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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

As an AWS-focused practitioner, I started doing Google Cloud training and it blew my mind when I found out that the multiple account sub-account mess that AWS continues to use just doesn’t exist there. GCP sensibly uses a folder and project system that provides a lot of flexibility and IAM control.

It also blew my mind that Google Cloud VPCs and autoscaling groups are global, so that you don’t have to jump through hoops and use the Global Accelerator service to architect a global application.

After learning just those two things I’m downright shocked that Google is still in 3rd place in this market. AWS could really use a refactor at this point.

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I think Google scares a lot of people away with their approach of not being able to talk to any human whatsoever unless you spend a lot of money on a monthly basis.

I read a lot of horror stories of people getting in troubles with GCP and not being able to talk to a human person, whereas you would get access to some human presence with AWS.

Things might have been changed, but I guess a lot of people have still this in the back of their mind.

I’m scared of Google realising that maintaining a given cloud product just isn’t fun anymore and sending it to the Google graveyard.

Yeah I think anyone who chooses to do business with Google at this point is taking a needless risk. I wouldn't trust them to continue to provide anything except perhaps the ad business.

Or sell it off to nefarious companies like SquareSpace

Like IoT service? I had friends working in that field that scrambled for a year when that happened and they will never touch Google Cloud again.

Ahhhh it wasn't nice, but we at Echo54[0] had a plan/execution (6 months before the due date) to migrate to RabbitMQ (with MQTT Plugin) works way better and cheaper than GCP IoT service. We did all of that in less than 2 months.

0. https://www.echo54.com/

true that too

That may be true, but a lot of cloud customers are in that category of spending a lot of money on a monthly basis.

Google’s poor support reputation is deserved, but I’m not sure I’d want to architect extra stuff over that issue. After I found out those facts about GCP I was pretty sure I could have gotten 6 months of my professional life back because of the architecture of GCP being superior.

Sort of the same with anything Amazon. Look at their retail website! It used to be the most ground breaking, impressive product search engine out there.

Now it's weird in a dozen different ways, and it endlessly spews ridiculous results at you. It's like a gorgeous mansion from the 1900s, which received no upkeep. It's junk now.

For example, if I want to find new books by an author I've bought from before, I have to go to: returns & orders, digital orders, find book and click, then author's name, all books, language->english, format->kindle, sort by->publication date.

There's no way to set defaults. No way to abridge the process. You mysteriously you cannot click on the author name in "returns & orders". It's simply quite lame.

Every aspect of Amazon is like this now. It was weird workflows throughout the site. It's living on inertia.

We all say “Microsoft” “Google” “Amazon” as though each is a single monolithic entity with a consistency of culture, mission, and behavior. And yet I bet the company you work does things in marketing which don’t reflect how engineering thinks.

Your observations imply a root cause. But public information about Amazon’s corporate structure shows that AWS is almost a separate company from the website. Same is true for Google’s search vs YouTube or Apple hardware design vs their iMessages group.

So this is about customer support. Google supports by the customer by a better product but minimal manual support for issues later.

AWS has an organically evolved bad product which has been designed by long line of six page memos but a manual support in case things get too confusing or the customer just need emotional support.

I agree completely. Every time I need to do Something in AWS I feel like I’m just stumbling over footguns in an infinite sea of footguns. Meanwhile, other providers. (GCP and Azure) have the ability to group resources under projects/folders. They have sensible default isolation primitives that you can understand…

If you forget to tag a resource in AWS, it’s very difficult to find out what it’s being used by. And yeah, infrastructure as code helps with this, but God help you if you created something via the console.

If AWS had a cloud product that had 10% of the surface area, and a simplistic project/RBAC primitive, I would use it in a heartbeat. Hell, it’s essentially what other companies like Heroku are selling (and charging a premium for).

Even if Cloudflare’s R2 cost the same as AWS, I’d use it because the likelihood of one of our engineers doing something wrong permissions is GREATLY diminished.

Anyway, just nodding along to your comment and venting a bit.

I've worked with both AWS and GCP off and on for 15 years. In general, I find GCP easier to work with: better developer experience, services that are simpler to configure (Cloud Run vs ECS/Fargate), etc. However, AWS is like the new IBM: nobody ever got fired for going with AWS...

AWS’s account system is nuts. I know it grew historically out of the “just buy S3 storage with your Amazon account” original, but it’s 2025 and they run half the internet now.

Until a few months ago, you couldn’t even be signed in to more than one account at a time in the console. Now you can use…up to five? (If you’re following “best practices” you likely have far more than five.)

For anyone who hasn’t seen GCP’s console, there’s just a simple menu to switch your view to any of the projects you have access to. There’s even a search box in case you have enough to need it.

One of the stand-out things at AWS Summit London was the number of talks basically saying:

"Yes accounts is a mess but they're what we have".

Azure has Resource Groups and global visibility across all products in all regions in a single pane of glass.

There are “single IP” global load balancers with regional dynamic routing in Azure too.

People just assume AWS is the best in the same way that Cisco was considered the best even though they were a dinosaur selling over-priced products for the last two decades.

What is the "account sub-account" you are referring to? Does it blow your mind Google Availability Zones are firewalls across the SAME data center?

https://youtu.be/mDNHK-SzXEM?t=560

Google's resource management + AWS's IAM + Azure's... nah == best of everything.

AWS IAM terrible, GCP's is much better

In AWS, everything is in one place and uses a fairly expressive policy syntax. For GCP, you have " global IAM" in one place, contextual IAM in another (VPC-SC), per-resource IAM under the resource (GCS buckets), roles in another spot that require using the most sluggish docs website in the world to decode, and user/group management in an entirely separate app (cloud identity/workspace).

How is GCP much better? FWIW I use/evangelize GCP everyday. Their IAM setup is just very naive and seems like it has had things bolted on as an afterthought. AWS is much more well designed and future proof.

It's not as clean in AWS as you make it out to be. Service control policies, resources policies in services like S3 and SNS...

GCP's resource based hierarchy means it's much easier to locate where a permission comes from, it's either global, or attached to the resource in question. Most people probably shouldn't ever need to know about VPC-SC.

AWS IAM is a ball of mud, attach any policy at any one of the possible attachment points, good luck figuring out where you managed to gain permission to do X. And the constant emails for "ACTION REQUIRED: we changed some managed IAM permission and your workflows will break", whether you actually use that role, they can't even tell, so all you can do is complain to your emotional support TAM in the weekly call.

AWS's IAM conditions are also annoying dynamically typed, sure it's more powerful, but imo that's just more string to hang yourself with. the use of "*" in so many rules is just a recipe for disaster.

I don't know GCP but my experiences with Azure were also way smoother than AWS. It's like the Amazon folks are not even trying to work on less friction...

Which parts of Azure have you used that have less friction than AWS?

Azure Resource Manager provides a “single pane of glass” for both the GUI and CLI tooling so that you’re not jumping between web consoles that appear unrelated but manage a single cohesive deployment of inter-related parts.

It uses human names instead of random gibberish identifiers. Last time I looked at AWS it still refused to turn these into clickable hyperlinks. Do the lookup yourself human! This menial task is beneath the great cloud computer.

Etc…

Azure Ops type, IAM and organizing is much better.

My experience with GCP was that the support staff was rude.

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