It is hard to recommend Google Cloud

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Customer support and responsiveness

  • Many describe GCP support as slow, indifferent, and disempowered, even for large, high-paying customers.
  • Sales and “contact us” flows are often bot-gated, with difficulty reaching a human.
  • In contrast, AWS is repeatedly cited for responsive support (even for small accounts) and willingness to get engineers on calls; Cloudflare is also praised for quick public responses.

Product churn, deprecations, and migrations

  • Frequent API and product deprecations (Cloud IoT, Container Registry, Photos API changes, Firebase/Android APIs, etc.) are a major complaint.
  • Migrations are seen as poorly documented, labor-intensive, and often unnecessary, draining developer time.
  • Some note that AWS also deprecates services, but usually more cautiously, with longer grace periods and life-support rather than hard shutdowns.

Google Domains, DNS, and optics

  • Shutting down Google Domains is viewed as a self-inflicted trust disaster, especially for such foundational infrastructure.
  • Many moved domains to Cloudflare or Route 53 and now avoid GCP for anything critical.
  • Cloud Domains’ unclear status (limited availability, “deprecated” transfers) deepens concerns.

Trust, bans, and catastrophic failures

  • Several reference Google’s reputation for sudden account bans and opaque, unfixable enforcement.
  • The UniSuper incident (accidental deletion of a private cloud environment) and a Mozilla outage tied to a GCP change are cited as red flags, though details and blame are debated.
  • This leads some to consider GCP a “hard no” for serious business use.

Comparisons with AWS and Azure

  • AWS: seen as the most reliable and “customer-obsessed,” but expensive, bloated, and with complex IAM/UX.
  • Azure: often described as unreliable and confusing, yet strong in enterprise integration and long-term support; many big orgs prefer Microsoft 365/Azure stack.

GCP strengths and weaknesses

  • Many engineers praise GCP’s technical design, UI, CLI, IAM model, logging, Terraform snippets, and products like Cloud Run and GKE.
  • Core services are reported as stable by long-time users.
  • Weaknesses: sluggish console, convoluted permissions, lack of spending caps, surprising pricing (e.g., load balancers, egress), and products that feel under-resourced or abandoned.

Alternatives and cloud skepticism

  • Some advocate self-hosting or simpler VPS/second-tier providers (Hetzner, OVH, IONOS, etc.) for cost, control, and stability.
  • There is broad cynicism toward all big clouds: AWS = cost extraction, Azure = reliability issues, GCP = churn and trust problems.