Among the cloud providers, this seems to be unique to Amazon. There's a lot of malfeasance that's unique to Amazon, like HQ2 and the counterfeit and offensive products on Amazon.com. I don't feel like giving any part of their company money. For twitch I donate on Stream Labs. It sucks not being counted as a subscriber or being able to use the emotes, but I prefer that over Amazon taking a cut.
Google's Firebase has had some absolute horror stories, especially when Firebase found out they were under-billing some people and then "adjusted" their bill to be more accurate, causing massive charges.
I recently had a surprise GCP bill from a personal kubernetes project I did. It wasn't anything crazy, but it made me realize that I'm always only one click away from seriously hitting my credit card.
What the HQ2 malfeasance? Ie, if they committed unlawful acts why not pursue that in court?
I know they selected a location in New York they shouldn't have / the community rejected, and after a big outcry ended up going with not against community pressure.
I think the one in Virginia is going ahead, they just got permits there for a metro station. Are there protests in Virginia they are not listening too?
Actually the scale is larger than that. Amazon got over 100 cities to bid on the project. Entered into deeper negotiations with at least 20 of those. Got many cities to spend hundreds (or thousands) of hours putting proposals together, pitching teams, crunching numbers, offering deeper tax incentives than anyone else can get. In the end, they chose the location they were going to choose anyways.
So it was a colossal waste of time for 5,000+ people across North America. Burnt a lot of goodwill. Many cities learned a valuable lesson on dealing with these big multi-nationals as a result of it. So it won't likely happen like this again.
Genuinely curious - I thought it was strange when it first started - but surely every company must do this? Wouldn't making the investment of a large presence likely involve seeking concessions from each location as part of the scouting process?
What did Amazon do different here? Instead of in back rooms, it was all out in the open.
The posters here are misusing malfeasance terribly.
Other examples are federal grant programs - they are required to publicize them and lots of folks / nonprofits spend lots of time applying but reality is most will renew to existing partners etc
I believe (from having read a fair amount of the process hullabaloo) that they were taking advantage of tax incentives available to all employers choosing to locate in that area. To the extent that’s the case, I see absolutely no malfeasance.
There were additional, negotiated real estate related credits that are also likely to be similarly negotiated by any other developer.
They were negotiating with the government - who writes the laws.
I was curious about the malfeasance - but if this is the the claim of criminality - uh... not a good look for the folks yelling at amazon.
I think MUCH stronger claims may be possible around just their fake product volume and consumer harm there, but good luck with these claims - are they being litigated anywhere?
What is the cost reporting situation on azure and gcp?
We've gone for aws because they're supposed to have good customer support, but opaque cost reporting and the inability to inpose spending limits is a concern.
Does anyone know how azure/gcp:
1. Handle cost reporting
2. Handle spending limits (e.g. can I impose a hard spending limit per service/per user/globally?)
Used all 3 for complicated things, preferred AWS for better overall security/compliance support and more features. Azure is largely comparable to AWS for most shops and some services can be slightly cheaper. GCP seems to be way behind both but I'm sure lots of places could get away with using them.
1. Azure basically has comparable cost reporting to Amazon, though has a cost aggregator if you want to use both Azure and AWS. I personally thought it didn't really bring all the nice features AWS billing had into Azure very well so I'd not recommend if your AWS usage is large and varied. I found GCP to have less features than either Azure or AWS for billing.
2. None of the 3 providers have a hard spending limit feature, though Google app engine service (not GCP) let's you shut it down. Other than that, permission roles are generally the same, AWS wins slightly on features again but Azure had a slightly nicer UI.
Anyways, you should do your own research on what cloud seems sane to you, and not let randos on HN make your business decisions.
One thing that bit me was that GCP spending limits could only be updated on a 24 hour timer (so one full day before they kicked in)
This is absolutely terrible if you have a spike in legitimate traffic and try to increase the limit and you lose all that “front page of hn traffic” forever because your supposedly scalable system didnt scale.
I have no idea if they have fixed that issue yet but I doubt it.
2) No cloud has proper spending limits (aside from barebone compute like linode). It works on your bill continuing to get pricier as their overall multitenant costs come down.
