Why I distrust Google Cloud more than than AWS or Azure

[DISCLAMER: I used to work at Google in general, but not at Google Cloud]<p>I&#x27;m not sure whether this has been discussed here before, but I&#x27;d love to take this forum to share an angle from the tech side of things:<p>IMO, Google is _cursed_ to keep deprecating its products and services. It&#x27;s cursed by Google&#x27;s famous choice of mono-repo tech stack.<p>It makes all the sense and has all the benefits. But at a cost: we had to keep every single line of code in active development mode. Whenever someone changed a line of code in a random file that&#x27;s three steps away on your dependency chain, you will get a ticket to understand what has changed, make changes and fire up every tests (also fix them in 99% of the cases).<p>Yeah, the &quot;Fuck You. Drop whatever you are doing because it’s not important. What is important is OUR time. It’s costing us time and money to support our shit, and we’re tired of it, so we’re not going to support it anymore.&quot; is kind of true story for internal engineers.<p>We once had a shipped product (which took about 20-engineer-month to develop in the first place) in maintenance mode, but still requires a full time engineer to deal with those random things all the time. Would have save 90% of that person&#x27;s time it it&#x27;s on a sperate branch and we only need to focus on security patches. (NO, there is no such concept of branching in Google&#x27;s dev system).<p>We kept doing this for a while and soon realized that there is no way we can sustain this, especially after the only guys who understand how everything works switched teams. Thus, it just became obvious that deprecation is the only &quot;responsible&quot; and &quot;reasonable&quot; choice.<p>Honestly, I think Google&#x27;s engineering practice is somewhat flawed for the lack of a good solution to support shipped products in maintenance. As a result, there is either massively successful products being actively developed; or deprecated products.

I&#x27;ve been in GCP support for over 4 years. My opinions are my own. I try to stay as impartial as I can about my employer. I know there are a lot of valid criticisms to be made about GCP. As one of the people often bearing the brunt of the fallout whenever there is a painful outage or deprecation, I share some of them.<p>But it never gets easy to read posts like this. This one appears to be a collection of old hacker news posts. And I can&#x27;t help but think about all the posts that are never written, submitted, or upvoted about every time someone had a good experience with support. No one talks about their GCE VMs with years of uptime.<p>I&#x27;ll spend hours on video calls with customers, going through logs, packet captures, perf profiles, core dumps, reading their code, conducting tests. Unpacking the tangled web until the problem is obvious. It&#x27;s always a good feeling when we get to the end, and you get to reveal it like the end of a mystery novel. For me, that&#x27;s the good part. Sometimes it takes a couple of hours. Sometimes weeks. Months even. And then the customer goes on with their life, as they should.<p>That&#x27;s how it always should work. But no one talks about when a process works the way it&#x27;s supposed to. People want to read about failures. And trade their own analyses about why that failure happened and how Google is fundamentally broken for these N simple reasons.<p>I don&#x27;t want to diminish the negative stories as they are about people who went through real pain. I also realize that I&#x27;m just one person, and I can only work with so many customers in my time here. I&#x27;m not sure where I&#x27;m going with this.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m trying to say is, keep an open mind. This is a highly competitive field. There are strong incentives for GCP to listen to its customers.

I don&#x27;t know, seems to be mostly filled with speculation and anecdotes. I can find similar anecdotes of bad behavior by Amzon, for example claims of using AWS to steal its users&#x27; business ideas[1].<p>Admittedly, the original author&#x27;s title of &quot;Why I distrust Google Cloud more than AWS or Azure&quot; much better describes their position than the editorialized title of the HN submitter (&quot;Why Google Cloud is less trustworthy than AWS or Azure&quot;).<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23929044" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23929044</a>

I&#x27;m one of those &quot;you&#x27;ll get my baremetal and systemd out of my dead cold hands&quot;, kind of guy.<p>But I have reasonable exposure to both AWS and GC and I can say that, by far, Google Cloud is easier to reason about. As a consequence, it&#x27;s much harder to misconfigure. The 2 large AWS deploys I&#x27;ve seen have, at best, had billing issues no one really understood (incl AWS), and at worse, security issues.<p>Complaining that maps prices went up re Cloud Hosting is, to me, like complaining that Amazon raised the price of the Kindle, e.g., not particularly relevant.

I see the Google hate on HN is strong enough that an article that just regurgitates the contents of a few articles and blog posts can be upvoted to #1 in short order.

To be honest, since I&#x27;ve heard literally <i>all</i> of these stories&#x2F;anecdotes, and in some cases have been affected by them, and yet there is still <i>nothing</i> new in this article to rehash, it actually makes me feel good having gone with GCP.<p>I certainly have felt what I thought were missteps by GCP in the past, but over the past couple years have been an extremely happy customer, and I still feel I&#x27;ve architected my applications so that if worse came to worse I could migrate off GCP if needed.

&gt; The clock is ticking for Google Cloud. The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft-currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share-or risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily in the business since last year, Google wants its cloud group to outrank those of one or both of its two main rivals by 2023, said people with knowledge of the matter.<p>If they pulled this off, they would be hailed as gods of marketing for eons to come.

What left a bad taste in my mouth is any quota increase getting rejected unless you got on a phone call with sales and listened to an upsell speech. I&#x27;m trying to give you money and you&#x27;re putting roadblocks in front of me.

While I&#x27;m not arguing the general point of the article, I will counter point one thing.<p>&gt; Will Google Cloud even exist a decade from now?<p>This seems wildly speculative, and the likelihood of GCP, or its core offerings, not existing any time so soon is next to zero. Google has to royally fuck up for this to be the case, but even if it ends up being case, there will be a string of lawsuits lined up that will likely cost the company more than keeping the product.<p>I&#x27;ve worked at billion dollar companies that aren&#x27;t shy to drop a lawsuit who have gone all in on GCP, with contracts worth millions of dollar. To force such a company off their product seems reckless at best, malicious at worst. Such a big decision would drive Google into the ground, maybe not from the consumers, but certainly from the lawsuits that will inevitably ensue.

Can HN please add a filter for these increasingly lame &quot;Google cancels all the stuff&quot; posts?<p>Yes, Google has cancelled services, but they&#x27;ve all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue. Why should Google have to keep everything they ever built running for ever?<p>If you <i>pay</i> for services from Google, then it&#x27;s a completely different story. We&#x27;ve used Appengine for 12 years now, and every time they&#x27;ve decided to deprecate services, there&#x27;s always plenty of notice, a superior replacement, and usually lower costs.

Look where the cash cows are. For MS and Amazon, their cloud platforms are top of mind for senior management. Even more so with Amazon&#x27;s new CEO having been with AWS since inception.<p>For Google, anything not driving search and ads is a side show. Does anyone think Sundar&#x27;s staying up at night worrying about Asian egress pricing when he&#x27;s about to spend the next day being accused by performatively outraged senators about censorship and election influcence?

This is very real. After a production outage caused by excessive health check failures the day after a massive GCP outage (Sept 2020) -- where we quickly hit our already-oversized quota (quotas, another GCP issue) during a traffic spike -- we&#x27;ve moved all of our sensitive workloads to AWS.<p>We continue to use GCP for less sensitive workloads and for GKE, but our entire ops team has unspoken distrust. This is totally an infra-specific opinion, ignoring the fact that we&#x27;ve had to rewrite apps entirely after breaking changes from Google products.<p>GCP has a great UI, the project structure makes much more sense, and billing is way easier, but after having a massive outage during a pretty standard scaling event, we just can&#x27;t justify the risks.

Google generally does not come off to me as having a great customer support culture. To appreciate the scale of the issue, take a look at the hoops and blackboxes merchants who want to be listed on Google Shopping have to go through and all the horror stories online. I did notice on Google Workspace and Google One that they do seem to be trying to improve the support experience.

I am using GKE, buckets, cloud SQL, pubsub and IAM, big query.<p>Our costs are 1&#x2F;3rd of what AWS was.<p>Their support isn&#x27;t as good as AWS.<p>I use terraform for everything and Google authors that provider and I find that their resources are very consistent.<p>IAM is a bit of a mess but at least it is a consistent mess.

Probably would have been better for the author to have taken the &quot;don&#x27;t sell out to a single cloud vendor API&quot; angle. But I guess no clicky-baits for that approach. I&#x27;ve been screwed over by both AWS and Azure, and never by GCloud, but that doesn&#x27;t mean I trust any of them.

GCP doesn&#x27;t really support IPv6 at all. Sure you can terminate IPv6 on a load balancer and then proxy the connections over IPv4 back to your instances, but you can&#x27;t get native IPv6 on an instance.<p>It&#x27;s that type of shortcoming that leads me to believe Google does not see a future in this product.

I’ll never use Google Cloud as long as I’m using Gmail. I don’t want either one to trigger shutting down the other for “suspicious activity.”

The best argument against GCP is indeed the unpredictability with which Google turns down services. On the other hand you have Microsoft which still supports - let me give an extreme example - Silverlight (!). If Silverlight would be a Google product, all support would have ended years ago.

All the providers are reliable if you stick to simple stuff (VMs, storage, DB, etc.) or as OP called it &quot;cloud agnostic stuff&quot;.

The only reason I didn&#x27;t try Google cloud is payment. I can&#x27;t even run a couple of VM, some test db without using the credit card. This means that if someone hacks me, if the documentation isn&#x27;t clear enough or if I make a mistake I will fully pay for it (and immediately). This is incredibly haunting for beginners and people that cannot afford such scenarios.<p>With AWS at least I can use a prepaid card: if something bad happens for any reason, at least I know I can afford to eat the day after.

They might cancel a service you rely on, they might even censor your documents in storage (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BreesAnna&#x2F;status&#x2F;1384763150109716481" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BreesAnna&#x2F;status&#x2F;1384763150109716481</a>). It might be time to move away from Google.

I recommend to do as much k8s and try to avoid any vendor specific lock-ins as possible.

Seems pretty thin. A handful of price hikes that made the news is not something that would bother an ordinary company. Maybe a little mom and pop that&#x27;s running on tight margins, but they would be better served by squarespace anyway. Everyone in business understands that sometimes you raise prices.

The only advantage of Google Cloud is the TPUs--if you&#x27;re not running massive machine learning workloads, AWS is almost always the better choice on features, service, and reliability.<p>The *link between compute and storage* is not even officially a production product:<p>&quot;Please treat gcsfuse as beta-quality software. Use it for whatever you like, but be aware that bugs may lurk, and that we reserve the right to make small backwards-incompatible changes.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;gcsfuse&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GoogleCloudPlatform&#x2F;gcsfuse&#x2F;</a><p>If a supposed cloud platform can&#x27;t even produce a reliable way to access your data, then they have no basis being used in any halfway serious setting.

This definitely applies to Google&#x27;s PaaS offerings. Google App Engine looks like a great solution except your app is now entirely stuck on a constantly changing platform. The drop-in components they offer are constantly getting deprecated and re-architected with no clear upgrade path. For example many of their original drop-in components were custom (Memcache, Taskqueues, NDB) and are now deprecated with no interoperability with the now recommended 3rd party components. If you depended on these components you now are either existing in a precarious purgatory or you need to rip out and replace all uses of those libraries which completely reneges on the PaaS value proposition

I recently switched from AWS to Google due to the complexity of managing AWS. However, I am not willing to use ANY proprietary GCP services or any tools at any level. Firebase looks amazing, not a chance I’ll use it.<p>GCP is great if you’re going to stick to containers and Cloud SQL. You can pick up your toys and leave if Google tries some stupid shenanigans.<p>But for the time being I am saving money directly by hosting on GCP, and saving even more money by not needing as much DevOps investment.<p>Honestly I think people are so used to AWS that they don’t realize how much of a complicated mess it’s become.

&gt; Most business can&#x27;t rationally avoid picking a cloud provider option - and that often means choosing between AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.<p>It looks like this lie has been repeated long enough it became a reality for some people. Yes, you can perfectly avoid using a &quot;cloud provider&quot;, as millions of businesses worldwide already do, from small companies to largest tech businesses (for drastically different reasons though).

I have little experience with GCP, but AWS does an AMAZING job supporting old products. When they need to deprecate&#x2F;remove something you get 12+ months notice and lots of support.

I thought this was going to be written by someone who uses it a large scale. from a customer service point of view, is Microsoft the best ? Is Google the most secure? Is Amazon the simplest to enter?

Their Wavenet Text To Speech is gold

if I didn&#x27;t keep writing new solutions to solved problems, how would I get promoted?

has GCP cancelled products? Or is that just Google

That was worth it just for the link to the brilliant Steve Yegge.

Storj.io for the win. Move over Google!

The single biggest concern I have with Google cloud, bigger than Reader or the like, is Project Maven.<p>What if some Google employees decide my company is bad? Will Google cave in and fire us as a customer? That’s an existential risk.

I&#x27;d like to hear arguments on this topic that aren&#x27;t just moronic. If you&#x27;d launched your company on Google App Engine 10 years ago, what harm would have come to you in the meantime?

I&#x27;m not sure what the author (or Yegge, for that matter) expect a good timeframe to be for deprecating services.<p>Anecdotally, Google announced the changeover of Cloud logging API versions in October of 2016, with a 5-month ramp (October to March) to switch from the v1 beta API to the v2 beta API. Five months is nearly two quarters, which is quite a long window for a beta API IMHO.<p>That having been said, Google&#x27;s habit of leaving things that are pretty much mission-critical in beta is unwise, but it should be unwise for them, not end-users. End-users that need reliability and low churn shouldn&#x27;t be developing on beta-anything.