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by kmbfjr 1474 days ago
Try out GCP sometime…lemme know how you feel when they want you to pay 3% of your annual spend for the privilege of being able to email them as to why their (pick a service, but BigQuery is usually my source of frustration) is degraded. The response and escalation for that 3% is essentially whenever they feel like it.

Stay away from Google. AWS has its issues but not with that level of hubris and indifference.

4 comments

You should try Azure sometime. It’s a cloud service run by some scrappy upstart in the Pacific Northwest.

I heard they have some of the best support for developers, despite not having the name cachet around HN that the bigger players have.

I did not expect to hear their support lauded by anyone. They prevent solutions to problems from ending up on their forums, aren't widespread enough to have solutions on stack overflow, and have documentation that is often simply inaccurate (i.e. they've changed the names of things, or moved options, etc.)

Here's an example. We have an issue, find other people on their forums that have also had it, but no solution is visible. We file a ticket. They say it's a known problem with a known workaround and tell us the workaround. Why isn't it shared? Because they wouldn't share the solution unless you're paying for support.

Some of their systems are a mess too. There are multiple ways of getting logs out of function apps, and only the most pain in the ass way that requires the most configuration is going to contain all the logs. Other viewers and ways of reading the logs will be partial.

Resource groups are a great idea though.

Azure's UI is so shockingly bad, confusing and complex it puts AWS to shame.
Seriously?

I thought it made way more sense.

I kind of wonder if this is a case of what-I-already-know bias for both of us.

I found similar. Their documentation often refers to things that simply don't exist. Pictures of how menus used to look and no longer do. Multiple ways of doing the same thing that give slightly different results, with no real reason for the difference.

I have heard though, that it makes more sense for people coming out of sysadmining Windows Server networks.

They also unfortunately have some shockingly bad issues with securing their services
Also, as Google seems to have a habit of summarily cancelling people's accounts across every one of its services at once, each time you add another Google service to what you use, you're increasing your risk of suddenly having your online life or business destroyed at their whim. Basically, use only the Google services you absolutely have to.
How is that different from what AWS does? The pricing is similar (even higher at some break points, but I guess for very high spends GCP is slightly more expensive as AWS charges you 3% for more than 1M per month, vs 4% for the whole thing in GCP), and the support experience in AWS is also utterly crap. We have to go to our TAM if we need an escalation, or anything that doesn't involve blaming us.
BigQuery is so many light-years ahead of Redshift, though, even everyone on AWS still tends to use BigQuery.