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

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

#41

Post by obulpathi »

teh wrote: post #37
brianwawok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in general, the comparable GCE offerings are LIGHTYEARS ahead in performance. Compare instance launch times. Compare internal network performance. I just cannot fathom using AWS for a new project. I guess if you MUST have some of the SAAS apps built on top of AWS and don't want to consider how you would run the same thing on GCE... but I think GCE would be a fantastic default cloud for 90% of people.

Do you have benchmarks on that? Not my experience for network speeds and CPU of individual machines but it's been 6 months since I checked.

Google Network and SSDs offer an order of magnitude more performance / price. Disks and Storage are about 2 times fast. Booting is 5 times fast.

Not just the performance, all Google Cloud services are fully managed (Think of S3 and Lambda on AWS). No servers! On AWS, only a couple of services are fully managed. Rest of them are a thin layer on top of EC2. If AWS is DevOps, Google Cloud is NoOps.

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

#42

Post by owaislone »

sandGorgon wrote: post #20

Are you talking just about the VMs ? Because if you're talking about the platform, then just the fact that Amazon has Postgresql RDS to take care of your databases is killer. And if I'm already locked in to AWS for one service...

Lack of managed PostgreSQL is the reason I've not tried GCC for anything serious yet

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

#43

Post by owaislone »

_jezell_ wrote: post #3

If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a sing…

AWS has more services but they also come out with improvements and newer services much more often than GCC. GCC/GCE is very exciting but AWS is miles head right now. Open source libraries and documentation available for AWS in a wide range of languages is reason alone for a lot of people to prefer it over Google's.

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

#44

Post by obulpathi »

dcosson wrote: post #39
_jezell_ wrote: post #3

If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a sing…

Does GCE have an equivalent of IAM Instance Profiles and IAM policies in general, and if so how do they stack up? One of the most underrated features IMO in AWS is being able to connect services without worrying about passing around, rotating, expiring, etc. any credentials. For instance if you use any of the client or CLI libraries on an EC2 instance, it automatically uses the instance profile credentials. It can al…

Yes, Google Cloud offers IAM. I find it easier to use than AWS IAM. Google Cloud IAM gives you curated roles, hierarchy of resources and thus is easier to use.

Yes, Google Cloud can manage secrets for you. For example, you can spin up an instance and let Google Cloud handle SSH key creation, copying it to instance, auto-rotating it periodically, deleting it when a user is removed from project, connecting to services from Cloud instances is taken care for you.

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

#45

Post by kjksf »

dcosson wrote: post #39
_jezell_ wrote: post #3

If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a sing…

Does GCE have an equivalent of IAM Instance Profiles and IAM policies in general, and if so how do they stack up? One of the most underrated features IMO in AWS is being able to connect services without worrying about passing around, rotating, expiring, etc. any credentials. For instance if you use any of the client or CLI libraries on an EC2 instance, it automatically uses the instance profile credentials. It can al…

It's been introduced very recently, but yes: https://cloud.google.com/iam/

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

#46

Post by obulpathi »

owaislone wrote: post #43
_jezell_ wrote: post #3

If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a sing…

AWS has more services but they also come out with improvements and newer services much more often than GCC. GCC/GCE is very exciting but AWS is miles head right now. Open source libraries and documentation available for AWS in a wide range of languages is reason alone for a lot of people to prefer it over Google's.

I find Google Cloud miles ahead of AWS. AWS does not play well with open source services. Google on other hand embraces OpenSources (Google OpenSourced Kubernetes, Dataflow, TensorFlow, MagLev the load balancer, integration with OpenStack ... ). This reduces your risk of vendor lock-in. I have not seen AWS OpenSoruce a single Cloud service.

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

#47

Post by nohorseinthisra »

ap22213 wrote: post #28

I work with 40+ partner companies, and they are all using AWS. Moving big data sets around is cheap and super easy. And, it's not been very expensive to process large data sets on AWS. On average, I crunch through 20 TiB for like $50 a pop. Given that no company that I work with uses Google's cloud, I'm curious who is using it. They're marking hard obviously. Makes me wonder what's an ad and what's not.

Off the top of my head, Spotify, Apple, and Snapchat run at least some part of their businesses on Google Cloud products.

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

#48

Post by obulpathi »

Scrayos wrote: post #29

I'd go for AWS since it has already proven its trustability, stability and usability in the context of daily routine/providing solid solutions for hosting high access-content. GCE is interesting however, I'll definitely keep that in mind for future "testing" but at the moment I'd take AWS as my "out of the box"-solution.

Give GCE a try and I am sure you will be blown away!

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

#49

Post by obulpathi »

whalesalad wrote: post #30
_jezell_ wrote: post #3

If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a sing…

Also keep in mind that when you are inside of a cloud (or at least a region within a cloud) you typically do not pay fees between things like EC2 and S3, for example. If you were to build parts of your infra on AWS and other parts on GCE you would pay for data to go between those deployments.

Google Cloud if feature equivalent of AWS.

If you build inside AWS, you have to pay for cross-region bandwidth like transferring data between the east region and the west region.

If you choose Google Cloud, cross-region bandwidth is also free!

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

#50

Post by elsurudo »

obulpathi wrote: post #40
xorgar831 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCE is less expensive than AWS for on-demand instances, but not compared to AWS's RIs. Unless there's a specific feature that you need in GCP, AWS is a safer bet from scalability, stability, support and cost. GCE has an edge on performance, per minute billing, custom machine types, and some datacenters in areas AWS doesn't cover, however they're learning how to be a public cloud, so you will run into beta level bugs,…

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…

> Reserving capacity does not belong to the age of Cloud, it belongs to the age of data centers.

Nice, I really like that way of putting it. The promise of the Cloud is, indeed, that it is supposed to abstract you from that, but Reserved Instances reveal what is actually happening behind the curtain.

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