Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?

Azure is shit. The portal is insane. It's as if the Windows 8 UI people took over. It's slow and buggy. They actually call series of navigation steps a "journey", reflecting how difficult it is.

Their SSD story was late and pathetic. At first, they started offering SSD ... as temp volumes. Zero real-world use cases (except as a SQL 2014 "Buffer Pool"). Like, why would you even announce such a weak offering?

Then they added full SSD ("Premium Storage"). You need special instances to use SSD, it's not just a bit you flip on your storage options. AND, you need to pick 1 of 3 sizes. If you need something between, round up. Need more performance? They suggest you software RAID things together. It's laughable.

Everything is SLOW. Machines take forever to start up. Windows boxes often enough get stuck, requiring resizing (change to larger, change back to orig size) to get them unstuck.

The networking is dumb. "Cloud Service" = 1 public IP, then each VM gets NAT'd. This is a holdover from when Azure thought they could PaaS their way to fame. Oh, I tested restoring an Elasticsearch backup that was stored on Azure blob storage. Restoring to a GCE instance went about 10x faster.

Pricing is very high. On some instances, GCE was 10x cheaper, though the average was like 2-3x and that was including Azure's "enterprise" discount.

Azure is squarely aimed at old MS-style customers that want "cloud" and don't really know more than that. "Ooh Hadoop... in the Cloud!" That kind of thing. They know they can make a killing by just migrating on-prem customers to their own thing. And they're probably right. Why would an enterprise with a big AD deployment decide to take a risk by not going with Microsoft?

Oh and did I mention the portal will cause depression and frustration? Cause it will. It's beyond comprehension how anyone thought it was a good idea. Oh, and there's 2 of them. The old one is not-as-bad and last I checked, was still needed for things they didn't include in the New Tablet Edition Portal.

You literally could not pay me to use Azure over GCE: I was looking at something that might get BizSpark Plus, with $$$$ in free Azure credits, and it wouldn't be worth it.

Edit: Oh another awesome part. Global Namespace! Everything you create is scoped globally, so if you're naming things like mysite-web-1, better hope no one else decides on that prefix too. But hey, maybe it's 2016 and we're supposed to use guids for names and container managers so this doesn't matter. Just another poor decision decision.

I know I accurately summarize many of my coworker's opinions when I say: Fuck Azure.

Disclaimer: I used to be a huge MS fanboy, and I still really dislike Google as a company. If I sound bitter and biased, it's because I've dealt with Azure for ops for around 2 years and they've earned it. I've less exp with GCE but it's been so, so, refreshing. Like a cool minty breeze.

You have to run their images however, but yeah, that's a nice feature esp. if your org uses GA already.

Here are the cases you need support:

- instance needs to be force stopped, that doesn't always work in the AWS console, you have to open a support case

- scaling things up: s3 buckets that get sudden amounts of traffic need to be manually partitioned, ELBs as well

- they have more logs on the backend you can't see: ELB logs aren't complete for example, they have more detailed logs only support has access to

- RDS failovers: determining if a RDS failover was due to a maintenance period or a hardware problem

- SNS/SQS errors: 5xx from SNS/SQS due to backend issues you have no control over

- Accidently used the official CentOS AMI? Oops, that AMI is "locked" and doesn't let you mount the image on another instance to get your data, you have to use support to get them to remove market codes

- New instance types don't alway boot correctly, this happened with i2s, they'd just fail to boot sometimes

- Accidently use CloudFormation to deploy your stacks? Lots of support tickets to fix all the backend problems with that, but at least Terraform solves that now :)

Google Cloud wins hands down!

Places where Google Cloud shines over AWS: Excellent UI, Ease of use, Scalability, Security, Data services, Big Data, Machine Learning, Network, Disks. The only place where Google loses to AWS is Relational Databases.

Google Cloud Network and SSDs are about an order of magnitude better (in terms of performance / price) compared to AWS Network and SSDs. Googles Big Data tools (BigQuery, PubSub, Bigtable, Dataflow) can scale to petabyte scale without any problem. AWS can be OK for terabyte scale data workloads, but beyond that, it's hard to scale and manage. Other pieces like Kubernetes, TensorFlow and Dataflow (Opensource, if you want to run in-house) and available as native Cloud services, all services are fully managed makes Google Cloud the best Cloud.

GCE is less expensive than AWS even with AWS's long-term contracts. If you pay money upfront (losing the interest) and reserve instances for 3 years, then you can beat GCE prices by a small margin. But, if you take into consideration of interest on upfront capital expense, lost flexibility due to reserved instances, cloud cost cuts, GCE beats AWS even with the 3-year commitment. We go to Cloud because Cloud gives us agility and enables us to create infrastructure in a matter of minutes without any constraints (Imagine singing up a contract with your electricity company agreeing that you will consume the electricity for TV for 3 years on a 24x7 basis. That what reserving capacity looks like). Reserving capacity does not belong to the age of Cloud, it belongs to the age of data centers.