Google Cloud

What differentiates Google Cloud from other similar products?

Google cloud feels like it has the soul of open source. because they gave the world kubernetes and tensorflow, their managed versions of these tools feel the most "real." i went with gcp in part because i wanted a platform that didn't strike me as a walled garden. great, most of the internal products seem based on open standard instead of lock in whenever possible.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Cloud spanner database is amazing. attaining relational consistency at the global scale is something i didn’t even thing was feasible until now. i also love the local ssd options for our performance-computation stuff — the i/o rates are literally insane. outside of the unlockable content it’s obvious the hardware running behind the scenes is high-end. the whole thing feels snappy and responsive.

What do you dislike most about this product?

The web console tends to be heavy on memory. it can slow your browser down if you have a bunch of tabs open.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

If you care about open standards and performance, google cloud is the place to be. it’s a tool for serious developers.

What differentiates Google Cloud from other similar products?

The switch to gcp was the best choice for our devops operations. the gcloud command line tool is far and away the most consistent and usable of similar tools from other providers i picked it for the tight integration between cloud build, gcr and gke. the whole pipeline feels unified. it's the best place to do gitops because api first is so powerful.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

I'm a big fan of cloud run. it’s the happy medium of serverless functions and full kubernetes. you hand if a container and it goes to zero when not in use. it’s saved us a whole heap on our development and staging environments. also the project-based organization of gcp is super natural to separate different clients/environments from one another.

What do you dislike most about this product?

The switch from other clouds can be a little bumpy since the vocabulary is changed. you'll need to break some old habits to use it properly.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

If you’re looking for a modern, container-forward cloud experience, google cloud is the solution. it’s efficient and incredibly scalable.

What differentiates Google Cloud from other similar products?

I found aws to be nothing but a high quality expensive vendor lock-in machine when it comes top big data compared to what google cloud feels much more focused and integrated. and aws has a million things you need to find and wire up manually bigquery just does it all in one spot. It's the best because it has a serverless model where i don't need to bother myself with clustering or scaling. the fact that it can scan petabytes of data so quickly is literally kind of terrifying in a way. it feels like it is built by data scientists for data scientists and every other cloud feels like it was designed by sysadmins.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

i am loving the new conversational analytics is bigquery studio. i can actually just write out a query the way i speak in plain english like “what was last month’s revenue trend per region” and it creates the sql and chart on the fly. integration with vertex ai is also very smooth i can run machin learning models directly on top of my data without have to shift it here and there. the tight 2 million token context window in gemini 1.5 pro is also a game changer, because now i can upload huge technical manuals or an entire codebase to get answers. it’s just a far smarter ecosystem.

What do you dislike most about this product?

the networking rules can be a bit complicated for those who are used to the traditional world. having to configure vpc service controls and firewall rules for every project is just one thing that feels like a pain in the ass - and if you make even a tiny mistake during setup, your whole fucking project has no connectivity anymore.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

if you are a datadriven company or an ai startup, you have no in options with google cloud. it gives you the most advanced analytics and machine learning technology available today, and its serverless architecture within all of its core services will make you cleaner operations-wise.