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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible.

GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...).

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I thought Terraform provider was developed/maintained by Hashicorp, not Google. Are Google employees actively involved? I also did encounter annoying issues (which have slowly been getting better though).

I guess it might speak to a solid, if somewhat slow, API.

The terraform provider is usually a near 1:1 mapping of the provider's APIs.

My understanding is that it is actively maintained by GCP employees, but yes Hashicorp owns the repo.

Yeah they've got a nifty tool called Magic Modules that partially auto-generates the Terraform Provider (along with Ansible and InSpec) from the GCP API:

https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/google-provider-new-terr...

> Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. They're attempting to maximize their velocity, maximize their API stability, and make programmatic usage of their system as easy as possible.

Yep, already covered that under incompetence and cluelessness.

> GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick. Probably the best one of the bunch (Azure, AWS, Oracle, OVH, ...).

In that case, I would assume that backend team indeed consist of competent people, as opposed to web team. But TFA was about front end experience which is abysmal.

They had some big outages over the last year. I’m therefore still skeptical to bet on them from a “backend” operations reliability standpoint also. To be fair I’m not sure they are doing worse than AWS though when looking into details. I’m thinking recent AWS Kinesis us-east issue - move fast and break things? Maybe uptime is more important than a gazillion new “feature” services. I also prefer good terraform provider stewardship over any “fancy” new cloudformation CDK or “beautiful” GUI actually. It’s complicated.

> Cloud service providers aren't really optimizing for the same thing that the average website is optimizing for. (snip) GCP's UI? Yea it's pretty bad. GCP's terraform provider? It's really slick.

That's still incompetence. That counts as incompetence, too.

"This restaurant is filthy and full of bugs, but that's OK, because they're take-out only, so they're not optimizing for the same thing the average sit-down restaurant is. Sure, that place is disgusting, but the food in box still tasted pretty good..."

A better comparison:

"This restaurant only has one table and 1 chair with a broken leg and gum stuck to the seat but that's ok because they're take-out only"

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