Comment by rswail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rswail | Hacker News Reader

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We are a reasonably large AWS customer and our account manager sends out regular emails with NDA information on what's coming up, we have regular meetings with them about things as wide ranging as database tuning and code development/deployment governance.

They often provide that consulting for free, and we know their biases. There's nothing hidden about the fact that they will push us to use AWS services.

On the other hand, they will also help us optimize those services and save money that is directly measurable.

GCP might have a better API and better "naming" of their services, but the breadth of AWS services, the incorporation of IAM across their services, governance and automation all makes it worth while.

Cloud has come a long way from "it's so easy to spin up a VM/container/lambda".

> There's nothing hidden about the fact that they will push us to use AWS services.

Our account team don't even do that. We use a lot of AWS anyway and they know it, so they're happy to help with competitor offerings and integrating with our existing stack. Their main push on us has been to not waste money.

When I was at AWS, I watched SAs get promoted for saving customers money all the time.

AWS wants happy customers to stick around for a long time, not one month of goosed income

Yep. Pay us less every month and stick around for a long time. Getting low prices makes it really difficult to move away.

If you still decided to move away, and want to take data with you, yeah... there is a cost. Heck there is a cost to delete the data you have with them (like S3 content).

Its a good way to do business.

I can't say the same of the reserved instance team which is genuinely running a protection racket business.

In a previous role I got all of these things from GCP – they ran training for us, gave us early access to some alpha/beta stage products (under NDA), we got direct onboarding from engineers on those, they gave us consulting level support on some things and offered much more of it than we took up.

Fwiw as a medium spend (250k to eventually grow into 1M+ year) GCP customer we had the same deal with product roadmaps shared up-front under NDA etc.

And never did I miss something in GCP that I could find in AWS. Not sure the breadth is adding much compared to a simpler product suite in GCP.

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