[dijit]

Interesting, if you swap GCP and AWS in your post then thats exactly my experience.

I wonder what makes us different, I work in europe on video games; AWS’s handling of me when I was at Ubisoft left a really sour taste - when I moved into Tencent/Sharkmob I tried really hard to love AWS as it was the defacto industry standard and instead I was left with a feeling that most of it is inconsistent garbage papered over with lambda functions. I referred to these weird gotchas as “3am topics”; things that I don't have the mental capacity to deal with at 3am and convinced the studio to switch to GCP- which, incidentally they are still extremely grateful to me for doing.

[cjaybo]

> I was left with a feeling that most of it is inconsistent garbage papered over with lambda functions

This sounds more like an indictment of the system design than the cloud provider.

What are some of these “3am” topics that made GCP a better choice?

[dijit]

Small examples included (I’m on my phone so these are from memory and you’ll have to forgive the lack of great detail):

1) having the project/account your in visible at the top at all times.

We used SSO for “accounts” which is AWS’s way of completely separating resources; the long string that is returned is not unique in the start and the remainder is cut off: so all accounts/projects looked the same, was impossible to tell at a glance if you were in dev, staging or prod.

2) Autoscaling groups with that had human readable incrementing “names”, in AWS instances have hex slugs as instance names and you can give an instance a special “Name” label: but any new machines created with an ASG will just reuse the same name label making them hard or impossible to tell apart.

The AWS official solution for this is to have a lambda function hook on the scale event and give your new node an incremented name label. Given that AWS is pricy to save me time: I do not personally consider this an elegant solution.

3) having all regions on one page.

We spent €6,000~ on a database we didn't know about until we started digging into the bill. Not knowing what resources are available at a glance feels pretty basic to me tbh.

4) the network implementation overall; in Google you can just make a network and it will work without having to mess with zone routing and configuration of that which is put on the user.

If it’s on the user, it’s a variable that has to be checked during an outage; it is terraform code that has to be grokked and so-on.

[master_crab]

“2) Autoscaling groups with that had human readable incrementing “names”, in AWS instances have hex slugs as instance names and you can give an instance a special “Name” label: but any new machines created with an ASG will just reuse the same name label making them hard or impossible to tell apart. The AWS official solution for this is to have a lambda function hook on the scale event and give your new node an incremented name label. Given that AWS is pricy to save me time: I do not personally consider this an elegant solution”

Why were you even messing with the instance name? This is a ridiculously simple problem to solve with tags on your ASG. And AWS even did the courtesy of propagating those tags across the ASG and all its instances.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/ec2-au...

[justin_oaks]

> 1) having the project/account your in visible at the top at all times.

I agree that this is an annoying issue in the AWS web console.

I assume this is something that could be fixed on your end by a little bit of CSS.

[thedougd]

I believe the solution is to give the account an alias.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/console_acc...

[robingchan]

company im working at currently uses Token Vending Machine.

pros: cannot get accounts mixed up.

cons: All sessions are actually 12hr sessions (ASIA not AKIA) and no access to perm keys for cli, security i suppose. Its not too bad though as TVM gives creds for various use cases.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/tag/token-vending-machine/

[grogenaut]

we fix that internally by having names for accounts and having stages for accounts in a meta tool. There's a tampermonkey script that pulls that in and shows it on screen and a red banner if it's prod. Could be a json file in a github repo. And yes it could be a console feature but everyone's got different concepts of prod. I think a ton of companies use like 2 total accounts as well.