Fire Phone holding up for you these days? I assume it's still working well and powerful enough to do your web searches on a9.com, and read sites like the Amapedia and DPReviews. Do you happen to know how many of the Alexa.com top500 sites it can browse, or do you need to ask on Amazon Askville? But I know it won't be able to play Amazon's hit game Crucible, that's a PC game!

If you need to play some tunes on your Amazon Tap speaker and don't have them on the phone, all your mp3s are right there on Amazon Music Storage, just where you left them with the Amazon Music Importer to be played with the Amazon Cloud Player. And the files are safely backed up on Amazon Drive just in case! It's the same thing with all the digital movies you bought on Amazon Unbox, they'll just be waiting in the cloud for you to download them. (Watching DVDs rented from LoveFilm is just so yesterday.) [0]

And let's not forget Amazon's initial core competency of retail!

Just use your Dash Button to order some more books from Book Depository, it'd be a bother to have to go to one of the physical Amazon Books stores. It's just crazy how much stuff you can buy online these days! Shoes from endless.com, food delivered straight to your doorstep by Amazon Restaurants, concert tickets from Amazon Tickets, flash fashion from MyHabit.com, hotel bookings from Amazon Destinations, and all kinds of daily necessities for the family from places like diapers.com and soap.com. And don't worry, if you're bored of these normal online stores (like those set up with Amazon Webstore) and want a different experience, there's always Amazon Spark or Amazon Light for fresh takes on shopping! And for the really rare stuff, there's a good chance that there's some listings on Amazon Auction. Really, the only time I have to deal with local businesses is when I get one of those amazing group deals from Amazon Local (the code for that can surely be stored in Amazon Wallet).

I wonder what the right way to pay in one of those local stores is though... Will they take Amazon WebPay, or will I need to have my credit card scanned by one of those Amazon Local Register payment terminals?

But let's not think that it's all about consumption. I'm actually working on a screenplay myself, using Amazon Storywriter! Once I get it printed using BookSurge, it'll look professional af.

Possibly the best comment I have read on this topic...like ever. Do Microsoft next!

That would be a novel.

I bet if you combine every single one of those products, they have less users than stadia

Book Depository alone was much more popular.

This was eye opening

Those are almost (if not all) consumer facing products. I get it though - most of the complaints leveled at Google relate to their shutting down of consumer facing products. What's Google's track record for removing cloud infrastructure services? In the context of this thread, that comparison would be interesting.

Them offloading domain registration is pretty bizarre

Google recently killed an important firebase feature around cross platform in-app links, not raise prices, no

KILL IT. It’s a feature depended on by tons and tons of customers, that was a far bigger shock for me than google domains, atleast domain infra is designed with migration in mind usually (dns not included)

But google killing of a vital feature[1] of firebase (with no google alternative provided) made me shit scared on if I should integrate with more of their products.

They also randomly jacked up prices of sms authentication exponentially in a day without any major notice and caused a ton of people to get thousands of dollars in bill increase suddenly [2].

Stay away from google is a good idea unless playing russian roulette at work is your hobby.

Every product there is one manager’s ambition for promotion away from being killed and re-invented

- [1] (https://firebase.google.com/docs/dynamic-links)

- [2] (https://www.reddit.com/r/Firebase/comments/14cj7au/firebase_...)

You put a ton of effort into this post and it’s all consumer services.

We are talking about the Cloud.

No, we aren't. Everybody complaining about Google having a reputation for killing products is talking about their consumer products.

In fact, if you read just a few posts up, you'll see that in my first message I made the exact point about how Amazon!=AWS just like Google!=GCP. And the rebuttal was that Amazon actually rarely kills products. That's what I was replying to.

If you want to say that Amazon's track record is irrelevant to AWS, just be consistent and apply the same reasoning to Azure and GCP.

This is a good point. But I'd like to dig deeper than that.

Google has demonstrated a culture of killing off services. https://www.thestack.technology/google-cloud-iot-core-retire...

Amazon, on the consumer side has many canceled products. On the AWS side they have demonstrated a commitment to keeping old services alive.

So on a surface level, your analysis holds up. But where Amazon has earned some goodwill by supporting even barely used services, Google has not.

Perhaps they will given time, as GCP is fairly new. But when you are talking tens of millions of dollars in spend, reputation matters.

What about Google Cloud IOT?

I've been watching folks here on HN speculate that Google will kill GCP "any minute now" for at least the last 4 years, so ya'll can keep holding your breath, I will be having fun deploying things for 1/10th the price of AWS.

Maybe they'll kill Ads next?

> However my style and approach to problems is more in alignment with GCP. I am for example of the opinion that the cloud provider should take care of everything linked to infrastructure, maintenance and as well scaling.

You get that on AWS, too. The difference in my experience has been that once you’re out of a narrow range of features you’re more likely to hit something which is builtin on AWS but has a GCP ticket from 5 years ago with no progress. If you have any kind of security compliance requirements that gets brutal on GCP since you have to take on running an entire service to get that one missing feature.

GCP is overall a good product. Support is so atrocious and they break things often enough that it more than offsets that in any larger scale use case in my experience.

> cannot imagine what a significant argument would be to use AWS instead of GCP that outweighs the benefits and the seemingly integrated services.

Confidence that it will continue to exist in the next 3-10 years?

What odds would you like to bet that GCP is going to be gone in 10 years?

The sentiment is probably not abou GCP as a whole, but about its trigger happiness when it comes to deprecating services.

Fun read:

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...

I'm not going to read yegge's rants.

Name the odds and condition you think gcp will violate.

Google IoT came and went.

If they do want to kill it, I can see them giving as little as a 5 year window before everything is shut down.

Odds? Nobody's a fortune teller, but it was still being subsidized by ads with 3B loss in its FY22[0 p. 70], only increasing 100M in profit despite cloud revenue growing from 19B to 26B overall [0 p. 66]. They're either going to need to increase costs or add more "killer" products with large margins if they want to become profitable.

0: https://abc.xyz/assets/d4/4f/a48b94d548d0b2fdc029a95e8c63/20...

At what odds are you willing to make a bet on this? Do you think there's a 20% chance it's gone in 5 years? Do you think it's 5%? Do you think it's 30%?

People keep saying things will be shut down and I think they should put their money where their mouth is.

What an oddly aggressive comment - perhaps the problem isn't prediction but extrapolation of past experiences with Google, would you not agree that it gives you a sliver of worry that they may cut the service off?

You seem very intense about Google's offering, maybe you feel attacked by the points made in the thread, but the way you're approaching this discussion is very strange.

I'm tired of reading the same thing over and over where people prognosticate based on poor readings of events and I think people should put there money where their mouth is.

I really do not think the chance of GCP discontinuing a core service is high enough to warrant the level of comments this gets and if I find myself constantly reading these comments, maybe I can at least be compensated by people making bad bets or maybe people will admit the chance is really low.

So if you are so worried about this, please give me a number that represents how worried you are about this.

Nonzero is enough to choose an alternative.

Lol, ok man, sounds like you're real good at making rational choices. I'm sure there's exactly zero chance AWS or Azure will ever have any problems.

Do you not consider Google Cloud IOT an important service?

It is not a core cloud service, it is a service for a niche industry that never met the hype it had and probably didn't get many customers.

I don't think discontinuing cloud iot provides any indication that compute engine is going away.

AFAICT cloud iot core was hosted mqtt, which is a thing others offer and you can transition relatively easily. I don't think the shutdown of it was catastrophic for any companies; the quotes I saw in articles were of the sort "yeah, that's annoying, but it shouldn't be hard to migrate to something else".

Eridrus used to work at Google. Not sure if it would be good to disclose before aggressively asking people to bet on the lifespan of Google products, I certainly would err on the side of disclosing.

Sure, I used to work at Google, I used to work at Microsoft, some of my best friends worked at Amazon, I own stock in all of them.

Are you interested in making a bet on the chance GCP will be discontinued?

Even 5% is uncomfortably high if you're planning to build your mission-critical infrastructure around it.

A 5% chance of needing to do a migration in 10 years is very small in comparison to other technical risks.

And lets be clear, this is not a catastrophic risk; your contract with GCP guarantees they will not discontinue services without 12 months of notice so you will have time to do an orderly migration unless Alphabet itself goes under.

I am a GCP user; I have found their offering (actually having GPU quota) significantly better than the other clouds and GCP shutting down does not keep me up at all.

12 months notice is too short for big non-tech enterprises. They plan their infrastructure needs in 5-year terms. Changing to a new environment takes re-educating a lot of people, going through a lot of legal and audit meetings, finding enough manpower to do the transfer, putting things on hold purely for the migration,...

12 months is the time for the contracts to settle between these enterprises and cloud-vendors.

If your company is that big and unwieldy that a tiny chance of needing to do a migration in 12 months is unacceptable, you can stick to the key services which offer 36 months of notice. For all I know at that point you can negotiate your own guarantee if you're so big.

If you work at a company that can't do a cloud infra migration in 36 months, I don't have any good advice for you, but I doubt most commenters on here fall into that bucket. Frankly, I would expect companies that large to be in all the clouds so that you could negotiate them against each other, but I doubt that impacts many people here, and the chance of any of these worst case scenarios happening is vanishingly small.

This isn't a tiny change, if GCloud says "we quit in a year". That is a huge change. Applications using GCloud SDK for services suddenly need to be reworked and redrawn. That alone is a huge change for non-tech companies.

Some companies even need to check with the laws they reside in if the new cloud vendor can even be used.

Just work in any financial, medical, pharmaceutical, government-related... company and you'll understand that a year is nothing for these companies.

It's already profitable (although the Q2 profits were apparently a few million below wall street's expectation)

If it can't get profitable (or at least within $1B/year of profitable, or have some sort of major loss leader value to Google) then I'd give it 90% likelihood they they announce a shutdown within 10 years.

Whether or not they'll continue to lose billions a year for Google I can't say.

They had a net profit of 266M this quarter, so like, as of today they're on track to go past 1B in profit.

Cloud was profitable during the last quarter

If you want to give me 10:1 odds GCP is not going to be around in 10 years, I will bet you any amount of money you are willing to name lol.

GCP support is a joke compared to AWS.

Yep shutdown our production servers and take 1 whole week to get it resolved. Nothing fraudulent on our end. Just missing out on KYC form.

I used to work in cloud security, mostly AWS but got to hear about experiences with GCP.

AWS IAM is much better than GCP, or was 3 years ago. If you are in an industry where fine-tuned RBAC per service is a thing you want, it's better to go AWS, all things equal.

Also, GCP reps suck compared to AWS in terms of responsiveness and general give-a-shits. Hearsay.

Yeah, no. GCP actually allows you to give developers full permissions on their project. This sort of separation doesn't exist on AWS, at least not without making it very hard to impossible to share resources. So on AWS, you either have a really good platform team that handles permissions / terraform review / all infra setup (unlikely), a bad or understaffed team doing the same so everyone waits a week or two on specific things being set up (and everyone will hate them for killing their velocity), or you let everyone run wild with way too many permissions so they can actually use the console, hoping they'll stick to best practices (they wouldn't). At least developers doing unsafe things is contained in GCP.

But all that aside, AWS is better. It's much more predictable which things will work together from the documentation, the support is better and the IAM is better on paper, if you actually have that unicorn platform/infrastructure team.

Well, I was on a unicorn team, then. Guardrails on all AWS resources, developers deployed via gitlab/terraform to AWS accounts mapped to departments.

You can share resources across AWS accounts. I don't know for easy that is on gcp, but it didn't seem crazy on Amazon.

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