It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.
As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not.
GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global.
Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
GCP’s use of folders makes way more sense.
GCP having global VPCs is also potentially a huge benefit if you want your users to hit servers that are physically close to them. On AWS you have to architect your own solution with global accelerator which becomes even more insane if you need to cross accounts, which you’ll probably have to do eventually because of the aforementioned insanity of AWS account/organization best practices.
There's a very large gap between "seems" and reality. GCP is a huge PITA. It's not even stable to use, as the console is constantly unresponsive and buggy, the UX is insane, finding documentation is like being trapped in hell.
Know how you find all the permissions a single user in GCP has? You have to make 9+ API calls, then filter/merge all the results. They finally added a web tool to try and "discover" the permissions for a user... you sit there and watch it spin while it madly calls backend APIs to try to figure it out. Permissions for a single user can be assigned to users, groups, orgs, projects, folders, resources, (and more I forget), and there's inheritance to make it more complex. It can take all day to track down every single place the permissions could be set for a single user in a single hierarchical organization, or where something is blocking some permission. The complexity increases as you have more GCP projects, folders, orgs. But, of course, if you don't do all this, GCP will fight you every step of the way.
Compare that to AWS, where you just click a user, and you see what's assigned to it. They engineered it specifically so it wouldn't be a pain in the ass.
> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
This was an issue in the early days, but it's well solved now with newer integrations/services. Follow their Well Architected Framework (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework...), ask customer support for advice, implement it. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the best description of the best information systems engineering practice in the world, and it's achievable by startups. It just takes a long time to read. If you want to become an excellent systems engineer/engineering manager/CTO/etc, this is your bible. (Note: you have to read the entire thing, especially the appendixes; you can't skim it like StackOverflow)
Similar to my experience with the two. We didn't have regular meetings with our GCP account manager, but they did help us and we had a technical support rep there we were in contact with sometimes. We rarely heard from anyone at AWS, and a friend had some horror stories of reporting security issues to AWS.
Architecturally I'd go with GCP in a heartbeat. Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role. Completely changed out business for almost everyone, vs Redshift which cost us a lot of money to learn that it sucked.
You could say I'm biased as I work at Google (but not on any of this), but for me it was definitely the other way around, I joined Google in part because of the experience of using GCP and migrating AWS workloads to in.
> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
What are these struggles? The product I work on uses AWS and we have ~5 accounts (I hear they used to be more TBF) but nowadays all the infrastructure is on one of them and the other are for some niche stuff (tech support?). I could see how going overboard with many accounts could be an issue, but I don't really see issues having everything on one account.
googlers in their infinite wisdom have built a startup ecosystem for gcp that assigns "startups" to entry level new hires who are scrambling to figure out how to be managers of accounts while learning how to talk to humans, because googlers are generally not used to interacting with humans, just code, and that is the result of the programmatic hiring/screening process. each newly hired 20-something is also assigned 3,000 gcp accounts to manage.
what is the engineering used to determine a weak startup from a growing company you ask? well....googlers again use random numbers not logic (human interaction avoidance firewall) to determine that and set the floor at $30M "publicly declared investment capital". so what happens when you the gcp architect consultant hired to help this successful startup productionalize their gcp infra but their last round was private? google tells the soon to be $100M success company they are not real yet.....so they go get their virtual cpu,ram,disk from aws who knows how to treat customers right by being able to talk to humans by hiring account managers who pick up the phone and invite you to lunch to talk about your successful startup growing on aws. googlers are the biggest risk factor to the far superior gcp infrastructure for any business, startup or fortune 10.
If you spend enough (or they think you'll spend enough), you'll get an account manager without the premium support contract, especially early in the onboarding
If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support.
We add support when we want to do something new, like MediaTailor + SSAI. At that point we're exploring and trying to get our heads around how things work. Once it works there's no real point in support.
That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. In general we have a talk with our AM when we're doing something new, and they rope in SMEs from the various products for us.
We're not that big, and I haven't worked for large companies, and it's always been a mystery to me why people have problems dealing with AWS. I've always found them to be super responsive and easy to get ahold of. OTOH we actually know what we're doing technically.
Google Cloud, OTOH, is super fucked up. I mean seriously, I doubt anyone there has any idea WTF is happening or how anything works anymore. There's no real cohesion, or at least there wasn't the last time I was abused by GCP.
> That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance.
Depending what precisely you mean by the second one, you may not even need an AM/support for that.
They won't help me use the platform, but they will still address issues with the platform. If you run into bugs, things not behaving how they're documented, or something that simply isn't exposed/available to customers they seem to be pretty good about getting it resolved regardless of your spend or support level.
(On my personal account with minimal spend, no AM, and no support... I've had engineers from the relevant teams email me directly after submitting a ticket for issues.)
So yeah, "if you know what you're doing" you probably don't even need the paid-for support.
> If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support.
Hard disagree. I have to engage with AWS support almost once every 6 months. A lot of them end up being bugs identified in their services. Premium support is extremely valuable when your production services are down and you need to get them back up asap.
I never got this in the comparison of aws between gcp. Why do people need direct support that much?
In 8 years, I had to reach out to GCP maybe twice and still got an answer anyway.
We've only raised a handful of support cases with GCP the past 5 years, but we happened to raise one this week and they've put us onto a preview feature that solves the problem we were facing - I'm suddenly wondering if we should be trying our luck with support more often instead of figuring it out ourselves.
I found two separate bugs in GCP products. One with gVisor where it would sometimes null-truncate large network packets (this was very hard to diagnose – why is my JSON full of null bytes?) and one where Cloud Run broke sudo sporadically (sudo in a FaaS is definitely niche, I had essentially containerized a very old application written by undergraduates).
Both times they were serious production bugs that took at least a week to resolve, though I only had the lowest tier of support package.
With my experience it’s the edge cases. The few times I had to reach out to AWS support were due to some weird edge case we couldn’t fix but AWS had to. And having a rep involved made it so much smoother.
if you need to bump a quota above the predetermined range of what googlers think is "normal" usage (which is far too low to run anything at scale)you have to talk to a human to negotiate the quota bump. why? because googlers in their infinite engineering wisdom use "gcp quotas" not as a cost optimization guardrail for customers benefit, but to inform google on when and how much metal they need to buy for their datacenter region you are running in.
One day, you will need support and when you do, you will realise why every week there's a top voted post on HN on someone complaining about not reaching Google Support
dangus|10 days ago
GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global.
Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
GCP’s use of folders makes way more sense.
GCP having global VPCs is also potentially a huge benefit if you want your users to hit servers that are physically close to them. On AWS you have to architect your own solution with global accelerator which becomes even more insane if you need to cross accounts, which you’ll probably have to do eventually because of the aforementioned insanity of AWS account/organization best practices.
0xbadcafebee|10 days ago
Know how you find all the permissions a single user in GCP has? You have to make 9+ API calls, then filter/merge all the results. They finally added a web tool to try and "discover" the permissions for a user... you sit there and watch it spin while it madly calls backend APIs to try to figure it out. Permissions for a single user can be assigned to users, groups, orgs, projects, folders, resources, (and more I forget), and there's inheritance to make it more complex. It can take all day to track down every single place the permissions could be set for a single user in a single hierarchical organization, or where something is blocking some permission. The complexity increases as you have more GCP projects, folders, orgs. But, of course, if you don't do all this, GCP will fight you every step of the way.
Compare that to AWS, where you just click a user, and you see what's assigned to it. They engineered it specifically so it wouldn't be a pain in the ass.
> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
This was an issue in the early days, but it's well solved now with newer integrations/services. Follow their Well Architected Framework (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework...), ask customer support for advice, implement it. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the best description of the best information systems engineering practice in the world, and it's achievable by startups. It just takes a long time to read. If you want to become an excellent systems engineer/engineering manager/CTO/etc, this is your bible. (Note: you have to read the entire thing, especially the appendixes; you can't skim it like StackOverflow)
danpalmer|10 days ago
Architecturally I'd go with GCP in a heartbeat. Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role. Completely changed out business for almost everyone, vs Redshift which cost us a lot of money to learn that it sucked.
You could say I'm biased as I work at Google (but not on any of this), but for me it was definitely the other way around, I joined Google in part because of the experience of using GCP and migrating AWS workloads to in.
SkiFire13|10 days ago
What are these struggles? The product I work on uses AWS and we have ~5 accounts (I hear they used to be more TBF) but nowadays all the infrastructure is on one of them and the other are for some niche stuff (tech support?). I could see how going overboard with many accounts could be an issue, but I don't really see issues having everything on one account.
UltraSane|10 days ago
wetpaws|10 days ago
[deleted]
sandorscribbles|10 days ago
what is the engineering used to determine a weak startup from a growing company you ask? well....googlers again use random numbers not logic (human interaction avoidance firewall) to determine that and set the floor at $30M "publicly declared investment capital". so what happens when you the gcp architect consultant hired to help this successful startup productionalize their gcp infra but their last round was private? google tells the soon to be $100M success company they are not real yet.....so they go get their virtual cpu,ram,disk from aws who knows how to treat customers right by being able to talk to humans by hiring account managers who pick up the phone and invite you to lunch to talk about your successful startup growing on aws. googlers are the biggest risk factor to the far superior gcp infrastructure for any business, startup or fortune 10.
sharts|9 days ago
unsnap_biceps|10 days ago
necubi|10 days ago
mannyv|10 days ago
We add support when we want to do something new, like MediaTailor + SSAI. At that point we're exploring and trying to get our heads around how things work. Once it works there's no real point in support.
That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. In general we have a talk with our AM when we're doing something new, and they rope in SMEs from the various products for us.
We're not that big, and I haven't worked for large companies, and it's always been a mystery to me why people have problems dealing with AWS. I've always found them to be super responsive and easy to get ahold of. OTOH we actually know what we're doing technically.
Google Cloud, OTOH, is super fucked up. I mean seriously, I doubt anyone there has any idea WTF is happening or how anything works anymore. There's no real cohesion, or at least there wasn't the last time I was abused by GCP.
nucleardog|9 days ago
Depending what precisely you mean by the second one, you may not even need an AM/support for that.
They won't help me use the platform, but they will still address issues with the platform. If you run into bugs, things not behaving how they're documented, or something that simply isn't exposed/available to customers they seem to be pretty good about getting it resolved regardless of your spend or support level.
(On my personal account with minimal spend, no AM, and no support... I've had engineers from the relevant teams email me directly after submitting a ticket for issues.)
So yeah, "if you know what you're doing" you probably don't even need the paid-for support.
darth_avocado|9 days ago
Hard disagree. I have to engage with AWS support almost once every 6 months. A lot of them end up being bugs identified in their services. Premium support is extremely valuable when your production services are down and you need to get them back up asap.
h1fra|10 days ago
mnahkies|9 days ago
travisd|10 days ago
Both times they were serious production bugs that took at least a week to resolve, though I only had the lowest tier of support package.
JoeBOFH|10 days ago
sandorscribbles|10 days ago
dielll|10 days ago
0ckpuppet|10 days ago
[deleted]
rco8786|10 days ago