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Comment by jodiug | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to find all comments so strongly against Google. I do not like their customer support nor their surprise product closure acts... but I do find their cloud interface easy to use, pricing is solid, and (K8s/Cloud Run) I have barely been affected by any significant outage in some 8 years of use.

Contrast to Azure who despite their SLA had significant outages every few months that were very noticeable, sometimes even requiring us setting up an entire new K8s project from scratch. AWS is better in terms of reliability. Their UX is not great though, I often feel like I'm a wizard waving my wand with permissions and connecting things like audit trails. Many actions are a bit delayed in their effect. I've also had to contact support at times to raise arbitrary limits in the platform.

In balance I would recommend GCP. Their product closures have not affected me enough to scare me away. I guess experiences vary depending on which product we are using.

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It's been brought up elsewhere in the thread but GCP deleting an entire tenant's account rules them out entirely from any serious business IMO.

The Gemini team that completely fucked up recent deploy by blocking queries originating from Google Cloud Functions is a masterpiece as well.

Full downtime for 2 days, no apologizes, no answers, had to pay 3% extra for support, no credits.

Special award to the dude representing Google trolling on Twitter that they will do another "wild Friday release".

Shitty.

You can't even set spending limits on Google Cloud and have to use some obscure script that deactivates billing if you want to imitate it. The whole product is incredibly buggy and complicated.

I seem to recall Azure had a similar issue until recently. Pay-as-you-go accounts weren't able to set budgets.

I wanted to link the specific article mentioning that, but it seems like this works now :)

Wait, so you can now set up a hard cap on your spending and they guarantee they won't charge you more? It would be exciting but I don't believe they actually allow that especially as their competition also refused to implement that, in spite of it being no #1 requested feature for many years.

By the looks of it (their updated documentation) it seems like they do support this now!

I haven't tried it myself, and I hope it's true (:

Where did you see this documentation?

Okay, my bad, I was looking at this page [1] which says that the "Cost Management" feature is available for Pay-as-you-go subscriptions, but [2] is pretty clear on the fact that Spending Limits aren't available for Pay-as-you-go subscriptions.

So, TL;DR: Azure still doesn't allow you to set spending limits on Pay-as-you-go subscriptions

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-bill...

[2]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/support/legal/offer-detail...

Do any cloud providers have this?

AWS has slightly improved with their "budgets" and "budget actions", but it’s far from something I’d call a "spending limit".

> AWS has slightly improved with their "budgets" and "budget actions", but it’s far from something I’d call a "spending limit".

Yeah they had to do something so they came up with a half-solution that basically informs you with a delay, doesn't prevent any quick damage and - if you decide to use budget actions - requires you to know what is actually causing the problem. Better than nothing I guess.

GCP charges you insane prices for egress bandwidth to China/Asia and offers no clear and simple way to say "I don't have any customers there."

My impression from a small project needing a OAuth scope was that the UI of GCP was sluggish, and although the other providers have sometimes sluggish UIs Google's was uniquely so. Anyone else feel this way?

Example is a sidebar that opens for adding an email during OAuth flow, after adding it clicking "Add" once did nothing, there was no feedback. Had to click it at least 5 times for it to go away and save correctly. In fact this is even specified in the documentation for the third-party tool (Google Drive downloader[1] step 18) that you have to click it multiple times. I don't think this is normal.

And also I should mention, depending on hardware specs the GCP portal was nearly unusable. So hopefully one will not need to rely on creating OAuth resources for a CLI program on the same computer. Although to be fair, I wasn't benchmarking against AWS/Azure on that hardware (since I needed to use GCP Google APIs).

[1] https://github.com/glotlabs/gdrive/blob/main/docs/create_goo...

i would say that smaller, independent enterprises/solo shops tend to not hate GCP.

Large shops - aka, a shop where you're not part of the controlling entity - tend to prefer either AWS, or Azure depending on how hard the CIO got wined and dined previously (and existing inertia - older shops that used AWS as an early adopter seems to stay with AWS).

> Their UX is not great though

i agree, but nobody really cares enough. On the other hand, i'd not pay more for better UX. Judging by the current state, i say a lot of customers fall into this category.

Assuming AWS/Azure were chosen due to thinly veiled bribery is unnecessarily reductive and in bad faith.

As a matter of fact Google Cloud will also wine and dine a CTO as needed. That's part of the sales process IMHO.

A decision maker can basically choose from where they want to get bribed, so it won't be a crucial factor most of the time.

There's been quite a few documented instances of large scale bribes by Azure.

In quite a few places I saw, it would be either that or sheer incompetence (which was obvious to me at the time, and become obvious to people who came after me and finally decided to migrate away, with more losses on the way that could have been easily avoided).

I'm part of a smaller shop. GCP didn't even bother responding to us when we tried to contact sales, which is why we're at AWS.

AWS is the best provider for tech people, the product is high level but versatile too. Price is somehow high, but the service is here.

azure is microsoft, so this explains that

gcp has "a vision": if you do not share it, it's a pain. Also, gcp has some sick design for core products : checkout load balancers if you want a "good" laugh. It's a stack of hack, put one on top of the others

I would not recommand against GCP, it's the average player: not the best, definitely not the worst.

"AWS is the best provider for tech people".

This is an option, not a fact. Many of us don't agree. After working on all 3 I feel AWS is, by far, the worst experience for tech people. My perspective is that it's only doing great for execs and PowerPoint engineers.

By "tech people", I mean "people who enjoy tinkering", like playing legos

In opposition with people who enjoy taking a product of the shelf and call it a day

But you are right: this is my opinion, not a fact

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