It's weird that one of the reasons that you endorse AWS is that you had regular meetings with your account manager but then you regret premium support which is the whole reason you had regular meetings with your account manager.
If you know what you're doing you don't need AWS support.
We add support when we want to do something new, like MediaTailor + SSAI. At that point we're exploring and trying to get our heads around how things work. Once it works there's no real point in support.
That said, you need to ask your account manager about (1) discounts in exchange for spend commitments, and (2) technical assistance. In general we have a talk with our AM when we're doing something new, and they rope in SMEs from the various products for us.
We're not that big, and I haven't worked for large companies, and it's always been a mystery to me why people have problems dealing with AWS. I've always found them to be super responsive and easy to get ahold of. OTOH we actually know what we're doing technically.
Google Cloud, OTOH, is super fucked up. I mean seriously, I doubt anyone there has any idea WTF is happening or how anything works anymore. There's no real cohesion, or at least there wasn't the last time I was abused by GCP.
If you spend enough (or they think you'll spend enough), you'll get an account manager without the premium support contract, especially early in the onboarding
I never got this in the comparison of aws between gcp. Why do people need direct support that much? In 8 years, I had to reach out to GCP maybe twice and still got an answer anyway.
As a counterpoint, I find our AWS super team to be a mix of 40% helpful, 40% “things we say are going over their head,” 20% attempting to upsell and expand our dependence. It’s nice that we have humans but I don’t think it’s a reason to choose it or not.
GCP’s architecture seems clearly better to me especially if you are looking to be global.
Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
GCP’s use of folders makes way more sense.
GCP having global VPCs is also potentially a huge benefit if you want your users to hit servers that are physically close to them. On AWS you have to architect your own solution with global accelerator which becomes even more insane if you need to cross accounts, which you’ll probably have to do eventually because of the aforementioned insanity of AWS account/organization best practices.
The regret was about the cost of the premium support
googlers in their infinite wisdom have built a startup ecosystem for gcp that assigns "startups" to entry level new hires who are scrambling to figure out how to be managers of accounts while learning how to talk to humans, because googlers are generally not used to interacting with humans, just code, and that is the result of the programmatic hiring/screening process. each newly hired 20-something is also assigned 3,000 gcp accounts to manage.
what is the engineering used to determine a weak startup from a growing company you ask? well....googlers again use random numbers not logic (human interaction avoidance firewall) to determine that and set the floor at $30M "publicly declared investment capital". so what happens when you the gcp architect consultant hired to help this successful startup productionalize their gcp infra but their last round was private? google tells the soon to be $100M success company they are not real yet.....so they go get their virtual cpu,ram,disk from aws who knows how to treat customers right by being able to talk to humans by hiring account managers who pick up the phone and invite you to lunch to talk about your successful startup growing on aws. googlers are the biggest risk factor to the far superior gcp infrastructure for any business, startup or fortune 10.