Just two stories on HN I've seen about it:
2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661391
I have nothing against GCP or Firebase, just countering the "this seems to be unique to Amazon" comment.
I know they selected a location in New York they shouldn't have / the community rejected, and after a big outcry ended up going with not against community pressure.
I think the one in Virginia is going ahead, they just got permits there for a metro station. Are there protests in Virginia they are not listening too?
There were additional, negotiated real estate related credits that are also likely to be similarly negotiated by any other developer.
They were negotiating with the government - who writes the laws.
I was curious about the malfeasance - but if this is the the claim of criminality - uh... not a good look for the folks yelling at amazon.
I think MUCH stronger claims may be possible around just their fake product volume and consumer harm there, but good luck with these claims - are they being litigated anywhere?
So it was a colossal waste of time for 5,000+ people across North America. Burnt a lot of goodwill. Many cities learned a valuable lesson on dealing with these big multi-nationals as a result of it. So it won't likely happen like this again.
What did Amazon do different here? Instead of in back rooms, it was all out in the open.
Curious of there are other examples of this.
Other examples are federal grant programs - they are required to publicize them and lots of folks / nonprofits spend lots of time applying but reality is most will renew to existing partners etc
We've gone for aws because they're supposed to have good customer support, but opaque cost reporting and the inability to inpose spending limits is a concern.
Does anyone know how azure/gcp:
1. Handle cost reporting
2. Handle spending limits (e.g. can I impose a hard spending limit per service/per user/globally?)
1. Azure basically has comparable cost reporting to Amazon, though has a cost aggregator if you want to use both Azure and AWS. I personally thought it didn't really bring all the nice features AWS billing had into Azure very well so I'd not recommend if your AWS usage is large and varied. I found GCP to have less features than either Azure or AWS for billing.
2. None of the 3 providers have a hard spending limit feature, though Google app engine service (not GCP) let's you shut it down. Other than that, permission roles are generally the same, AWS wins slightly on features again but Azure had a slightly nicer UI.
Anyways, you should do your own research on what cloud seems sane to you, and not let randos on HN make your business decisions.
This is absolutely terrible if you have a spike in legitimate traffic and try to increase the limit and you lose all that “front page of hn traffic” forever because your supposedly scalable system didnt scale.
I have no idea if they have fixed that issue yet but I doubt it.
2) No cloud has proper spending limits (aside from barebone compute like linode). It works on your bill continuing to get pricier as their overall multitenant costs come down.