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Rant time: Why does anyone use GCP? I had not used GCP for a few years and recently tried to get a simple webapp scaffolding up.

So I see the myriad of services offered by GCP, I pick: https://console.cloud.google.com/products/solutions/details/...

Dynamic web application with Python and JavaScript. Okay, I've built these things before, let's see the Google way.

Nice, there is a diagram, there's Firebase, there's Django, there's PostgreSQL, something called cloud storage. A bit of an overkill, but let's roll with it.

Okay, let's click Deploy.

This should give us some sort of ready to use stub, placeholder, template right?

Wrong.

Resources tab shows 65 actions/resources created. All nice green checkmarks, there is IAM, there Firebase, there is Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, and everything else under the sun.

65 green checkmarks - that is good right?

However the app itself is not ready to be shown to the world!

Apparently there is something missing in Firebase config (remember this is the default deploy for a new user):

Google helpfully informs me

  Why am I seeing this?
  There are a few potential reasons:

  You haven't deployed an app yet.
  You may have deployed an empty directory.
  This is a custom domain, but we haven't finished setting it up yet.
  How can I deploy my first app?
  Refer to our hosting documentation to get started.
So I go hosting documentation link and that is just generic: https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/

Meanwhile all this nice setup is costing about $2.40 every 24 hours.

The issue isn't the complexity of the solution, or the lack or over abundance of documentation.

The issue is that their sample "Hello World" app is not ready.

I should not need to go through stacks of extra documentation to find out what is wrong when trying a sample product of some complexity.

Why should I be forced to fight abstraction leaks immediately when starting to use GCP?




I never used GCP NGL. Google always rubbed me the wrong way and I ended up migrating away even from gmail


If you always used Azure, then you have no idea what reliability is. If you always used AWS, then you have no idea what great developer experience is.

GCP is fairly reliable and has a great developer experience. I wish more AWS folks used GCP to make AWS a better developer experience.


There are 50 ways to shoot yourself in the foot with GCP (and even AWS).

  - don't use Firebase
  - don't use GKE
  - use Google Cloud Run for such simple setups




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