alt Hacker NewsThere's a very large gap between "seems" and reality. GCP is a huge PITA. It's not even stable to use, as the console is constantly unresponsive and buggy, the UX is insane, finding documentation is like being trapped in hell.
Know how you find all the permissions a single user in GCP has? You have to make 9+ API calls, then filter/merge all the results. They finally added a web tool to try and "discover" the permissions for a user... you sit there and watch it spin while it madly calls backend APIs to try to figure it out. Permissions for a single user can be assigned to users, groups, orgs, projects, folders, resources, (and more I forget), and there's inheritance to make it more complex. It can take all day to track down every single place the permissions could be set for a single user in a single hierarchical organization, or where something is blocking some permission. The complexity increases as you have more GCP projects, folders, orgs. But, of course, if you don't do all this, GCP will fight you every step of the way.
Compare that to AWS, where you just click a user, and you see what's assigned to it. They engineered it specifically so it wouldn't be a pain in the ass.
> Every organization I’ve ever witnessed eventually ends up with some kind of struggle with AWS’ insane organizations and accounts nightmare.
This was an issue in the early days, but it's well solved now with newer integrations/services. Follow their Well Architected Framework (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/framework...), ask customer support for advice, implement it. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the best description of the best information systems engineering practice in the world, and it's achievable by startups. It just takes a long time to read. If you want to become an excellent systems engineer/engineering manager/CTO/etc, this is your bible. (Note: you have to read the entire thing, especially the appendixes; you can't skim it like StackOverflow)
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GCP's UI sure is dog slow. I once filled in that 'How would you rate...' prompt that sometimes appears about Instance Group management via the UI and it seems they later addressed the issue.
I’m sure anyone willing to read through a 1,000 page document can make a well-architected GCP environment, too.
The problem is that no company I’ve ever worked for implemented the well architected framework with their AWS environment, and not one company will ever invest the time to make their environment match that level of quality.
I think what you describe with the web tool to discover user permissions sounds a lot like the AWS VPC Reachability Analyzer which I had to live in for quite a while because figuring out where my traffic was getting blocked between an endless array of AWS accounts and cross-region transit gateways was such a nightmare that wouldn’t exist with GCP global VPCs and project/folder based permissions.
I don’t like the GCP console, but I also wouldn’t consider a lot of the AWS console to be top tier software. Slow/buggy/inconsistent are words I would use with the AWS console. I can concede that AWS has better documentation, but I don’t think it’s a standout, either.