[jjoonathan]

They need to throw shade at AWS.

"Google cancels everything" is a meme, but AWS releasing broken pre-alpha products, letting old ones rot on the vine, and having crazy monetization schemes that are utterly inconsistent with marketing is not a meme, even though they do these things all the time. If GCP wants to win, they need to fix that, because "will I be blamed for the next shitshow" is the key question on every architect / purchasing manager's mind, and right now AWS is winning that battle to a degree that they do not remotely deserve because google is just MIA.

Hell, Google could coordinate with Walmart to hit AWS and Amazon at the same time because there is clearly, shall we say, a degree of cultural continuity between the Amazon and AWS business units.

[crazysim]

Do a Project Zero not for security but for usability, capability, and pricing against AWS?

[jjoonathan]

Sure, but it it has to be memeable. Imagine technical manages bickering in front of their managers.

"Let me get this straight, Google canceled a service and you didn't see it coming?"

^ this needs a comeback.

"Let me get this straight, you ran into another AWS scaling limit and you didn't see it coming?"

or something.

[abraxas]

If I had a dime for every time I see a convoluted architecture in our code that only exists due to the arbitrary hard limits in AWS I'd be able to quit and never again worry about arbitrary AWS limits.

[jjoonathan]

I'm pretty sure they aren't arbitrary at all and are mostly due to managed and serverless offerings backed by duct tape and chewing gum. On a few occasions I have been left with all-but-proof that behind the "let us handle scaling for you" smoke and mirrors is a bash script on an EC2 instance sized by guesswork and hardcoded until you complain, at which point support might be able to shuffle it between instance types to eek out a bit more vertical scaling.

[abraxas]

Yes, it's part this and part "let's get rid of the noisy neighbour issue by making everyone whisper" design philosphy. This just arrogantly pushes the scaling challenges back down to the customers who are then forced to buy more AWS services to build workarounds for the scaling limitations in front of them. For Amazon it's a win-win though and they'll keep doing this as long as c-suite fools keep buying.

[jen20]

I spent the first months 2020 building out a database-as-a-service offering that runs in AWS, Azure and GCP (think Cockroach Cloud or MongoDb Atlas model, but for a different database).

That was an instructive project - building the same service in three clouds tells you a lot both about:

- The quality and completeness of foundational services (identity, networking, compute, storage)

- The tooling ecosystem (the quality of the Packer builders and Terraform providers [1] in our case)

- How helpful (or existent) support is, which ranged from an account manager telling us up-front “here’s the way to avoid hitting limits for your design” to not being able to talk to a human at all throughout the entire project, and thus having to phase in beta customer onboarding for that cloud because of the arbitrary limits.

At some point that team should write a full retrospective on this.

[1]: Disclaimer - I have worked on both Packer and Terraform in the past at HashiCorp.