Google is still good for some things
Friday, November 3, 2017
Everyone loves free things, hence the proliferation of services like GMail and the rest of the Google suite. The problem is, as my old boss used to say, “If you aren’t paying for the product, than you are the product”. Nothing in life is free, and Google has to make money somewhere. It’s no secret that I have a love/hate relationship with Google … I love their services but hate their continuous privacy violations and tracking behaviors (hence my move over to services like ProtonMail and self-hosting). However, this doesn’t make me turn a blind eye to them in general. I’ve been watching the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) product suite for some time, and have recently started playing around with it. It’s nice, compatible with all my tooling (Terraform, Vagrant, etc.), and in most cases cheaper than competing AWS services. Even better is their free trial which, unlike AWS, is much more robust. Their trial, available for one year from your sign up, comes with $300 in credit to use on their services. Which makes it a lot less limited than the AWS “Free Tier” for one year.
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