[HN Gopher] Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
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Google Cloud vs. AWS Onboarding Comparison
Author : kevinslin
Score : 440 points
Date : 2021-02-24 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kevinslin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kevinslin.com)
| zxienin wrote:
| GC CEO, Kurian has enterprise sales genetics. Entire exec
| leadership he put in place, comes from SAP Oracle-esque sphere.
| They speak enterprise, even with startups.
|
| GCP's primary target and starting point is enterprise.
|
| OP's experience is no surprise.
| jcims wrote:
| And yet their engagement teams are remarkably ignorant of how
| enterprise works. Even after weeks of conversations I still
| hear a voice in my head saying 'oh you sweet summer child'.
| amichal wrote:
| Alternate datapoint from outside YC:
|
| We've had pushy account reps trying to upsell from both vendors
| (and not knowing that we already talked to another rep). We've
| also had reps get actual engineers on the calls early who advised
| us fairly on which of their products to avoid and how to exploit
| various savings options or soon to be released features. We are a
| consultancy and so these reps were sometimes interacting with us
| as a direct customer/potential customer and sometimes via our
| clients (both larger existing customers of AWS/GCP and totally
| noob unknown startups)
|
| I'm my experience, there is no pattern other than some CS reps
| are good and some are aren't. Getting credits in both cases has
| always been a PITA at the start and than easy when the right
| person to make the call was reached.
| directionless wrote:
| This feels like a somewhat narrow and biased comparison. It is
| focused around getting startup credits, and while that's
| important, I think it's a very limited view of onboarding.
|
| Better would be to think about what the general initial usability
| of these services are. How easy is it to spin up the compute
| load? Create reasonable IAM policies? Debug problems?
|
| My own experience (and bias) is that while AWS has vastly more
| features, GCP is much more usable. The latter feels like a
| coherent setup with projects and IAM. AWS always has a
| surprisingly amount of work around org accounts and IAM setups.
|
| So maybe it's faster to get AWS credits, but it's much harder to
| make use of them.
| epiphytegreg wrote:
| I agree, post is very focused on customer support and getting
| the credits, not at all on product usability. I didn't start
| building on either AWS or GCP with the expectation I'd have a
| human to talk to, and from that perspective, GCP was much, much
| more usable. I found (and find) AWS's interfaces and
| documentation to be a maze.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I recently joined a new company to start a Data Science team.
| They had an existing GCP account for years that they had small
| usage on and had a long term valid form of payment. I request a
| tiny increase in our GPU quota (ie: 8 T4s in one region) on GCP
| and was denied and told to talk to a sales person. I literally
| said in my message to sales that AWS doesn't make it this hard to
| give them money. Every quota increase still seems to require
| escalation to our sales person and all they could offer as advice
| was to switch to invoice billing.
| k__ wrote:
| Half-OT: Anyone knows how hard it is to come by AWS (Activate)
| credits when you are building something and not have founded a
| company yet?
| pluc wrote:
| I've been working for startups for 20 years and I was never able
| to get an AWS Account Manager, much less a "Startup Rep". They
| must only care about spending, your email domain, the fact that
| you're an ex employee or likely to write about the experience.
| Cause it's always been "you're on your own" for me.
| wyck wrote:
| I literally just started a new sass on AWS and only have spend
| about 80$, today I got a call from a rep from their primary
| headquarters (unlike Google) , and he applied a 300$ initial
| credit and I can email him for a questions/support. No pressure
| just all around nice.
|
| I've had similar calls from google in the past that were
| disasters, just someone hammering the up sales button, I
| actually had to block a google rep on my phone.
| klohto wrote:
| Then I would advise you try again. Our AWS bill is between 4
| and 5 figures and we got dedicated startup account manager
| while on development within a week of asking. No internal
| contacts, literally pinged support team and got it.
| jcims wrote:
| Bit of an absurd question, but is anyone in here spending 6-7
| figures a month at GCP? Does it get better?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Just another anecdote, we are a startup that got GCP credits last
| year which fully funded our first year, and it was an extremely
| simple process. So far we've been extremely happy with GCP (and
| Firebase), but in fairness haven't needed much tech support.
| nkingsy wrote:
| Confusing title, quick read. This is about sales/cs not product.
| loceng wrote:
| From the comments in this thread it sounds like Google doesn't
| have much internal communication or accountability going on?
| kyloon wrote:
| I can confirm the same experience too (my company uses both AWS
| and Google Cloud) where most of the human touch points related to
| startup credits are with the sales team for Google Cloud instead
| of an account manager (we still don't have one after about a year
| now) if you manage to get pass their usual generic responses.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Just another Google Cloud vs AWS anecdote, but I have been trying
| to use Google's cloud services to translate snippets of text here
| and there for personal use. I specifically went with Google
| because their translations are a cut above other translation
| services.
|
| I recently switched over to translating with AWS because Google.
| Keeps. Breaking.
|
| There's a decided lack of focus on user experience in Google
| Cloud services, from invalidating my credentials, upgrading the
| tool chain (and invalidating my credentials), to the usability of
| the gcloud CLI tool itself. With AWS I was up and running in
| literal minutes.
| [deleted]
| iamgopal wrote:
| Does top google management listen/read HN ? Not that it failed
| for me ever, but negativity is mesmerising
| ngokevin wrote:
| That might be one of the only effective ways to impact change
| at big tech companies, embarrass their engineers on HN.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| If history serves as an example, embarrassment doesn't
| necessarily spur improvement.
|
| It could instead convince them it isn't a core offering,
| resulting in the decision to shut it down.
| ngokevin wrote:
| True, they can down the YouTube route and wipe out any
| humans in the loop for moderation and customer service.
| smartties wrote:
| GCP ? No thanks, I've had enough trouble with google to know they
| don't care about having a real support.
| f430 wrote:
| This has been my experience so far:
|
| Scenario: Run some expensive resources by mistake during learning
| period
|
| AWS: Awww shucks, we'll refund you today.
|
| GCP: Sorry no refunds.
| halbritt wrote:
| How does interacting with reps have anything to do with
| "onboarding"? This is more or less an evaluation of how easy it
| is to take advantage of credits.
|
| I'd be more interested in how easy it is to use a credit card and
| get a service off the ground. What is the relative quality of the
| products on offer by either vendor?
| Havoc wrote:
| On the plus side you managed to speak to an actual human at
| google!
| joduplessis wrote:
| AWS has been amazing, even for someone who doesn't spend beyond
| 1,000 EUR. You always get a human on the other side of the line.
| GCP / Google I have no time for.
| dboreham wrote:
| Hmm...I've never even thought to talk to a human at a cloud
| hosting company.
| stevencorona wrote:
| I used to be a huge fan of GCP and bet on it to power my startup,
| and have come to greatly regret it.
|
| Recently, I needed to increase a CPU-limit quota from a small
| number (like 16 vCPUs to 64 vCPUs) - nothing crazy. In the past,
| the quota increase system was more or less automated and would
| only take a few minutes to process.
|
| This time, however, GCP denied my quota increase and forced me to
| schedule a call with a sales rep in order to process the quota
| increase. It was the biggest waste of time and kind of goes
| against the entire point of instant cloud resizing.
|
| It also feels like the velocity of new features, instance types,
| etc has slowed down dramatically in the past year. Also, while
| I'm ranting, Google Cloud SQL is probably the worst cloud service
| I've ever used (and it costs an arm and a leg for the pleasure!)
| Aperocky wrote:
| Wait what, it's not available through an API? That's
| ridiculous.
| eyal_c wrote:
| I just started using Google Cloud SQL - the allure of a managed
| Postgres service was strong. Can you share some of your
| experiences with it?
| stevencorona wrote:
| Sure.
|
| - No way to upgrade major postgres version without full
| export and import into new cluster.
|
| - Incredible delay between postgres versions. IIRC, it took
| nearly 2 years for them to add postgres 11 after it was
| released.
|
| - HA is basically useless. Costs double, still has 4-5 minute
| window of downtime as it fails over, doesn't avoid
| maintenance window downtime (both primary/standby have same
| maintenance window) and you can't use it as a read replica.
| Honestly, feels like a borderline scam since I'd imagine a
| new instance could be spun up in the same amount of time a
| failover takes (but I haven't tested)
|
| - With default settings, we experience overly aggressive OOM-
| killer related crashes on a ~monthly basis during periods of
| high utilization. On a 32GB instance, OOM killer seems to
| kick in around 27-28GB and it's incredibly annoying.
|
| - Markup over raw instances is almost 100%, with no sustained
| use discount outside of a yearly commit.
|
| It's just a lot of money to pay for a crashy, outdated
| version of Postgres.
| sa46 wrote:
| > Incredible delay between postgres versions
|
| To be fair, it looks like GCP supported Postgres 13 (Nov 5,
| 2020) before AWS did (Nov 27, 2020) and AWS currently marks
| Postgres 13 as a preview. Maybe GCP had a large initial
| engineer-cost to support multiple versions of Postgres and
| now the incremental cost to add new versions is small?
|
| > It's just a lot of money to pay for a crashy, outdated
| version of Postgres.
|
| Have you looked at other options? I'm evaluating GCP SQL
| and the comments in this thread are scary. Seems like Aiven
| might be a good way to go. I've also briefly looked at
| CrunchyData's Postgres Operator [1] for Kubernetes but it's
| a lot of complexity I don't really want.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/CrunchyData/postgres-operator
| stevencorona wrote:
| I've only looked at CrunchyData which does seem like more
| complexity than I want - I was willing to suck it up pay
| the premium but the monthly OOM crashes have forced my
| hand - but to where, I don't know yet
| cakoose wrote:
| I need to run Postgres in production soon. I've used AWS
| RDS (MySQL) in the past, but am also considering Google
| Cloud SQL.
|
| Things that seem similar in AWS:
|
| - For major version upgrades, you need to bring up a new
| instance from a snapshot and catch it up with replication.
|
| - HA failover results in a few minutes of downtime. (They
| claim using their SQL proxy will reduce this.)
|
| - Lag in providing the latest Postgres versions. GCP seems
| to be a bit ahead of AWS here.
|
| Is there a managed Postgres offering that you prefer? Aiven
| looks nice, feature-wise.
| stevencorona wrote:
| To clarify, it's a lot more work than bringing up a
| snapshot. You need to do a full export as SQL and
| reimport as SQL. Super annoying, slow, and requires hard
| downtime.
|
| Am using SQL proxy but doesn't do much re: HA.
|
| I don't know, I'll probably just run my own Postgres at
| some point. The only peace of mind that I get from Cloud
| SQL is the automatic backups.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| Why don't they make the upgrade seamless? If it's truly an
| export/import process, then it should be dead simple for
| them to do that on their end. Especially after they've
| snatched your db from serving requests
| cbushko wrote:
| CloudSQL was slow for us until we do the following:
| 1) Increase the disk size to 100GB as this increases the IOPs
| 2) Switch to using private IP addresses. Huge speed increase
| 3) get rid of cloudsql-proxy. Another huge speed increase
|
| These 3 things have kept our database instances very small and
| costs low.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| 3) get rid of cloudsql-proxy. Another huge speed increase
|
| ^ Do not use cloudsql-proxy ever. GCP docs are wrong. DO NOT
| proxy all your db requests through a single VM.
| cbushko wrote:
| Ours cloudsql-proxies were on running on GKE so they were
| not "that bad".
|
| Switching to private ip definitely had the largest impact
| by far on performance.
| stevencorona wrote:
| Yeah, have hugely over provisioned disks for IOPS. Am still
| using public ip + cloudsql-proxy because the alternative
| didn't exist when I first deployed, but I'll try switching.
| cbushko wrote:
| I went through this during last summer. The nice thing is
| that you can switch to private ip and cloudsql-proxy will
| still work. At least you can isolate your changes.
| sa46 wrote:
| > Switch to using private IP addresses. Huge speed increase.
|
| Interesting. I'm looking Cloud SQL right now and the advice
| seems to lean in the opposite direction: use public IPs for
| ease of connecting. Can you quantify the decrease in latency?
| All I can find is bits about reduced network hops.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Is the call just so they have a window to upsell you?
| stevencorona wrote:
| 100% upsell. Felt like sitting through a high pressure
| timeshare sales pitch to get the free gift at the end
| marcinzm wrote:
| I got the same treatment but I think I came off as annoyed
| enough in my message to sales (with an implied threat of
| just moving to AWS) that I didn't get an upsell
| conversation.
| croes wrote:
| Maybe that is the reason why Google's cloud business doesn't make
| profit.
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| We spend 100s of 1000's of dollars a month on AWS. Our rep tried
| getting me to upgrade to paid support, and I said there was no
| way I was going to do that. I'm already paying AWS millions a
| year and will be giving them more and more business as Loom
| continues to skyrocket in usage. No way I'm paying for support at
| that scale. It's a bogus model to charge your customers more when
| they're continuing to accelerate in growth and pay you more
| money. I expect to get more support and attention over time
| automatically because I'm simply paying much more and my need for
| support hasn't proportionally gone up in the least.
|
| That was it. Other than that one conversation, my experience with
| AWS has been _absolutely stellar_ every step of the way. We've
| struck deals with them for several products and have felt like
| they were fair for both parties. Instead of continuing to focus
| on getting me to pay for support, they focused on areas where
| we'd want to rely on other AWS products and have come back with
| some amazing suggestions. I am extremely impressed with the teams
| I've worked with at AWS - it seems like they really understand
| the customer, and that incentivizes me to stay and use even more
| managed services when the unit economics work out for us.
|
| For GCP I've had reps reach out. I tell them there's no way we'll
| go multi-cloud because it doesn't make sense for our business
| goals and detracts from them. They respond as if they never even
| heard what I said. I get that you have to be persistent as a
| sales person, but the response wasn't even talking about how
| _part_ of our infra would be worth hosting with them. There's no
| conversation - it's just what GCP wants me to do for them.
| jedimastert wrote:
| Marginally related as always, but here's a repository of user
| onboard teardowns I've always found really interesting
|
| https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/
| pnathan wrote:
| I've been extremely happy with GCP's GKE offering as a solo dev.
| They've regularly upgraded it and improved it.
|
| That said, the risks around customer support and occasional
| account termination worry me substantially. I'd be less worried
| if I had a corporate G Suite account with admin.corp@example.com
| with an invoice system and a corporate counsel on retainer to
| write grumpy letters as needed.
| campac wrote:
| Exactly same experience on our end.
|
| On AWS: fast, close to our needs and all setup in days. After our
| one year program cam to an end we still had around 50k in
| credits. One email asking if they could extend for one or two
| months, they extended for 6. We also messed up the last month as
| we did not setup any limits and spend more than 17k in cloud
| computing - they offered us an 80% discount!
|
| On GCP: We got accepted very fast (2 days). But we struggled for
| 2 months to get GPU quota. The communication is not fluid and we
| were pointed from sales rep to support to sales rep.
|
| Also from the management perspective (but this is purely my
| opinion), GCP is a labyrinth. You need a phd in GCP to setup your
| users with permissions. And i still could not figure out how to
| create good usage reports out of it.
| [deleted]
| lazyant wrote:
| Startup idea for ex-googlers: backdoor access to GCP support
| (frozen accounts etc)
| ineedasername wrote:
| AWS seems to realize that good service focusing on product needs
| will lead to more revenue in the long term.
|
| GCP wants to front load revenue concerns, making product usage
| secondary.
|
| Even apart from AWS's first-mover advantage, GCP should not be
| lagging as far behind as they are. Azure for example started a
| little later than GCP yet still appears to have more of the
| market.
| devops000 wrote:
| Google has truly lost the ability to innovate in front of Amazon.
| Its business is based on online advertising which has many
| problems: bot clicks, ad blockers, privacy issues and users don't
| like it. The cloud business as we see from this article is not
| the best and will hardly take market share from AWS.
| legionof7 wrote:
| I've started using Zeet (https://zeet.co/) to host my startup's
| website, apps, bots, etc.
|
| Found it super easy to use and to quickly deploy things. Replaced
| our usage of Heroku and Vercel.
| randlet wrote:
| Title should maybe be switched to "Google Cloud vs AWS Onboarding
| Comparison for YC companies".
|
| Not to say that isn't a useful article on its own, but it's hard
| to draw too many meaningful conclusions for the rest of us when
| the first line of the AWS bullet points is "reach out to
| dedicated YC email".
| dpedu wrote:
| Why? Why can't Google offer the same thing?
| randlet wrote:
| Of course Google could offer the same thing. My proposed
| title change would be even more recommended in that case.
|
| My point is that obviously AWS thinks that on average being
| in YC is going to result in more revenue for them and
| therefore they prioritize support for YC companies. As a non-
| YC company I won't get the same treatment which makes any
| conclusions from this article less useful.
| dpedu wrote:
| I don't think it's surprising at all that an article posted
| on a Ycombinator.com subdomain about news talks about
| Ycombinator-related topics.
| recursive wrote:
| It wouldn't help much if they did, seeing as how that would
| be specific to YC. As such, it's not representative of the
| general experience.
| blackoil wrote:
| Not a general experience but common for many incubators,
| even for some with bootstrapped companies.
| tyingq wrote:
| Yeah, that was weird to me also. It just sounds like YC
| companies collectively use enough AWS to get some premium tier
| support. I assume GCP has something similar, but YC companies
| don't spend enough there to get it.
|
| Apples and oranges.
| ttul wrote:
| AWS has, for a few years now, had a team dedicated to
| ensuring that AWS wins all of the successful startup
| business, which they know may turn into huge amounts of
| revenue for the few startups that succeed. The team was
| headed up originally by Paul Zimmerman
| (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsloanzimmerman/); he may be
| a good person to reach out to if you're hoping for some
| credits.
| doomslice wrote:
| I was able to get 130k free GCP credits (over 3 years) just by
| filling out the startup forms... as a complete nobody. You
| don't even need an affiliate to sponsor you.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| That used to be the case. They recently (last year?) changed
| it to make it much harder.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| In 2015 I worked at a start-up and was in charge of applying
| for various cloud start-up benefits at AWS, GCP, etc. At the
| time getting GCP credits was the hardest and required meeting
| with a program coordinator after getting a referral from an
| industry recognized VC. It may have changed since then,
| bottom line YMMV.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I worked briefly for a startup that changed their name and
| then got an additional round of credits.
| aroman wrote:
| Did you apply via https://cloud.google.com/startup?
|
| I'm in a similar position and those credits would be
| lifechanging.
| doomslice wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
|
| The grants start out small (I think the first one was $3k)
| -- but then once you spend 75% of them you can apply for
| the next round, which for me they gave me $17k out of a
| possible $30k based on previous usage. After I spent around
| $15k for that over the next year I applied again and got
| $100k.
|
| Just one note though that I already had an MVP that I was
| running on GCP at the time I applied (but I was within the
| $300 free credits that I started with so I didn't pay out
| of pocket).
| alberth wrote:
| What does GCP get in return. If they give you free
| credit, do you have to give then equity in your company,
| do you guarantee them X spend, etc?
| omarhaneef wrote:
| If you hit it big, you'll spend on their platform for a
| long time. You don't have to explicitly promise anything
| because you've built everything around their platform for
| months/years.
| kateho wrote:
| my understanding is that GCP has recently changed their
| startup programme. I applied a few weeks ago, and had the
| same bad service as the OP.
| xur17 wrote:
| Your future spend. Once you start using them, it would be
| a decent amount of work to change.
| kbar13 wrote:
| probably vendor lock in
| matwood wrote:
| Moving clouds is hard if you use the cloud features.
| Giving credits to startups is a cheap way to get them
| locked in for the future.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| If you have enough funds, you might not care about
| building an efficient architecture, and when the credits
| run out, you'll spend more?
|
| Also good PR.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Interesting.
| randlet wrote:
| I'm not saying anything for or against AWS or GCP. All I'm
| saying is most startups experience with AWS won't begin with
| "Send email to dedicated YC email address" so it's hard to
| draw conclusions from this article about what AWS support is
| like for "regular" start ups.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| While I agree that this is a confound and as someone who
| also went through the same process, GCP _also_ knows that
| you 're applying as a YC company, and is a PITA regardless
| - in that way, there's a normalization factor of applying
| to both entities' startup credit programs with similar
| social factors. I've heard the same pains with GCP from
| non-YC founders about the free credits process and from
| non-YC technologists about bad customer service.
| dheera wrote:
| Are there similar forms for AWS? I got 100k credits for my
| prior YC startup but I'm exploring new projects for a
| possible future startup and if I could even get 10k credits
| it would be a big help.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| If you're planning on building your business on the cloud,
| the availability of free credits seems like the worst way to
| evaluate a cloud provider. Generous "free" credits might even
| be a warning that they have to pay people to use the
| platform.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| This ignores the other big reasons to take losses early,
| when one is a new(er) player in a market with a dominant
| competitor.
|
| It's not completely wrong, but incomplete.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Doesn't the same logic apply -- that new upstart is
| unproven and is essentially paying people to use their
| platform. The last thing your burgeoning new business
| needs is trying to debug issues on a brand new platform,
| you can't even hire industry experts to help because
| there are no industry experts.
|
| So if you want to work on building your business and not
| debug cloud provider issues, avoid the new upstart.
| redisman wrote:
| If you truly need cloud hosting then that is $130k of free
| money no? That's more than many pre-seed rounds. If you use
| that for a bunch of Linux machines running some kinda
| containers and a non-proprietary database then I don't see
| any downsides.
| samsgro wrote:
| How!? I am a VC backed startup, just went through the same
| grief described in the original linked post.
|
| I like Firebase, but the moment the utility runs out we're
| heading back to AWS.
| doomslice wrote:
| Maybe things have changed since I applied - but I have not
| talked to a single sales person and only communicated via
| email with the google cloud for startups team. The process
| was so quick and painless that I at some point felt like I
| was being scammed and had to make sure I was not going to
| end up with a huge bill after they pulled the rug out from
| under me.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > I like Firebase, but the moment the utility runs out
| we're heading back to AWS.
|
| Just from a technical perspective I'd advise to avoid the
| firebase databases like the plague.
| resonantjacket5 wrote:
| It's not too bad if you use the firebase store. But yeah
| using the firebase realtime db for anything that requires
| relationships/indexing can be kinda cumbersome.
| reader_mode wrote:
| > It's not too bad if you use the firebase store
|
| I've built a prototype on top of it and it's fairly
| rudimentary but you can make it work. My biggest concern
| is that there are no case studies I can find of people
| using it past the prototype stage and how the
| pricing/scalability works out at that point.
| samsgro wrote:
| We've spent a lot of time working around the limitations
| of FireStore, but it does work reliably. Pricing is VERY
| hard to extrapolate from early use; all it takes is one
| feature request and your assumptions are blown.
|
| Love to hear from anyone who has gone beyond the
| prototype phase.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| Why's that? I haven't looked into it but thought I might
| someday.
| syshum wrote:
| Based on other stories though, the customer experiance between
| the 2 companies appears to be simliar even if not a YC Company.
|
| Google has never had a good reputation for Customer service,
| they believe they can solve all Customer Service with bots and
| Automation, this will ALWAYS lead to a lower level of customer
| service.
|
| Amazon started in retail sales where customer service is king,
| so it naturally has batter customer service philosophy than
| Google.
|
| Google has shown zero signs it even desires to have a customer
| service philosophy that is remotely similar to Amazon, or even
| Microsoft Software which is somewhere between Amazon and Google
| on the customer service scale
| balls187 wrote:
| We got hella (official size) AWS credits by using Carta to
| manage our captable/409a.
| wdb wrote:
| Yeah, I think having a YC dedicated mail address at AWS helps.
| As I am still waiting for a response from AWS regarding joining
| one of their programs while GCP response was within the day.
| All access sorted the next day.
| tapoxi wrote:
| This is also pretty specific about needing more free credits
| than GCP provides out of the box.
|
| If you just want to get started with GCP, you just sign in with
| your Google Account for $300 in credit. When you run out you
| can just start paying with a credit card.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Exactly. Google: gives me $300 of credit no questions asked
| and tells me what things will cost upfront.
|
| AWS: makes me apply to a program to get credits and if I want
| to price out anything it's almost a full-blown research
| effort where I have to dig through documents and cross
| reference tables between different services and I still
| probably miss something important. Free tier is opaque enough
| to frustrate even "use it at small scale and see," because
| you still have to do the research to see if they are pulling
| a "your first hit is free but try to scale and WHAM." Oh, but
| they're customer obsessed, so after much begging and pleading
| they'll refund half of WHAM, one time.
| coder543 wrote:
| I don't really agree with that comment. I think all of the
| megaclouds have undesirably complex pricing structures, but
| they also all provide pricing calculators. AWS has one
| here: https://calculator.aws/
|
| If I punch in the services I want to use, I can quickly see
| how much they will cost, and it's easy. I recommend
| clicking "Advanced" inside services on the calculator if
| you want to be sure you're not going to run into an edge
| case that costs lots of money unexpectedly.
|
| If you use any of the megaclouds without first
| understanding the price structure, good luck.
|
| Personally, I think a lot of companies would be better off
| using DigitalOcean or some other medium-size cloud. The
| pricing is much simpler, and pretty much all medium-size
| clouds charge $0.02/GB for egress bandwidth, either
| globally or in the US, depending on the provider.
|
| In contrast, the megaclouds make _shocking_ amounts of
| money off of their extremely pricey egress bandwidth, among
| other highly profitable aspects of their business.
|
| Even still, AWS is a solid cloud platform, and they really
| do seem customer obsessed compared to what I've seen happen
| on GCP.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I don't really agree with this comment, because we've
| gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and
| pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a
| major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always
| seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They
| never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack
| on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about
| cross-referencing. If you're willing to put in a lot of
| effort across tools, you can get a complete picture, but
| it really does take a lot of effort and foresight into
| the exact structure that your solution is going to take
| (which involves cross-referencing documentation). Amazon
| doesn't make any effort to quote you a price once they
| have enough information, they always make you work for
| it. If a price transparency tool is gated behind enough
| effort, is it really a price transparency tool?
|
| That said, I'll grant you that AWS is not the only
| megacloud leveraging opaque cost structures. They just
| leverage them more.
|
| AWS support is genuinely a cut above, though.
| coder543 wrote:
| > pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a
| major way that's only obvious in hindsight and seems to
| be consistently worse than other clouds.
|
| Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS
| calculator doesn't compute the correct price for?
|
| I honestly can't remember ever being surprised by what
| things on AWS cost, and I don't think I'm _that_
| shockingly good at detecting hidden costs.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Cloudwatch costs have been the ones my coworkers complain
| about. The one that got me was sagemaker -- the console
| had a bug where if you went to a region without
| endpoints, it would pop up a tutorial screen and the
| tutorial screen would "stick," hiding endpoints in other
| regions. Which led to hanging endpoints, which were
| covered by free tier for a few days before costs
| exploded. We had alerts active, but they alerted when we
| span up the resources, which was expected, and didn't
| make it obvious that paging through all the regions
| ensuring there were no running resources (itself painful)
| and watching daily costs for a few days was insufficient
| to ensure that we weren't going to have a $700 bill at
| the end of the month (or maybe $1400 -- I forget if $700
| was the half refunded cost).
|
| When I shared this anecdote at Re:Invent, the sentiment
| at the table was "lol that's cute, here's my story with
| an order of magnitude higher price tag." There were 5 or
| 6 of us, and my story was the smallest surprise cost
| except for one other person who was even greener than I
| was.
|
| > Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS
| calculator doesn't compute the correct price for?
|
| Can you tell me how I should have used AWS calculator to
| prevent my surprise charge? You can't, because AWS
| calculator assumes you know exactly what you're asking
| for, and the problem with opaque pricing structures is
| that you sometimes don't.
|
| Other clouds tend to be much more upfront about "this
| will cost X," "this is costing X," "you're out of free
| tier," etc.
| fossuser wrote:
| This is a good example of why I'm long Amazon and short Google.
|
| Though Jeff Bezos stepping down worries me a bit.
|
| Google doesn't care that much about their customers. They mint
| money from their web ad monopoly. They don't have aligned
| incentives, they don't have a customer focused culture.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I'm surprised that they didn't include Azure.
|
| Microsoft is not without their faults and I know a few sprinkles
| of comments in this thread have definitely highlighted issues I
| know people have had with them, but in the whole I have to say
| this:
|
| - my previous company switched from AWS to Azure and had
| significant savings, their sticker price is not the price you
| pay, and we were not spending millions to get deep discounts
| either (they were more interested in us being in a contract
| instead which makers some sense)
|
| - the support we dealt with was really good for the most part, I
| felt it was pretty comparable to AWS
|
| - they have really good uptime for the services we used (blob
| storage, cosmos DB, mssql and postgres, container hosting)
|
| Biggest downside though is they seemed to always be going through
| SDK changes. I think this had a lot more to do with migrating
| everything to .NET core though, still was very annoying. Their
| non .NET sdks were a bit more stable though.
| dataminded wrote:
| I'm not at a startup but this resonates.
|
| AWS crushes it with customer service. Google is a PITA.
| [deleted]
| ttul wrote:
| Amazon's first value is "customer obsession".
|
| "Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work
| vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders
| pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers."
|
| Out of interest, here are the other values:
|
| Ownership
|
| Leaders are owners. They think long term and don't sacrifice
| long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of
| the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say
| "that's not my job."
|
| Invent and Simplify
|
| Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their
| teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally
| aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited
| by "not invented here." As we do new things, we accept that we
| may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
|
| Are Right, A Lot
|
| Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good
| instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to
| disconfirm their beliefs.
|
| Learn and Be Curious
|
| Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve
| themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to
| explore them.
|
| Hire and Develop the Best
|
| Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and
| promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly
| move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders
| and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on
| behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like
| Career Choice.
|
| Insist on the Highest Standards
|
| Leaders have relentlessly high standards -- many people may
| think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are
| continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver
| high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure
| that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems
| are fixed so they stay fixed.
|
| Think Big
|
| Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create
| and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They
| think differently and look around corners for ways to serve
| customers.
|
| Bias for Action Speed matters in business. Many decisions and
| actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We
| value calculated risk taking.
|
| Frugality
|
| Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness,
| self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for
| growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.
|
| Earn Trust
|
| Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others
| respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing
| so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or
| their team's body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark
| themselves and their teams against the best.
|
| Dive Deep
|
| Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details,
| audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote
| differ. No task is beneath them.
|
| Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
|
| Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when
| they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or
| exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do
| not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision
| is determined, they commit wholly.
|
| Deliver Results
|
| Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver
| them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite
| setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
| random5634 wrote:
| As I've said elsewhere, the $29 and $99 support plans for AWS
| have to lose AWS money. At least a (fairly long) while ago the
| support was nuts through these. Total expert level / out of
| scope. Frankly I'd encourage them to hold scope a bit more but
| its obviously working for them.
| dataminded wrote:
| Not if they sell the rest of their services profitably.
|
| I keep throwing large sums of money at AWS because they
| insist on making their products useable. AWS wants to me
| adopt their products, they want to remove barriers, they want
| to help me make money. I have no problem continuing to invest
| in their services.
| sitharus wrote:
| AWS makes two thirds of Amazon's profit. I'm pretty sure
| most services are above cost.
| https://www.geekwire.com/2020/amazon-web-services-makes-
| near...
| NathanKP wrote:
| AWS employee here. When I was an AWS customer I was also
| often surprised by the quality of the support answers. Now
| from the other side I can explain why: even on the cheaper
| support plans it isn't uncommon for difficult questions to
| make their way back to the relevant team and the answer you
| are getting was often written by an engineering manager or
| engineer on the team that built and operates the thing you
| were asking about.
|
| Obviously there is a balancing act here to avoid slamming the
| engineers with too much load answering support questions, but
| it is not uncommon for customers to be getting answers from
| the people who built the thing. And on my team at least we
| always try to use support questions to know where we need to
| improve documentation with more troubleshooting steps, etc.
| temp667 wrote:
| Very interesting.
|
| This would explain the response I got (backstory - I am a
| contributor to a number of open source packages / not
| totally clueless, but was coming in from a micro personal
| account). I was like, how the heck do they afford this
| response for $99! (or whatever it cost back then - this was
| a long time ago).
|
| I kept my support plan active for a year as a courtesy
| though I never had another question aside from the first
| two I put in.
|
| That said, as a programmer I like time to focus so being
| asked customer questions would drive me nuts, hopefully
| they filter out the idiots who just can't setup things
| right (80% of issues are not bugs but customer setup
| issues).
| duckfang wrote:
| Agreed. AWS technical support is exactly that. It's been a
| pleasure every time, that when I open a ticket, I actually
| have a real technically minded human behind it.
|
| As a converse, I've also had the extreme displeasure in
| dealing with Oracle and Tenable/Nessus support...
|
| With Oracle, its either a continual feature-push to go to
| professional for only starting $50k/yr more (NO), or
| troubleshooting ends up asking 100 questions for your
| question.. And if you answer them, they give you 100 more.
| Effectively its a technical DOS in the hopes you abandon
| the ticket.
|
| Nessus/Tenable is similar. They want you to use their
| terrible tenable.io (which isn't fedramped), and will
| badger you incessantly. And service tickets demand enhanced
| logs be turned on and provided to them. Their tool can
| censor some passwords, but have caught passwords in there
| along with services, addresses, and exploit data about
| them. And even if you censor the logs prior to shipping to
| them, they will put their foot down and demand unedited
| logs.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _And on my team at least we always try to use support
| questions to know where we need to improve documentation
| with more troubleshooting steps, etc._
|
| Absolutely. In my ex-team at AWS, you could literally see
| visceral pain on the on-call's face when a customer
| tickets-in with a totally avoidable issue. The feedback
| from such customer contacts did inform most of the product
| roadmap.
|
| And most certainly, the most heavily prioritized and
| celebrated feature launches were the ones improving
| operation excellence including fixing things that a lot of
| customers had complained about.
|
| That said, cloud support engineers, often times, in my
| experience, were more knowledgeable than software engineers
| owing to their interactions with customers which lead them
| to internalise a tonne of troubleshooting patterns. Only a
| novel issue would stump them where a software engineer
| would have to work in-tandem to sort it out.
|
| The detailed internal knowledge-base that these
| support/software engineers write for issues impacting
| customers probably also plays an important role, because
| then even semi-technical folks like TAMs can more or less
| help the customer out pronto by searching through the
| knowledge-base, without requiring to escalate further.
| musha68k wrote:
| From personal experience in multiple startups I can confirm that
| with regards to customer service and sales processes AWS is light
| years ahead of GCP.
|
| That said I have heard even better stories about Azure actually -
| apparently it is yet in another league of its own in terms of
| perks and actual _service_ game.
| bitbuilder wrote:
| The Azure service game is indeed incredible. Every experience
| I've had with them has been excellent.
|
| A client once requested we file a support ticket with Azure to
| help deal with a performance issue my team was working through.
| It wasn't really all that urgent, but the client requested we
| use the highest urgency level anyway. So I filed our ticket.
|
| In less than a minute I felt like my phone was being blown up
| by every engineer at Microsoft. And the messages they left made
| it clear that the fate of humanity hinged on resolving our
| issue within the next five minutes.
|
| On top of that, the depth and intelligence of the support was
| downright humbling to this fellow engineer.
|
| (At the end of the day, it turns out we'd screwed up and left
| debug logging on.)
| [deleted]
| motives wrote:
| Most people on here dislike Azure because they don't buy into
| the Microsoft ecosystem, which is absolutely understandable,
| but if you do buy into the ecosystem, Azures really pretty
| great.
|
| AAD ties everything together (this is a pro or a con depending
| on whether you use it), meaning you get secure SSO (including
| biometric security) for everything from device provisioning to
| machine identity (through service principals), and then
| Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 licenses offer every internal business
| tool you'll probably ever need in one place.
|
| Azure basically only works if you go all in.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Similar experience here.
|
| AWS has had many years to build and polish their sales process,
| and it shows.
|
| GCP felt like the engineers built a good platform and then
| tossed it over the wall to some old school VP of sales type
| people to pitch it in whatever way maximizes their commission
| checks.
|
| Azure feels like a finely honed enterprise sales org that
| understands what they need to do as underdogs in this market.
| adflux wrote:
| Azure the underdog?
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Google's business model is to have no customer service and have
| customers discard-able without notice when Google chooses. Why
| would a business want to do business to business with Google and
| actually pay them at this point? They do 'free' sort of well but
| they are a terrible option for dependable partner whether you pay
| them or not.
| janosett wrote:
| I was involved in a mid-sized software company migrating from
| AWS to GCP. My experience was that the GCP team was very hands
| on, and that enterprise support was very responsive.
|
| The support isn't perfect, nor is the product -- but I would
| say the level of customer service for GCP can't be compared to
| other Google products.
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| maybe they are confused between Google & GCP
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Why did the company choose to migrate from AWS to GCP? Just
| curious.
| cbushko wrote:
| Not the original poster but we migrated to GCP because:
| 1) AWS was extremely expensive 2) Our GCP bill is
| about 1/3 of what AWS was 3) The Kubernetes
| offering is top notch 4) Google giving us credits
| and offering us consulting were the triggers that started
| us talking.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| Seems like k8s is a big seller for a lot of companies. We
| don't use it currently on our team and the larger company
| is whole-sale in on AWS I'm not sure they'd ever be able
| to make the switch.
|
| Always like to see why people make these big changes
| though, thanks!
| cbushko wrote:
| I spent over a year doing a full migration from AWS EC2 +
| ECS instances to GCP + docker + kubernetes. It was a huge
| task that has paid off very well. 1)
| Costs per customer are lower because you can fit more
| containers per VM due to kubernetes doing the scheduling
| for you. Customers also include developer environments.
| 2) The number of deploys is way up because there is a
| simple and established pattern that everyone follows.
| 3) The speed of creating new services has increased
| because of the established patterns with containers,
| kubernetes resources, and deploys. Thinks days vs weeks
| to get something running. 4) The number of Ops
| issues are lower because kubernetes handles so many
| things for you. For example, if a deploy is incorrect for
| some reason, the old service is sitting there running. No
| outage = no escalation = everyone sleeps at night.
|
| Even if I was a tiny startup, I would still recommend
| using Kubernetes. The patterns, tooling and insight that
| Kubernetes gives you will save you TIME. The time saved
| is worth more than the tiny cost of a 3 node Kubernetes
| cluster. That is time you can use to develop your product
| and sell it vs time spent ftp'ing binaries to your
| Digital Ocean instance. :)
| jrockway wrote:
| I know you're only picking on Digital Ocean incidentally
| here, but their managed Kubernetes offering is Pretty
| Okay. I use it for my personal stuff and it's pretty much
| everything I expect from a managed Kubernetes offering.
|
| Just don't use EKS. That is managed Kubernetes in the
| checkbox marketing sense only.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| What makes GCP's Kubernetes offering better than the
| competition?
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Anecdotally we had great experience with GCP support.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| GCP Support is not free though.
| colde wrote:
| Neither is AWS Support. But they do have much lower priced
| offers though.
| fnord77 wrote:
| google's propensity for abruptly cancelling products seems like
| a substantial business risk, too. GCP revenue has been
| declining, so...
|
| edit: revenue GROWTH is declining
| jsnell wrote:
| That is not even remotely true. In the latest earnings,
| Google Cloud revenue grew by 46% year on year, and they said
| GCP specifically grew faster than Cloud as a whole.
| fnord77 wrote:
| sorry, meant to say revenue GROWTH has been declining.
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2020/07/31/probeat-slowing-aws-
| micro...
| konne88 wrote:
| Wouldn't Google have a very long history of business to
| business from their advertising platform?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Some of the GCP stuff works really well, whereas the AWS
| equivalent feels like a janky afterthought. Looking at you,
| EKS.
| make3 wrote:
| I think this sorts of makes sense for free services like
| Search, Gmail and Youtube, where each "client" (user) only
| gives them a tiny amount of revenue.
|
| This makes very little sense for Cloud Computing where each one
| your clients gives you large amounts of cash. Maybe they are
| too used to the first scenario.
| avery42 wrote:
| From GCP docs [0]: Effect of ToS violations
| Google-wide disabled account In some cases a
| Google-wide account (which covers access to a variety of Google
| products like Google Photos, Google Play, Google Drive, and
| GCP) will be disabled for violations of a Google ToS, egregious
| policy violations, or as required by law. Owners of disabled
| Google accounts will not be able to access their Google Cloud
| resources until the account is reinstated. If an account is
| disabled, a notification is sent to the secondary email address
| provided during the signup process, if available. If a phone
| number is available, the user is notified via text message. The
| notification includes a link for appeal and recovery, where
| applicable. In order to regain access to their GCP
| resources, owners of disabled Google accounts will need to
| contact Google support and have their account re-enabled.
| To minimize the effect of an account being disabled on Google
| Cloud resources, we recommend that you add more than one owner
| to all resources. As long as there is at least one active
| owner, GCP resources will not be suspended due to the one of
| the owners being disabled.
|
| Given the Google account horror stories that pop up every few
| months, seems risky if you're solo/only have one GCP owner.
|
| [0]: https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/project-
| suspe...
| drstewart wrote:
| > To minimize the effect of an account being disabled on
| Google Cloud resources, we recommend that you add more than
| one owner to all resources. As long as there is at least one
| active owner, GCP resources will not be suspended due to the
| one of the owners being disabled.
|
| When even Google themselves is recommending gaming their
| system since they can't guarantee it won't screw you over,
| that should be a warning sign.
| firloop wrote:
| Google will suspend entire accounts even if you have more
| than one owner.
|
| A few years back, our business credit card was somehow stolen
| and used to buy Google Adwords. We disputed the charge with
| our bank. A day or two later, at 4am local time, our GCP
| account was suspended for fraud (presumably because the same,
| stolen, card was attached to that account). All instances
| were stopped and our service was brought to a halt.
|
| We couldn't contact Google Cloud support because our account
| was suspended. We had to go through our network to get our
| account re-instated. Pretty awful way to start our morning,
| to say the least.
| notyourday wrote:
| That's why one should not use GCP for _anything_
| jrockway wrote:
| AWS doesn't suspend your account if you chargeback your
| AWS charges?
|
| Hold on while I go mine myself a ton of crypto coins.
| notyourday wrote:
| AWS does not suspend your AWS account if there's an issue
| with you Amazon account. AWS reps are contactable and
| dare I say it _capable of escalating and resolving
| issues_.
|
| The idea that someone could use a stolen credit card
| associated with an account, buy something on some Google
| service, have a chargeback processed as fraud and that
| would trigger Google's suspension of services on GCP is
| absurd.
| meepmorp wrote:
| What happened once the account was reinstated and
| everything was up again? The customer service obviously
| sucked; did they acknowledge that and try to make it right?
| theginger wrote:
| On the link above there is a separate section for billing
| account suspensions and it seems to work how you described.
|
| You can fairly easily swap billing accounts a project is
| using if you still have an organisation admin account that
| isn't suspended. I saw this risk coming at a previous
| company and tried to get them to treat billing accounts
| like any other important resource and go for redundancy,
| but the director could not see the value and our Google
| account manager denied the risk existed, luckily they have
| been more fortunate and this has not happened to them yet,
| although it did come close once with some issues with the
| payments.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| The overly commercial approach by the GCP rep is so short sighted
| but not uncommon.
|
| I recently worked on a project which had a potential vendor spend
| in the millions if not tens of millions when it went to
| production and scaled.
|
| Without exception, all of the vendors we spoke with early doors
| were horrible. Only interested in qualifying the size of the
| opportunity and when it would sign, not giving us access to the
| right people and playing horrible politics with our client.
|
| I won't list them all, but the worst of the bunch was Snowflake.
| They were a nightmare and completely shot themselves in the foot.
|
| If these vendors would have just helped like a partner with even
| a medium term focus, any one of them could have signed an
| enormous deal within a year.
|
| Instead, we ended up going open source and AWS native, just
| because they are so much easier to deal with than many other
| vendors.
|
| Having ran an AWS partner and seen them up close hundreds of
| times, I agree they are generally very nice and easy to deal
| with. I did see a recent cultural change when I had a problem in
| my own startup, but suspect they are still nice to the big boys.
| mr_toad wrote:
| The only reason that I can think of as to why you would want to
| talk to a sales rep (because you don't actually need to to use
| cloud services) is to try and wrangle some sort of discount.
|
| But the sales rep knows that their job isn't strictly needed,
| because the customer can sign up and use services without
| talking to anyone. They only exist to upsell services.
|
| There's almost no intersection between what a customer wants
| and what the salesperson provides, so why wouldn't it be a bad
| experience for everyone?
| te_chris wrote:
| This feels like they've been lead astray. They should be talking
| to Google Cloud for Startups, not the numptys in GCP's accounts
| dept.
| Kassius509 wrote:
| dendron looks slick. not personally an early adopter when it
| comes to note taking apps, but might try this out.
| dpweb wrote:
| Enterprise Technology Sales and Technology are two entirely
| different worlds
| blackoil wrote:
| With AWS you can be confident that when you need help at anytime
| you can get one phone a person who knows his shit.
|
| Also another interesting thing with AWS, there representative
| give you honest suggestion on how to reduce your bill.
| streblo wrote:
| I've used GCP to great success (with some speedbumps) at 3
| companies I've worked for (small and large) over the last 5-6
| years. I have a lot of learnings from the experiences to pass on,
| and one of the key ones is this: work with a reseller.
|
| If you've lurked on HN over the past decade you'll have seen tons
| of stories about how bad Google's customer support is. I don't
| think GCP's support is anywhere near as terrible as it is for
| Google's consumer products, but it does have a lot of room for
| improvement. If you work with a reseller, you'll get much much
| better results.
|
| There are several GCP resellers that are really good and
| knowledgeable, and often are staffed by former Googlers that
| worked on GCP. The very first thing you should do if you've
| chosen GCP is to find one.
| dataminded wrote:
| This feels like working really hard to solve a problem that
| isn't yours. Why not just get your services from a company that
| will support you? Why is GCP worth doing this for?
| streblo wrote:
| For what it's worth, it doesn't involve really hard work, and
| it costs nothing. Google pays the reseller, the cost to the
| 'resellee' is $0.
| enumjorge wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. What I don't understand is why GCP can't
| get customer support right but resellers can. You'd think
| Google would have more resources than a reseller to provide
| better service. Is it the size of the company? Company culture?
| mamon wrote:
| Pretty basic question: the author states in the very beginning:
| "I used to work at AWS". Is it possible that things went smoothly
| for him, because they still remembered him, and prioritized his
| requests because of personal relationship?
| chromatin wrote:
| > told rep about infrastructure we were thinking of using but
| they needed a dollar monthly amount since they were in sales and
| didn't have an understanding of the infrastructure
|
| I am in computational genomics and this was exactly my experience
| with Google as well.
| smithcoin wrote:
| It's not much better if you end up being a GCP customer.
|
| My company has gone through 4 reps in 3 years. Every time we get
| a new GCP rep they just want to talk to us about "expanding our
| use of GCP offerings". The only thing they want to talk about is
| starting to use BigQuery - not my business at all.
|
| I signed up for a Google Cloud Security summit, and afterwards a
| sales rep reached out me. It was obvious from the start they had
| no idea I was a gsuite or GCP customer. They then directed me to
| a NEW account manager (#4) even though I had been working with a
| different one. I had worked with the prior account rep going over
| our architecture to make sure everything was kosher (sustained
| use discounts etc). I even made them a schematic of our
| architecture on GCP at their request. Once I provided that to
| them I was met with radio silence.
|
| It's really insulting, and to me obvious they don't care about my
| company at all. We're looking at other options.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this post leads to me getting
| an email from another rep "Wanting to start over and doing things
| right", which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how
| can I use BigQuery.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| I'd say your experience isn't unique to google. I think at some
| point we are going to hit a place where people realize the
| convenience of the cloud doesn't outweigh the additional cost
| of having a mostly predatory business partner.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _the convenience of the cloud doesn 't outweigh the
| additional cost of having a mostly predatory business
| partner_
|
| Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune on
| Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a comparable
| company would be spending a LOT more on cloud billing.
| mcny wrote:
| > Back in the dotcom days companies would spend a fortune
| on Sun kit but I bet when averaged out over time a
| comparable company would be spending a LOT more on cloud
| billing.
|
| I would like to learn more about this. I'd have thought
| costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is the
| cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly going up?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent?
|
| You always can drive cost concessions from sales,
| especially for base workloads where you have time
| flexibility.
|
| For a big company, cloud rarely saves money for many
| categories of expense. In a normal market, it is almost
| always faster time to market to rent, and always cheaper
| TCO to own.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > When was the last time a landlord reduced your rent?
|
| This is a different market and one which is ultimately
| constrained by the availability of land. Notably, cloud
| prices do fall especially relative to the compute power.
| Specifically I remember when Fargate moved to firecracker
| and prices fell by like 40% or something similarly
| considerable.
|
| Maybe managing your own internal cloud is indeed cheaper
| (especially if you don't account for support or
| maintenance!), but arguing that cloud prices don't
| decrease or making some housing analogy seems like poor
| reasoning.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Maybe cars or trucks are a better example. The ROI of
| buying, leasing or renting a vehicle varies and the
| optimal answer depends on the scenario!
|
| It's always better for you as a person to rent box truck
| to move. If you're a company that needs a truck 3-5 times
| a month, there's a probability that leasing may make more
| sense.
|
| I'd say that businesses that suck at managing on-prem
| will not magically get competent in a public cloud.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _I would like to learn more about this. I 'd have thought
| costs should go down over time. Are we doing more or is
| the cost per unit (not sure what that means) is truly
| going up?_
|
| I think a number of factors add up over a 3-5 year
| timeline (obviously this will be more or less true for
| different organisations). There is the way the cost
| scales for a given instance in the cloud - in the old
| days, for example, doubling the memory or doubling the
| CPUs didn't double the cost of the kit, but it does for
| clouds VMs.
|
| Another example is that the cloud bills you for
| everything, in the old days I could have a database
| server on a network and query it as much as I liked, the
| cost was fixed upfront for the lifetime of the hardware.
| Whereas it's very cheap to get started with a managed
| offering but e.g. BigQuery charges you for every query,
| Cloud Functions charge you per invocation, bandwidth is
| chargeable etc.
|
| Speaking of hardware, in the old days you could look at
| your hardware and say, actually, it's fine, we don't need
| to upgrade/replace it this year after all, and it will
| just keep running. Whereas in the cloud the payment is
| continuous (perhaps offset by the fact that it's easier
| to "give back" excess capacity).
|
| There will come a point at which the cost of DIY vs cloud
| will cross over, the question is whether you will reach
| that point, and if so, what you will do about it, since
| you may be well and truly locked in at that point.
| wegs wrote:
| I haven't found AWS to be predatory. Or Azure for that
| matter.
|
| GCE also isn't so much predatory as incompetent and
| apathetic. If a Google failure wipes out your startup, you're
| a statistic and it's okay.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Part of the beauty of it is that you don't realize it's
| happening. You just use more, and more, and more of their
| services...
| wegs wrote:
| No, I don't, and I advise other people not to. The
| baseline dozen-or-so services are awesome (EC2, RDS, S3,
| etc.).
|
| The massive number of newer services are propriety, often
| buggy, and poorly documented.
|
| I don't use any AWS services introduced past 2015 or so.
| cyral wrote:
| I've had the same experience with GCP account reps. They always
| go missing and someone new emails us about how they are taking
| over 6 months later. Every call we have had with them has not
| resulted in anything meaningful. Our biggest issue is how their
| "highly available" Cloud SQL goes down every couple months for
| maintenance, not how we can use BigQuery.
| ciguy wrote:
| I helped a major user of GCP migrate off the platform to AWS
| for this exact reason. Totally insane that they still do this
| when AWS has had a rock solid offering in the form of RDS for
| like 10 years now.
| byteofbits wrote:
| We're currently migrating to Spanner for a variety of reasons
| - but the mandatory downtime on their Postgres CloudSQL
| offering will be the part I miss the least.
|
| It's insane that even with all of their HA and failover
| turned on they take the whole cluster down for as long as
| they like every few months!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| One thing that customer obsession at an entire-
| organization-depth level does is encourage broad customer
| use awareness.
|
| To an engineer, things are things, because of how they
| architect and build them.
|
| To an engineer who understands a customer, things are
| things and all the things people actually use them for. Big
| difference.
|
| It also makes "Well, that customer is using it wrong" less
| of an exceptable engineering dodge.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers,
| right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I
| don't think we can conclude that the engineering team
| (rather than the product team) is the source of the
| deficiency?
| majormajor wrote:
| > Surely product makes these decisions, not engineers,
| right? I agree that customer empathy is important, but I
| don't think we can conclude that the engineering team
| (rather than the product team) is the source of the
| deficiency?
|
| I haven't worked inside AWS or GCP, but I've never seen
| product get _everything_ they want, especially around
| maintenance /downtime. If "less downtime" is on the
| roadmap but engineering is constantly pushing back
| "that'll be really really hard and take a long time and
| they're just using it wrong anyway," I can't imagine it
| getting done as quickly as at a place where the
| engineering team was also focused on customer
| satisfaction.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > that'll be really really hard and take a long time
|
| It probably is hard and intensive. Engineering shouldn't
| lie and promise that it will be easier. Product has to
| take that engineering estimate and determine whether to
| work uptime or some sexy feature (and sexy features
| usually win because of perverse incentives).
|
| Moreover, I have a hard time believing this for a couple
| reasons: first of all, I've scarcely met engineers who
| were opposed to improving product reliability,
| maintainability, etc. The portrait of Google engineers
| arguing that database services fundamentally shouldn't be
| HA (and customers are "using it wrong" for wanting HA
| DBs) is particularly incredulous. Secondly, I've never
| heard of an organization where engineering held political
| power over product decisions, _but I have_ worked in
| several places where product dictated engineering
| solutions. Businesses trust product more readily than
| engineering because the things that engineering is always
| petitioning for are abstract and "costly" (deferring
| some immediate profit for reduced costs in the long run)
| while the things product wants are usually tangible and
| profitable.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| WAIT. Be careful. That is a super expensive product with a
| high likelyhood of lockin. It doesn't support all SQL
| features. Also! I run hundreds of GCP databases and never
| ran into: "but the mandatory downtime on their Postgres
| CloudSQL", maybe it is only Postgres?
| Axsuul wrote:
| Same here. I have sent my GCP rep 5-10 follow up emails by
| now and _still_ no response. It really feels like I have no
| one to talk to over there and I 'm spending thousands per
| month.
| milesward wrote:
| Hit me, more than happy to make fun of the salient GCP rep
| for you in a way they _really_ won 't like :)
| trulyme wrote:
| Curious what your approach would be?
|
| That said, this is not some poor rep's problem. This is a
| problem of Google culture and one that will be very
| difficult to fix. They simple don't care much about their
| customers and never needed to.
| avipars wrote:
| These guys must be commission based
| jtdev wrote:
| This seems to summarize my experience with software sales
| processes and interactions in general. I'm hopeful that
| software sales culture is beginning to evolve into something
| other than the pack of hyenas on a carcass that it is today. I
| personally have resorted to rejecting any and all conversations
| with software sales people unless I can dictate the direction
| of the conversation.
| manigandham wrote:
| Same terrible experience here with GCP sales and support, but
| the other options aren't much better. The reality is that
| unless you are in the 7 figure range, you don't get serious
| attention. I'm still surprised why sales is so dysfunctional
| but billions of quarterly profit means there's little need to
| change.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I dunno, I spend $3 monthly with AWS, but when I click the
| support button I'm talking to a real person pretty much
| immediately.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| you only get billing/account support unless you have
| subscription, starting at 150 US$ month
| Androider wrote:
| That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some
| really general and technical questions of AWS support and
| always received a helpful reply without a paid support
| plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is
| better.
|
| In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases,
| they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have
| even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly.
|
| Our other experience is with paid Azure support, which
| did little else than direct us to the (not related to the
| question) docs. They also had a really hard time
| understanding our technical questions about specific
| APIs. To their credit, they did eventually escalate to
| the PM of the service in question.
|
| In general, the team responsible for the service really
| must be able to help out with support requests. In AWS
| this is definitely the case, in Azure as well but there's
| a bit of gatekeeping. Does developers and PMs in GCP
| participate in support?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Microsoft support is always useless in that way and the
| TAMs are pretty powerless. I hired an intern just to
| contest the hours to effectively cut our (large) premier
| bill 70-80%.
|
| Their model was fault-based, and a "bug" gets billed to
| the support group. So the game was always for MS to avoid
| assignment for non Sev-A cases, and our game was to find
| a product defect for anything.
| [deleted]
| random5634 wrote:
| Huh? Please look at the actual AWS page:
| https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/
|
| Developer support $29/month, and business support is $100
| (both go up if you spend more).
|
| I paid for business support. You get
|
| 24x7 phone, email, and chat access to Cloud Support
| Engineers
|
| Unlimited cases / unlimited contacts (IAM supported)
|
| This is for $100/MONTH!! That is the deal of the century.
|
| And they are ridiculously helpful.
|
| I don't understand this - AWS must be losing money at
| least on support side, though they obviously get happy
| customers (myself included).
|
| And even at $150 this would be great.
|
| I had a client on gsuite with google 8 years ago - we
| COULD NOT get anyone to help with some weird admin state
| flow issue - it just was not possible to talk to a human
| being for ANY amount of money.
| tron27 wrote:
| The price starts to go up steeply once you hit the % of
| monthly spend.
|
| I'd guess they don't get many resource intensive support
| queries from the < $10k a month customers (and at that
| level you probably don't get the A team support)
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| I suspect that AWS is 'losing money' on this in the same
| way that Apple are 'losing money' on their high Street
| retail shops.
|
| Working at a place with AWS enterprise support by
| contrast, for the second occasion, I would suggest that
| many of the places paying $15kpm don't cost that to
| support.
| [deleted]
| wegs wrote:
| Yeah. AWS is probably "losing" tens of dollars per month
| hosting my personal account. They've made a few million
| dollars in sales as a result. I've personally started
| several projects on top of AWS which spend that much now.
| That started with the free tier back when AWS was young.
|
| Google has treated me so badly so many times now on my
| personal account (as well as on business accounts, for
| that matter) in so many different ways that they've,
| conversely, lost MANY million dollars in business sales.
| It's hard to even count; a lot of people ask me for
| advise on decisions, and whenever someone even thinks
| about using Google Cloud in a business setting....
|
| This is not a hole I see Google getting out of, except by
| eventually shutting down the Google cloud. Too many
| people have had too many bad experiences, and reputations
| take a long time to recover.
|
| And the failures just keep on piling up.
|
| Google is great for personal use, but I think they're
| diversifying in all the wrong directions. They're not
| structured for success there.
| porker wrote:
| And yet Google Cloud has some great features that AFAIK
| AWS still hasn't, presumably due to different priorities.
|
| Like regional disks [1] or live migration of compute
| between hosts if problems are detected with the host.
|
| 1. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks#repds
| Aeolun wrote:
| > live migration of compute between hosts
|
| When would you ever want to rely on this? Seems to me
| like you should have two hosts in the first place.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| GCP loses more than a billion a quarter: https://www.google.c
| om/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/googl...
| jannes wrote:
| Non-AMP link: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/google-
| cloud-lost-5-6b-in-...
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Isn't it neat how if you Google something and share the
| link you find, you end up directing people to Google's
| AMP service!
| nucleardog wrote:
| AWS has been good for us.
|
| Since at least when we started spending about $100k/yr we've
| had a dedicated account rep we can contact at any time. They
| also get in touch to schedule a check-in every few months.
|
| They've been genuinely helpful in several situations and have
| scheduled meetings with various teams around AWS (like,
| actual engineers) to get us answers to questions, support,
| and guidance. We've been put in touch with team leads and
| engineers working on beta features when we tried to use them
| and had issues to report.
|
| Obviously this is all a sales tactic: if we have questions
| about X, putting us in touch with experts in X makes it more
| likely we'll successfully implement it and then pay them to
| use it. But it's the kind of sales we're getting value from,
| not just blindly pushing us to pay them more money.
|
| We don't pay for any support package or anything.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Somehow your comment reminded me how Google talks go at GDC and
| similar game development conferences.
|
| While everyone else is talking about game engines, design and
| programming techniques, Google's talks are mostly around their
| cloud offerings, and customer telemetry.
| milesward wrote:
| I'm not a rep, and I don't know anything about your use, but
| I'm 100% ready to learn about it and see if any of the stuff I
| know can be helpful to you and your team. Sorry this has been
| your ride to-date :( miles@sada.com
| franczesko wrote:
| I mentioned this a couple of times, but Google's CS is non-
| existent. That's #1 issue holding me back from trying any of
| GCP offerings.
| verst wrote:
| You need to see GCP as its own brand with its own support
| team and policies (though they are impacted by some shared
| technical infrastructure and associated policies). I cannot
| say whether these are good or bad, only that they are
| distinct for GCP.
|
| Experiences with support or lack of support concerning other
| Google product areas and divisions, especially those not
| designed for businesses really don't apply if you know how
| Google operates.
|
| I don't use GCP in a personal capacity at this time and I
| work for a competitor (though am certainly not speaking on
| behalf of the competitor).
| numbsafari wrote:
| I use a lot of Google products. All of them I pay for,
| except search.
|
| It is true there are individuals that shine, but across the
| board, Google sucks at support. It starts at the top with
| what kind of company they want to be, and goes from there.
|
| They do not like humans.
| rodgerd wrote:
| It's interesting that you've had that experience - it mirrors
| mine in dealing with Oracle reps: no engagement, no interest,
| very high turnover, always under pressure to sell, sell, sell.
| I wonder if appointing someone ex-Oracle to head GCP has
| carried that culture over.
| D-Nice wrote:
| Sigh, I remember a similar experience. It was a third-party rep
| they pushed us to, but we would be asking for ways to re-
| architect one thing we already had setup on AWS, and all they
| would do is just try and upsell us on random offerings that
| clearly did not resolve our specific needs.
|
| Some European-based customer apparently had a requirement if we
| engaged with them, that our service be offered via an
| acceptable vendor such as GCP, for some reason AWS apparently
| wasn't, but it was such a nightmare to even prod about an
| architecture that would have feature-parity with AWS, it wasn't
| even worth it. Also as an fyi, I'm no AWS fanboy, I don't use
| it in any of my own projects to avoid vendor lock-in this
| company suffered from.
| numbsafari wrote:
| This has also been my experience.
|
| When we first launched on GCP, there was no question that it
| was the way to go (frankly, because of BigQuery). Working with
| AWS, when we launched, was going to cost us significantly more
| up-front, before we had even brought on our first customer.
|
| Fast forward 5 years... AWS has closed the gap in every way
| that matters. I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more
| than Amazon's, but I don't encourage folks to use GCP the way
| that I used to.
|
| Just the opposite. In 2021, no questions asked, it's either AWS
| for general compute, or something more targeted if your
| business doesn't need it.
|
| Until you get to the point where your bill is larger than a
| dozen engineering salaries, you won't get any respect from
| these people.
| dastbe wrote:
| (I work at AWS)
|
| > I still, frankly, trust Google's Security more than
| Amazon's
|
| If you have the time, could you expand on this? While I'm not
| directly involved in security at AWS, I'd be down to forward
| your thoughts to people who do.
| manigandham wrote:
| One thing that GCP is far better at is account setup.
| Having everything nested under a single gsuite organization
| with folders and projects and IAM flowing through is
| incredibly easy to work with and makes permissions simpler
| to understand. AWS has a long ways to go in this regard.
| f430 wrote:
| I disagree. Once you learn IAM and able to segregate
| users into groups each with its own layer of security,
| then it is good enough.
|
| Often the UI, and docs make it seem like everything is
| all over the place but AWS feels like lego with some
| pieces tucked away. That is where I think AWS can be
| improved upon with a better documentation UI and
| discoverability.
|
| I do have to commend Google on Flutter + Firebase +
| Firebase Functions. I think if Amplify focused on serving
| Flutter users more it could pull me away from Google
| altogether.
|
| Unfortunately, Google has done a fantastic job with
| making Flutter integrate with Firebase through Android
| Studio and there really is no product from AWS that
| matches its developer friendliness and low learning
| curve. This makes it very easy to switch.
|
| I guess it is somewhat of a threat because the Firebase
| Cloud Functions also offer something of a counter to AWS
| Lambda as much as I love using it with API Gateway.
| Fordec wrote:
| IAM shouldn't be a thing to learn. It's account
| management, default and easy to access options should be
| sane enough for most people to use. At big companies,
| sure someone has it as a dedicated part of their job
| description. But if you're in the majority of smaller
| companies, ones maybe that's just doing e-commerce and
| tech isn't their core skill set, account settings should
| be near invisible and still be trustworthy. It's not the
| Slacks of the world that have an issue with this, but the
| long tail of the world we now live in that software has
| eaten and companies are just scrambling to exist in it.
| Flutter integration is not in the list of concerns of
| this long tail.
|
| And telling them to "just learn it" isn't the customer
| focused mindset, it's the engineering one.
| jrockway wrote:
| I came from an AWS background to my current company's GCP
| setup and was very confused at how IAM worked on GCP for
| a long time. Now that I know the system, though, I agree
| with you. It really makes a ton of sense and works really
| well.
|
| The biggest problem I have with GCP is that something
| will say "you need the foo.bar.baz permission", and when
| I go to the IAM page to give that to myself... there is
| nothing in the search results for "foo", "bar", or "baz".
| Instead, I have to guess the "friendly name" for the
| permission.
| silviogutierrez wrote:
| I can totally relate. The amount of times I've spent
| scouring the docs for the "machine name" to put into
| TerraForm, or vice versa, to do through the UI...
| lima wrote:
| Thoughtful features like supporting UEFI Secure Boot with
| vTPM attestation. This allows building setups where even a
| full GCP account compromise can be mitigated.
|
| Integration with our org GSuite (this alone is a massive
| plus).
| zomglings wrote:
| I used to work at Google on Cloud, and am now an AWS
| customer. Have used both clouds extensively.
|
| My comments are mostly backed up by my experience at
| startups and are not colored by my experience at Google
| (too different a beast).
|
| GCP is great for teams that are also using GSuite because
| you can set permissions at the level of a Google Group and
| have them propagate to individual members. You can, of
| course, also create groups in AWS but they don't have the
| same semantics of Google Groups and don't cover the wide
| range of use cases that Google Groups does.
|
| The AWS scopes -> policies -> roles -> resources chain of
| abstractions is less natural conceptually than GCP's GSuite
| accounts + service accounts with attached scopes per
| project.
|
| Also the fact that each managed service (GCE, GKE, Cloud
| Builder) has its own service account that you can attach
| scopes to is really nice. GCP service accounts just feel
| more discoverable than AWS IAM roles - I think it's because
| the number of AWS pre-built roles is so overwhelming.
|
| Just some thoughts off the top of my head.
| numbsafari wrote:
| I think all of these replies so far capture my thinking.
| However, I think the simplicity of the GCP IAM model is
| what I will miss most going back to AWS.
|
| I'm sure they exist, but over the last dozen or so years
| I've worked with public cloud offerings across 5 or 6
| industries and domains, I haven't found a use case that
| can't be easily implemented in the simpler GCP model.
|
| AWS support is really nice. That I miss.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "I even made them a schematic of our architecture on GCP at
| their request."
|
| >> Hahah. They did that to me too. I doubt they even looked at
| it. It was a fun homework assignment though.
|
| "Once I provided that to them I was met with radio silence."
|
| >> Hahaha. Same here.
|
| "which will inevitably devolve into the discussion of how can I
| use BigQuery"
|
| >> This is a trap. Once you are on BQ there is no sane way off.
| milesward wrote:
| As the guy who designed the architecture diagramming system,
| mostly to help folks keep straight what they're trying to
| help folks build, I hate that it's being used as a
| qualification/filter/etc. Sorry yo.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Honestly given how good BigQuery is, I don't blame the sales
| rep for keeping their eye on their wallet. I know a lot of
| companies who are primarily AWS but use Google Cloud
| exclusively for BigQuery analysis.
|
| (no, I'm not and have never been a Google employee)
| dominotw wrote:
| why not just use snowflake though if they aren't on gcp
| already?
| mr_toad wrote:
| Why use Snowflake over BigQuery?
| dehrmann wrote:
| I've used both GCP and AWS at multiple companies and
| personally, and my take is that a handful of important GCP
| products are significantly better than their AWS counterparts
| (Bigquery, Bigtable, Spanner, GKE), and a lot are just OK,
| usually slightly behind AWS in terms of features. If one of
| those products that's significantly better could be a
| differentiator for you, GCP is the better choice.
| 0df8dkdf wrote:
| Google Cloud, AWS, MS Auzra are made to lock you into their
| system. I guess if fine if you are ok with it and you don't
| have an experienced systemadmin/dev op on hand.
|
| There are plenty of cloud agnostic platform out there that does
| VPS, load balancers. digital ocean, linode, etc.
|
| If you want to be green there is also the Advania they use
| geothermal energy. And since it is in iceland better data
| protection policy than US companies.
|
| I'm not affiliated with any one of them, it is just from year
| of cloud provider hopping.
| antb123 wrote:
| same and ended up with hetzner.. great inexpensive service.
|
| Only thing I miss is firewalls for cloud (they have it for
| dedicated).
| cougarcan wrote:
| Where is Azure here?
| yawniek wrote:
| personal opinion: absolute pain. everything is very complicated
| due to being connected to AAD and other services. lots of
| features but most of them useless. the legacy that they dragged
| along really is hindering.
| 300bps wrote:
| Azure has amazing free benefits for startup. I formerly went
| through their Bizspark program which gave me a huge credit that
| let me have multiple VMs, relational database servers, etc for
| free FOR THREE YEARS.
|
| I'm pretty tied to AWS at this point because that's who my
| employer uses but Azure was really great and their startup
| benefits were very generous.
|
| https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/
| [deleted]
| geogra4 wrote:
| Not really startup friendly. Their market is almost exclusively
| the enterprise.
|
| "Oh you have office365 and adfs? just move your monolithic
| enterprise java app to azure and save!"
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| I had to evaluate the big 3 for a company I worked at a few
| years ago. We were a G-Suite shop, so GCP was already in the
| running, but folks were also interested in the Office 365
| option (We still used AD for local auth and had file servers
| etc, so not fully Chromebook style G-Suite), so I decided to
| start with Azure as it was the one I had the least experience
| with.
|
| Long story short, on my first day I couldn't get the console to
| log me out, even after explicitly logging out, etc. I thought I
| was going crazy or just doing something wrong, but I absolutely
| could not get Azure to log me out. I had to create a support
| ticket and it turned into an incident. It was honestly all a
| bit ridiculous. I wasn't going to veto Azure purely on that,
| though it obviously was not going in Azure's favor, I did have
| to explain my experience and it was effectively banned based on
| that experience, because we were a small/medium business
| subject to HIPAA and more senior folks didn't like the idea of
| us going bankrupt due to HIPAA violations from our data getting
| exfiltrated.
|
| It ended up being a pretty straight forward choice between GCP
| and AWS. GCP was already easy for us, because of G-Suite, but
| also our primary product encapsulated a TensorFlow CV ML model
| and TPU training was very appealing from both a cost and speed
| perspective.
| ngokevin wrote:
| I don't know, but I've tried it briefly and it felt pretty dog.
| In terms of UI, ease of use, quality of software. I don't feel
| in general MSFT is as strong engineering-wise either. In terms
| of customer service, the first email you get from signing up is
| from an AI, so there's that.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Expensive and not at all startup friendly. Most startups are
| doing containers or serverless and Azure makes you pay for
| straying away from their PaaS business model.
|
| Not to mention the way Azure handles networking and security is
| atrocious, bolted on to Active Directory.
|
| I don't know GCP at all, but I do know that AWS Serverless is
| brain-dead simple to implement and very low-cost even when you
| begin to scale.
| radium3d wrote:
| I'm curious, has anyone gone with Linode VPS or similar instead
| of the big two? How was that experience?
| jayp wrote:
| Hi Kevin ;-)
|
| I am founder of another YC backed company. We based our startup
| on GCP infra. They have great tech (for the most part) but I
| regret it so deeply for two reasons:
|
| Support or desire to help customers is non-existent. For any
| questions, they want us to upgrade to paid support and pay them
| at least 10% more every month for that (we ask like 1-2 questions
| a year). What? We are already paying you thousands of dollars
| every month! I get included support for all my software
| subscriptions - so this is my biggest beef. Also, when they do
| help, they keep passing you around from team to team and dont
| resolve issues as well I'd like. It is just not a company I can
| love as a customer.
|
| Their status dashboard is a joke. They dont even report minor
| outages, when they do, they start after a huge delay and update
| very slowly. And worst of all - when it only affects a single
| zone or a single region, they remove it from historic reports so
| everything looks green/great.
|
| I've experienced both these times multiple times.
|
| I have to assume AWS is better.
| steren wrote:
| > I have to assume AWS is better.
|
| Did you know that the grass is always greener on the other
| side?
| kevinslin wrote:
| Appreciate the additional insight. I really wanted to like GCP
| - they have good people and good tech.
|
| This whole onboarding felt like some caricature of what I
| thought were exaggerated stories of how bad the support was.
| sitharus wrote:
| Eh. It's similar in AWS-land.
|
| Basic business hours support is $29/month or 3% of your service
| spend, whichever is greater. 24/7 is $100/mo or 10%, which also
| includes outage assistance.
|
| I've also worked for places with enterprise support ($15,000/mo
| or 10%) but of you're bringing in millions per month it's
| definitely worth it.
|
| The AWS personal health dashboard is also pretty reliable. The
| public status page is the source of many jokes.
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| I don't know about Google's support offerings. But when I
| worked for a startup that was on AWS, here's what we'd do:
|
| 1.) Try to figure things out ourselves 2.) If we can't figure
| it out, subscribe to AWS Support. 3.) Get question answered
| and then turn off the support plan.
|
| You'll have your support plan for the rest of the month and
| pay a prorated amount for the days during which you had
| support. It's quick and cheap.
| te_chris wrote:
| You can do the same with GCP
| dmlittle wrote:
| While you do pay for AWS support, I must say that in my
| experience AWS support is pretty top notch. I don't
| particularly like the (somewhat) recent changes where the
| priority of your ticket is based on your support plan but I'm
| guessing it's because everyone always chose "critical" when
| making small support ticket.
| colde wrote:
| In my experience with AWS support, it's a major difference
| on whether you are asking EC 2 questions or some of the
| lesser used service questions.
|
| For Media services, the supporter will almost always need
| to coordinate with an internal team, which there is no
| visibility over, and then it becomes a game of telephone to
| make the supporter relay the information in a way the
| internal team understands. I've had the same thing happen
| with peering/networking related questions.
|
| For EC 2, VPC, DynamoDB kinda questions, they are indeed
| pretty good.
| dmlittle wrote:
| I guess that makes sense. The quality of their support is
| probably directly correlated to the level of internal
| tooling to help diagnose issues. For more popular/older
| services that tooling is probably better.
| jayp wrote:
| Thanks for adding the AWS perspective.
|
| I guess grass is not greener on the other side. Oligopolies
| for the loss.
| antoncohen wrote:
| You can get GCP support for as little as $100/month. AWS
| charges for support too.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/support
| woodgrainz wrote:
| "AWS: reach out to dedicated YC email"
|
| How is this an apples-to-apples comparison at all? Very
| disingenuous. You have a special support tier for your YC
| company.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Nothing is stopping GCP from doing likewise but they don't.
| Thus for a YC startup AWS is ahead in terms of customer
| service.
| Yabood wrote:
| We've been using GCP for a couple of years now and have nothing
| but good things to say about it. We also used Azure and AWS
| before migrating to Google, and the whole GCP platform feels a
| lot more intuitive. Lacking in some areas, sure, but more than
| makes up for it in other areas like Kubernetes. We had to use
| support a handful of times for various issues ranging from
| technical to general billing questions to long term commitments,
| and all incidents were handled quickly and professionally.
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