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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

My company started using GCP in the last few months, and my tolerance for sanctimonious engineering articles from Google has gone down quite a bit as a result.

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I've worked extensively with both GCP and AWS. I've met many Google engineers, TAMs, etc. and I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment.

That said, I prefer GCP as a product to AWS (and don't even get me started on Azure).

May be personal preference, or what you experienced first, but I prefer Azure with AWS as a close second, GCP as a distant third.

I find that AWS is overly account-focused, and it's more difficult to do operations at an org level. Azure is the inverse.

But I also don't like how Azure PaaS/serverless deploys open to the Internet by default.

You prefer Azure? Things on Azure don't work by default.

I agree. Use all three and Azure is the worst.

At least Azure has UI workflows for everything that is also exposed via AZ, Powershell, ARM and bicep.

Nothing like tracking down what magic spell is needed to reveal on the CLI features not exposed on dashboards.

My AWS pet peeve is that there are edge cases where the console does some bit of magic but the AWS CLI team is allergic to including it.

Protip: If it’s useful enough to appear on the console, it’s useful enough for the command line.

Only once you have invested significant effort in implementing all the failure-handling and retry mechanisms in your code, then Azure works smoothly.

TIL a new word: Sanctimonious: making a show of being morally superior to other people.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

Full disclosure, I’m a PM on GKE. These articles get written because EVERY CUSTOMER WE TALK TO ASKS FOR THEM. “What are the best practices for x…”. Personally I stave these question off with “it depends” or “I’d really need to understand your business so we can appropriately talk about trade offs”. But honestly, I would LOVE if my customers trust amongst each other would mitigate the need to ask us for all up best practices on how to build and ship software.

I have a perhaps useful piece of feedback:

If customers are asking for this, its important to ask why. The more obvious you make best practices (like via the UI, documentation etc) and what generally GCP offerings should be used for (e.g., Firestore is a NoSQL database that is good for flexible, hierarchical data structures to store and query data) and have strong use case examples, it would got a long way to mitigating this. It won't obviate it entirely, but it would likely move the needle on customer satisfaction. Whats driving these forms of contact is that it isn't obvious and clear what tech should be used for what, and in what common circumstances.

[0]: FWIW I have the same feedback about all the big cloud providers.

Fair feedback. My team is working hard to up level the documentation. But sometimes complex problems require complex solutions and it is quite the art to capture the 80% use case while leaving room for the rest.

I also think these questions are driven from a CYA perspective. Most of the enterprise companies I talk to are interested in offloading risk on to their cloud provider (but still somehow wanting every single knob available).

I worked in an AWS + GCP environment. There was a clique of people infatuated by Google. They would exert every effort to cargo cult Google and fail consistently. Their leadership chain also doted on Google so the end result was nothing got done and excuses were made with the promise of Google solutions, one day.

This article specifically seems reasonable. There's still some very smart people at Google. Unfortunate that the culture eroded so much over the past 5-10 years and may be unrecoverable, though.

Can't be worse than Azure though!

Even if they have something good to say, the end result is that they can ship their spyware more efficiently. I'd rather give an audience to someone who is working on a project that helps humanity.

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