Comment by morsecodist
2 years ago
> Picking AWS over Google Cloud
I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I have found is the lack of community resulting in fewer tutorials, difficulty finding experienced hires, and fewer third party tools. I recommend trying it. I'd love to get the user base to an even dozen.
The reasoning the author cites is that AWS has more responsive customer service and maybe I am missing out but it would never even occur to me to speak to someone from a cloud provider. They mention having "regular cadence meetings with our AWS account manager" and I am not sure what could be discussed. I must be doing simper stuff.
> "regular cadence meetings with our AWS account manager" and I am not sure what could be discusse.
As being on a number of those calls, its just a bunch of crap where they talk like a scripted bot reading from corporate buzzword bingo card over a slideshow. Their real intention is two fold. To sell you even more AWS complexity/services, and to provide "value" to their person of contact (which is person working in your company).
We're paying north of 500K per year in AWS support (which is a highway robbery), and in return you get a "team" of people supposedly dedicated to you, which sounds good in theory but you get a labirinth of irresponsiblity, stalling and frustration in reality.
So even when you want to reach out to that team you have to first to through L1 support which I'm sure will be replaced by bots soon (and no value will be lost) which is useful in 1 out of 10 cases. Then if you're not satisfied with L1's answer(s), then you try to escalate to your "dedicated" support team, then they schedule a call in three days time, or if that is around Friday, that means Monday etc.
Their goal is to stall so you figure and fix stuff on your own so they shield their own better quality teams. No wonder our top engineers just left all AWS communication and in cases where unavoidable they delegate this to junior people who still think they are getting something in return.
> We're paying north of 500K per year in AWS support (which is a highway robbery), and in return you get a "team" of people supposedly dedicated to you, which sounds good in theory but you get a labirinth of irresponsiblity, stalling and frustration in reality.
I’ve found a lot of the time the issues we run into are self-inflicted. When we call support for these, they have to reverse-engineer everything which takes time.
However when we can pinpoint the issue to AWS services, it has been really helpful to have them on the horn to confirm & help us come up with a fix/workaround. These issues come up more rarely, but are extremely frustrating. Support is almost mandated in these cases.
It’s worth mentioning that we operate at a scale where the support cost is a non-issue compared to overall engineering costs. There’s a balance, and we have an internal structure that catches most of the first type of issue nowadays.
What questions do you even ask?
In my experience all questions I've had for AWS were: 1. Their bugs, which won't be fixed in near future anyway. 2. Their transient failures, that will be fixed anyway soon.
So there's zero value in ever contacting AWS support.
This rings so true from experience it hurts.
This. This is the reality.
I am so tired of the support team having all the real metrics, especially in io and throttling, and not surfacing it to us somehow.
And cadence is really an opportunity for them to sell to you, the parent is completely right.
We are a reasonably large AWS customer and our account manager sends out regular emails with NDA information on what's coming up, we have regular meetings with them about things as wide ranging as database tuning and code development/deployment governance.
They often provide that consulting for free, and we know their biases. There's nothing hidden about the fact that they will push us to use AWS services.
On the other hand, they will also help us optimize those services and save money that is directly measurable.
GCP might have a better API and better "naming" of their services, but the breadth of AWS services, the incorporation of IAM across their services, governance and automation all makes it worth while.
Cloud has come a long way from "it's so easy to spin up a VM/container/lambda".
> There's nothing hidden about the fact that they will push us to use AWS services.
Our account team don't even do that. We use a lot of AWS anyway and they know it, so they're happy to help with competitor offerings and integrating with our existing stack. Their main push on us has been to not waste money.
When I was at AWS, I watched SAs get promoted for saving customers money all the time.
AWS wants happy customers to stick around for a long time, not one month of goosed income
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In a previous role I got all of these things from GCP – they ran training for us, gave us early access to some alpha/beta stage products (under NDA), we got direct onboarding from engineers on those, they gave us consulting level support on some things and offered much more of it than we took up.
Fwiw as a medium spend (250k to eventually grow into 1M+ year) GCP customer we had the same deal with product roadmaps shared up-front under NDA etc.
And never did I miss something in GCP that I could find in AWS. Not sure the breadth is adding much compared to a simpler product suite in GCP.
I don’t have as much experience with aws but I do hate gcp. The ui is slow and buggy. The way they want things to authenticate is half baked and only implemented in some libraries and it isn’t always clear what library supports it. The gcloud command line tool regularly just doesn’t work; it just hangs and never times out forcing you to kill it manually wondering if it did anything and you’ll mess something up running it again. The way they update client libraries by running code generation means there’s tons of commits that aren’t relevant to the library you’re actually using. Features are not available across all client libraries. Documentation contradicts itself or contradicts support recommendations. Core services like bigquery lack any emulator or Docker image to facilitate CI or testing without having to setup a separate project you have to pay for.
Oh, friend, you have not known UI pain until you've used portal.azure.com. That piece of junk requires actual page reloads to make any changes show up. That Refresh button is just like the close-door elevator button: it's there for you to blow off steam, but it for damn sure does not DO anything. I have boundless screenshots showing when their own UI actually pops up a dialog saying "ok, I did what you asked but it's not going to show up in the console for 10 minutes so check back later". If you forget to always reload the page, and accidentally click on something that it says exists but doesn't, you get the world's ugliest error message and only by squinting at it do you realize it's just the 404 page rendered as if the world has fallen over
I suspect the team that manages it was OKR-ed into using AJAX but come from a classic ASP background, so don't understand what all this "single page app" fad is all about and hope it blows over one day
Aws refactored their console to use modern wen spa and it is TERRIBLE.
It amazes me a company that makes that much money has such a crappy client.
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I do use azure a bit so I know what you mean. Googles ui is significantly more buggy in Firefox which I use. On chrome/edge it’s a bit better.
aws is even worse yet somehow people love them, maybe because they get to talk to a support "human" to hand-hold them through all the badness
Totally agree, GCP is far easier to work with and get things up and running for how my brain works compared to AWS. Also, GCP name stuff in a way that tells me what it does, AWS name things like a teenage boy trying to be cool.
That's completely opposite to my experience. Do you have any examples of AWS naming that you think is "teenage boy trying to be cool"? I am genuinely curious.
BigQuery - Athena
Pub/Sub - Kinesis
Cloud CDN - CloudFront
Cloud Domains - Route 53
...
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I have had the experience of an AWS account manager helping me by getting something fixed (working at a big client). But more commonly, I think the account manager’s job at AWS or any cloud or SAAS is to create a reality distortion field and distract you from how much they are charging you.
> I think the account manager’s job at AWS or any cloud or SAAS is to create a reality distortion field and distract you from how much they are charging you.
How do they do this jedi mind trick?
Giving discounts on the things that are more commodified, but digging in on areas that are harder to define and compare with competitors. And of course, evaluating your sophistication and lock-in to determine if they have to compete at all.
One way is to charge high prices from the get go, and then proactively contact you, and offer to help to reduce your bill by doing some cloud optimization magic ;)
Maybe your TAM is different, but our regularly do presentations about cost breakdown, future planning and possible reservations. There's nothing distracting there.
AWS enterprise support (basically first line support that you paid for) is actually really really good. they will look at your metrics/logs and share with you solid insights. anything more you can talk to a TAM who can then reach out to relevant engineering teams
I share your thoughts. It looks like an entire article endorsing AWS honestly
Heartily seconded. Also don't forget the docs: Google Cloud docs are generally fairly sane and often even useful, whereas my stomach churns whenever I have to dive into AWS's labyrinth of semi-outdated, nigh-unreadable crap.
To be fair there are lots of GCP docs, but I cannot say they are as good as AWS. Everything is CLI-based, some things are broken or hello-world-useless. Takes time to go through multiple duplicate articles to find anything decent. I have never had this issue with AWS.
GCP SDK docs must be mentioned separately as it's a bizarre auto-generated nonsense. Have you seen them? How can you even say that GCP docs are good after that?
very few things are cli only, most have multiple ways to do things. and they have separate guide reference sections that can easily be found. compared to aws where your best bet is to hope google indexed the right page for them.
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We're relatively small GCP users (low six figures) and have monthly cadence meetings with our Google account manager. They're very accommodating, and will help with contacts, events and marketing.
> I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud
I don't have a ton of Azure or cloud experience but I run an Unraid server locally which has a decent Docker gui.
Getting a docker container running in Azure is so complicated. I gave up after an hour of poking around.
Azure is a complete disaster, deserves its own garbage-category, and gives people PTSD. I don't think AWS/CGP should ever be compared to it at all.
Funnily enough, I have the opposite opinion.
AWS has "fun" features like the ability to just lose track of some resource and still be billed for it. It's in here... somewhere. Not sure which region or account. I'll find it one day.
GCP is made by Google, also known as children that forgot to take their ADHD medication. Any minute now they'll just casually announce that they're cancelling the cloud because they're bored of it.
Azure is the only one I've seen with a sane management interface, where you can actually see everything everywhere all at once. Search, filter, query-across-resources, etc... all work reasonably well.
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Oh I disagree - we migrated from azure to AWS, and running a container on Fargate is significantly more work than Azure Container Apps [0]. Container Apps was basically "here's a container, now go".
[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/products/container-apps
Heh, your comment almost echos the positive thing I was going to say, as well as highlighting half of why I loathe Azure with every fiber of my being
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-instances/... is the one I was going to plug, because coming from a kubernetes background it seems to damn near be the PodSpec and thus both expresses a lot of my needs and also is very familiar https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft....
Your link does seem to be a lot more "container, plus all the surrounding stuff" in line with the "apps" part, whereas mine more closely matches my actual experience of what you said: container, go
The "what the fucking hell is wrong with you people?" part is that their naming is just all over the place, and changes constantly, and is almost designed to be misleading in any sane conversation. I quite literally couldn't have guessed whether Container Apps was a prior name of Container Instances, a super set of it, subset, other? And one will observe that while I said Container Instances, and the URL says Container Instances, the ARM is Container Groups. Are they the same? different? old? who fucking knows. It's horrific
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GCP support is atrocious. I've worked at one of their largest clients and we literally had to get executives into the loop (on both sides) to get things done sometimes. Multiple times they broke some functionality we depended on (one time they fixed it weeks later except it was still broken) or gave us bad advice that cost a lot of money (which they at least refunded if we did all the paperwork to document it). It was so bad that my team viewed even contacting GCP as an impediment and distraction to actually solving a problem they caused.
I also worked at a smaller company using GCP. GCP refused to do a small quota increase (which AWS just does via a web form) unless I got on a call with my sales representative and listened to a 30 minute upsell pitch.
If you are big enough to have regular meetings with AWS you are big enough to have meetings with GCP.
I’ve had technicians at both GCP and Azure debug code and spend hours on developing services.
> I’ve had technicians at both GCP and Azure debug code and spend hours on developing services.
Almost every time Google pulled in a specialist engineer working on a service/product we had issues with it was very very clear the engineer had no desire to be on that call or to help us. In other words they'd get no benefit from helping us and it was taking away from things that would help their career at Google. Sometimes they didn't even show up to the first call and only did to the second after an escalation up the management chain.
> I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud
We started using Azure Container Apps (ACA) and it seems simple enough.
Create ACA, point to GitHub repo, it runs.
Push an update to GitHub and it redeploys.
Azure Container Apps (ACA) and AWS AppRunner are also heavily "inspired" by Google Cloud Run.
So?
Also much prefer GCP but gotta say their support is hot steaming **. I wasted so much time for absolutely nothing with them.
GCP's SDK and documentation is a mess compared to AWS. And looking at the source code I don't see how it can get better any time soon. AWS seems to have proper design in mind and uses less abstractions giving you freedom to build what you need. AWS CDK is great for IAC.
The only weird part I experienced with AWS is their SNS API. Maybe due to legacy reasons, but what a bizarre mess when you try doing it cross-account. This one is odd.
I have been trying GCP for a while and DevX was horrible. The only part that more-or-less works is CLI but the naming there is inconsistent and not as well-done as in AWS. But it's relative and subjective, so I guess someone likes it. I have experienced GCP official guides that broken, untested or utterly braindead hello-world-useless. And also they are numerous and spread so it takes time to find anything decent.
No dark mode is an extra punch. Seriously. Tried to make it myself with an extension but their page is Angular hell of millions embedded divs. No thank you.
And since you mentioned Cloud Run -- it takes 3 seconds to deploy a Lambda version in AWS and a minute or more for GCP Could Function.