It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.

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unsnap_biceps 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you spend enough (or they think you'll spend enough), you'll get an account manager without the premium support contract, especially early in the onboarding

	▲	necubi 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Or if you’re a newish startup who they hope will eventually spend enough to justify it.

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dangus 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not.

GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global.

Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.

GCP’s use of folders makes way more sense.

GCP having global VPCs is also potentially a huge benefit if you want your users to hit servers that are physically close to them. On AWS you have to architect your own solution with global accelerator which becomes even more insane if you need to cross accounts, which you’ll probably have to do eventually because of the aforementioned insanity of AWS account/organization best practices.

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0xbadcafebee 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a very large gap between "seems" and reality. GCP is a huge PITA. It's not even stable to use, as the console is constantly unresponsive and buggy, the UX is insane, finding documentation is like being trapped in hell.

Know how you find all the permissions a single user in GCP has? You have to make 9+ API calls, then filter/merge all the results. They finally added a web tool to try and "discover" the permissions for a user... you sit there and watch it spin while it madly calls backend APIs to try to figure it out. Permissions for a single user can be assigned to users, groups, orgs, projects, folders, resources, (and more I forget), and there's inheritance to make it more complex. It can take all day to track down every single place the permissions could be set for a single user in a single hierarchical organization, or where something is blocking some permission. The complexity increases as you have more GCP projects, folders, orgs. But, of course, if you don't do all this, GCP will fight you every step of the way.

Compare that to AWS, where you just click a user, and you see what's assigned to it. They engineered it specifically so it wouldn't be a pain in the ass.

> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.

This was an issue in the early days, but it's well solved now with newer integrations/services. Follow their Well Architected Framework (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework...), ask customer support for advice, implement it. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the best description of the best information systems engineering practice in the world, and it's achievable by startups. It just takes a long time to read. If you want to become an excellent systems engineer/engineering manager/CTO/etc, this is your bible. (Note: you have to read the entire thing, especially the appendixes; you can't skim it like StackOverflow)

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danpalmer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Similar to my experience with the two. We didn't have regular meetings with our GCP account manager, but they did help us and we had a technical support rep there we were in contact with sometimes. We rarely heard from anyone at AWS, and a friend had some horror stories of reporting security issues to AWS.

Architecturally I'd go with GCP in a heartbeat. Bigquery was also one of the biggest wins in my previous role. Completely changed out business for almost everyone, vs Redshift which cost us a lot of money to learn that it sucked.

You could say I'm biased as I work at Google (but not on any of this), but for me it was definitely the other way around, I joined Google in part because of the experience of using GCP and migrating AWS workloads to in.

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SkiFire13 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.

What are these struggles? The product I work on uses AWS and we have ~5 accounts (I hear they used to be more TBF) but nowadays all the infrastructure is on one of them and the other are for some niche stuff (tech support?). I could see how going overboard with many accounts could be an issue, but I don't really see issues having everything on one account.

	▲	sleepychu an hour ago \| parent [-]
		We were saved by the bell when they announced the increased account limit for S3 buckets (1M buckets, now, 1k I think before). Just before they announced that I was working on creating org accounts specifically to contain S3 buckets and then permitting the primary app to use those accounts just for their bucket allocation. AWS themselves recommend an account per developer, IIRC. It's as you say, some policy or limitation might require lots of accounts and lots of accounts can be pretty challenging to manage.

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UltraSane 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Global VPCs are very nice but they feel like a single blast radius.

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dangus 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Whether or not your VPC can have subnets in multiple regions is entirely unrelated to security.

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UltraSane 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I meant failure blast radius. Having isolated regions is a core part of the AWS reliability design. AWS has had entire regions fail but these failure have always been isolated to a single region. Global VPCs must rely on globally connected routers that can all fail in ways AWS regional VPCs can't.

	▲	ses1984 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If you need global HA to the extent that you're worried about global VPC failure modes, you're going to have to spend a lot of effort to squeeze uptime to the max regardless of where you deploy. Undersea cable failures are probably more likely than a google core networking failure. In AWS a lot of "global" things are actually just hosted in us-east-1.

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wetpaws 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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