[largepeepee]

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored.

Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.

Such a pity, Google used to be the most respected of the SV big tech.

[cogman10]

Google is just shit.

As my company briefly decided to look into using them for a cloud provider it quickly became apparent that they are just awful stewards of any software that isn’t related to advertisements.

It’s beyond shocking how amateurish GCP is being operated.

My assumption is it comes down to really awful leadership. They only care about making and selling new things. You simply can’t trust that any piece of software or hardware will receive ongoing support, including their cloud offerings.

[clnq]

Looking into Android Code Search, I've found the same issues. Google keeps saying C++ is a terrible language, but the way they use it is pretty bad too. "A bad workman blames his tools" springs to mind a lot reading that code.

[osigurdson]

That is interesting, I thought GCP might be a good alternative - at least for managed Kubernetes.

[acdha]

GKE at least used to be a bit better, but that’s only worth so much compared to the rest of the services where you’ll frequently find feature gaps where you end up adding a +1 to an issue which has been open for years, and building your own service (yay, more toil). There’s some room for debate on security depending on exactly what features you use and what your needs are but if you use GCP, I’ll just note that Google gave all of your compute instances privileged access to your entire project and you should fix that that immediately if you haven’t already done so.

I’d also note that it used to be fairly comparable on pricing but they’ve been raising prices on some things which I noticed meant a cost savings migrating away.

[cogman10]

> you’ll frequently find feature gaps where you end up adding a +1 to an issue which has been open for years, and building your own service (yay, more toil)

Yup, exactly my experience and what I meant by amateurish. We aren't even talking about "crazy" features.

For example, their identity management service supports MFA only though a cell text. Adding support for Google auth was a years old issue that we were told "yeah, lots of other people want this and if you plus 1 it maybe PM will prioritize it".

[oittaa]

It's probably the best managed Kubernetes out there. People just like to make hyperboles. The consumer stuff, especially the free ones, get abandoned every now and then, but the "enterprise" services are pretty good.

[solatic]

GKE is an abomination. Its reputation is completely undeserved. Sure there's some nice things out of the box, like authenticating to clusters with your Google/GCP account, but day 2 operations are a constant frustration.

What sucks?

1. The Kubernetes Pod garbage collector is configured to be abominally slow, keeping terminated pods in the API server for far too long. This interferes with cluster monitoring by making it seem like there's a consistently high number of OOMKilled etc. pods rather than blipping as it happens. GCP support claims this is working as intended and recommends manually running a script to clean up the API server if it bothers you (this is a managed service?!). See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75374590/why-kubernetes-... .

2. The rest of the Kubernetes world moved on from kube-dns and on to CoreDNS. Not GKE! On GKE your two options are kube-dns and the GCP VPC-native Cloud DNS (i.e. Kubernetes service and pod records are listed in the private DNS zone for the VPC). Surprise surprise - if you pick Cloud DNS to help scale your cluster, because GCP isn't operating kube-dns well enough on its managed control plan, then you're on the hook for paying for the Cloud DNS zone as well, it's not included in the GKE cluster costs. See e.g. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/cloud... .

3. GKE clusters automatically log to GCP Cloud Logging, the first 50 GB of which is free. Fair enough. But the ingestion price afterwards is a truly mind-boggling $0.50/GB! (https://cloud.google.com/logging/#section-7). How do you turn off GCP Cloud Logging so that you can ship your logs to a cheaper vendor instead? Nope, there's no first-class managed setting; all you get is a community tutorial (https://cloud.google.com/community/tutorials/kubernetes-engi...) that links to this GitHub configuration (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/community/blob/master...) aaaaand good luck :)

4. No native IPv6. See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64110542/has-anyone-iden... . AWS of course does support IPv6: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-ipv6.ht...

And this is just off the top of my head.

[jiggawatts]

A lot of this criticism could also be levelled at Azure’s AKS service.

IPv6 is broken there as well, and they similarly overcharge for logging. However, instead of 50c per GB, they charge $2.75 per GB, which is highway robbery. That’s more than 5x what GCP or AWS charge.

I swear Microsoft must have been aiming for “half price to be competitive” and then accidentally put the decimal point in the wrong place.

Let this sink in: they charge the price of a serviceable used car or a decent gaming PC to store 1 TB of text for a month!

[osigurdson]

This is the sad reality of the cloud currently, it is. It not remotely a commodity. Eventually it certainly will be.

[DangitBobby]

GCP is excellent.

[toast0]

GCP is clearly good if your use cases match their services. However, there are a lot of things that are sub-optimal.

IPv6 doesn't have non-premium networking. Premium networking is nice, but non-premium networking is less expensive.

Instances sometimes take more than 5 minutes to shutdown. A lot of things seem very slow like this. Really frustrating to use for testing when it takes so long to bring an environment up and to clean it afterwards.

Load balancing is hard to use outside of http style short connection use cases. There's no load feedback mechanism, and at small request rates, requests are severely unbalanced anyway. Managed instance groups can auto scale downwards, but connection drain is implemented as take it out of rotation and wait a configurable time and destroy the instance. If the instance drains faster, it won't be destroyed faster. If you want to drain for more than 60 minutes, that's too bad (this isn't that unreasonable, but while I'm ranting...)

Google's container optimized OS has documentation that tells you how to configure docker log retention... But then their container runner (konlet) forces their own log settings for the main container, so your settings are ignored.

[infp_arborist]

I have said it before and will say it again:

Google wants to look amateurish for as long as possible to avoid stronger regulation.

[dymk]

You should probably stop saying it because it makes no sense

[hackernewds]

I had to delete the YouTube app simply because there was no way to disable Shorts. Those things are hopelessly addictive and unavoidable. If I wanted shorts, I'd install TikTok.

[Drakim]

It's crazy, when I remove the YouTube Shorts pane it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days".

It feels like a slap to the face by some promotion seeking Google Manager who tells me that he knows better than me. It's crazy. I didn't stop using YouTube like you did but I was darn close. I guess they do know better than me, in a way.

[robin_reala]

It’s the same in Instagram: removing recommended posts only has an option to remove for 30 days. The consistent enshittification of products with these sorts of behaviours just makes me want to use them less. Unfortunately I’m sure they’ve got data that shows that my reaction is a minority.

[netsharc]

Black Mirror anyone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=99&v=5P_HqwgDFJM

Fascinatingly this content is narrated by a robot voice...

[netsharc]

On Android you can install https://newpipe.net and turn off a lot of things: no more trending/start screen recommendations if you don't want them, you can turn off comments, or "watch next" recommendations.. the shorts show up in the search results like other normal videos, with a slider so you can still navigate it.

[vxNsr]

I know this is an unpopular question, but are there ads in newpipe?

[simfree]

Nope, there are zero ads in NewPipe. No ad blocker needed!

[zo1]

They also are very slowly "injecting" shorts everywhere. I'm randomly browsing the feed, not shorts, click on something and before I know it, I'm watching shorts. And yeah, they also recently added a shorts "pane" on the side of normal videos.

[SoftTalker]

I'm annoyed by the inability to hide shorts but I don't really find them addictive. I've watched a few, determined they were as useless as they appeared, and just ignore them. But it's annoying the amount of space they take up, it's a good third of the screen on my phone.

[txtsd]

Try YouTube Revanced from https://revanced.net/

[cmehdy]

I'm pretty sure revanced.net is not affiliated with the actual project and shouldn't be trusted. AFAIK there's no prebuilt APK doing everything for you that can be trusted, it's a multi-step process one has to follow front the official source.

The official Github is https://github.com/revanced

The Github is very obtuse about the installation steps, so this guide on reddit gives the procedure more adequately: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/xlcny9/revance...

[grapesurgeon]

this is NOT the actual domain. do not share this around. the only domain is https://revanced.app, and it will redirect to their github.

[dangus]

Shorts are displayed on one single line of the home and subscriptions tab. They’re trivially easy to avoid.

[kps]

> I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored.

As someone who had been working at Google in this space (Nest Hubs, Matter, and planned thing I couldn't tell you about even if I knew its current status) until the decimation, I assure you it's not only products that get left behind.

[ChuckNorris89]

>I assure you it's not only products that get left behind.

Could you please enlighten us what else gets left behind?

[mcsniff]

People.

[23B1]

Ethics

[riemannzeta]

Not allowing good search within a channel is the most ridiculous. They're a search company. How is that self-consistent? Especially when you know they have the data and index, but are simply using it for advertising.

[pb060]

They are a search company, yet they decided to give the same name to two completely different web frameworks. Ok one is called AngularJS and the other one is Angular, but still.

[pedrobnsilva]

Agreed. See this across all of Google products.

It's amazing to me that Google Assistant was more useful when it came out than it is today. Just the past few days I've been dealing with this bug where I can't even set an alarm through it.

Google Photos is another one: content-based search used to work really well, but totally unreliable today.