anyone know where GCE stands in terms of PCI compliance? i know AWS is a level 1 PCI-compliant service provider and makes it a bit easier during the audit process.
Here is the recently published solution on how to accomplish PCI-DSS.
Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#62How do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
I'm an ex-Microsoftie so I tried everything to like Azure. They even gave my company like $600 / mo free through BizSpark.
Absolute shit experience, the worst I've had with a major platform. We went back to paying $250 / mo to DigitalOcean, despite being a bootstrapped startup with no money that hasn't paid ourselves in 18 months. That's how bad it was.
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#63How do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
Serious question: have you had to _use_ the Azure portal for anything? Like much enterprise software, the new side-scrolling mess which hides necessary information has the distinct smell of something that was built to sell on golf courses to clueless middle and upper management, and not for people who actually need to do the work. The load times are horrible because of the number of HTTP requests and the weight of th…
No, not for anything serious. I get some free credits every month for being a student, so I've used it minimally for configuring a few things for hobbyist projects, but I have never used it in production ready environments. Thank you for your perspective!
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#64We thought a lot about this question to pick a cloud for Quizlet (~200 cloud machines) and ended up going with GCP. Here's a summary of our analysis, hope its helpful: https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Yep, that's true. Capacity planning and reserving capacity should be taken care by the Cloud provider and users should be free to spin up and down the resources as and when they need them.
This is still the case, but I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount. I prefer GCE's automatically applied discounts to AWS's reserved scheme, but there are plenty of cases where you will need both flexible capacity and have predicted use.
k8s master, or any number of internal tools.
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#66GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a…
FYI, GCP is getting new regions later this year. US Western region in Oregon and East Asia region in (Tokyo) Japan.
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/announcing-two-...
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, that's true. Capacity planning and reserving capacity should be taken care by the Cloud provider and users should be free to spin up and down the resources as and when they need them.
This is still the case, but I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount. I prefer GCE's automatically applied discounts to AWS's reserved scheme, but there are plenty of cases where you will need both flexible capacity and have predicted use. k8s master, or any number of internal tools.
> I don't see the harm in offering the ability to reserve an instance for a discount.
There is no harm with the discount. The harm is only with lock in. Once you reserve instances, you can not change the type (different CPU / memory ratio), region or the number of instances. Once you reserve, you have to pay for your instances 24x7, whether you use it or not. If you require more capacity than reserved, you need to pay the full rate. If you require less capacity, then you need to pay for the unused capacity. You don't have all these headaches with Google Cloud pay per go and automatic discounts. You simply use as many resources as you want and you get the discounts automatically.
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#68If 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…
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 for compute than AWS, period, RI's or no RI's.
Disclosure: I'm a cloud pricing geek among other things working at Google Cloud Platform and I did substantial analysis on this, published here: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/01/understanding-c...
There's also a handy-dandy TCO calculator that further explores these dynamics here: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/tco
Let me know if any other details would be useful!
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#69Are they even comparable? AWS offers full virtual machines. I was under the impression that GCE offers a more high level platform where you run your code in their proprietery environment? If I am not mistaken, using GCE means you are locked in and cannot migrate away easily. That's why I never looked into it closely. I don't want to be at the mercy of a provider.
GCE ~= EC2 GAE ~= Elastic Beanstalk
I would say more correctly GAE ~= Lambda
Re: Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
#70How do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
Azure is good for corporate IT departments. Wouldn't recommend it for anything else.