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GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

thehftguy.com

21–30 of 179 posts

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#21
post #7

We moved back and forth between AWS and GCE (based on who gave us free credits). Once we ran out, we chose GCE and never regretted it. GCE has many quirks, for instance the inconsistency between API and the UI, it misses the richness of the services offered by AWS but everything GCE does offer is just faster, more stable and much more consistent. One of the biggest problems with AWS is that once you outgrow the assig…

> AWS requires that you request exact type and location for your instances

Are you running 25k without using Spot Fleets? Spot fleets let you specify value per instance type, and then total value you need. ("Value" could be CPU, memory, network or whatever) AWS will maintain the lowest cost spot instances that fulfill your requirements.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#22
Evaluated GCP, and 2 main issues made it hard to consider moving:

1) quickly bumped into project limits just doing some tests, and the fact that you have to wait until billing cycle to reset the counter was quite jarring (I presume there's a way to increase)

2) Better tooling for S3 than Google Cloud Storage - non-technical members of our team need to work with files, and there's many nice third-party tools for s3.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#23
post #7

We moved back and forth between AWS and GCE (based on who gave us free credits). Once we ran out, we chose GCE and never regretted it. GCE has many quirks, for instance the inconsistency between API and the UI, it misses the richness of the services offered by AWS but everything GCE does offer is just faster, more stable and much more consistent. One of the biggest problems with AWS is that once you outgrow the assig…

> AWS requires that you request exact type and location for your instances Are you running 25k without using Spot Fleets? Spot fleets let you specify value per instance type, and then total value you need. ("Value" could be CPU, memory, network or whatever) AWS will maintain the lowest cost spot instances that fulfill your requirements.

We couldn't even get them to approve 5k servers on AWS. We run everything in GCE.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#24

God I hate any piece of writing that doesn't define its acronyms at least once. Google Compute Engine isn't popular enough that people should be expected to know immediately what it means.

Also, GCE is a service while AWS is a suite of services. The correct comparison should be Google Cloud Platform (GCP) vs AWS. Guess it's nitpicking.. but still.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#25

Evaluated GCP, and 2 main issues made it hard to consider moving: 1) quickly bumped into project limits just doing some tests, and the fact that you have to wait until billing cycle to reset the counter was quite jarring (I presume there's a way to increase) 2) Better tooling for S3 than Google Cloud Storage - non-technical members of our team need to work with files, and there's many nice third-party tools for s3.

1) AWS has similar limits: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_ru... and it's pretty simple to fill in the form and request more.

2) GCS has an S3 compatible API so you can use your S3 tooling: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#26

Evaluated GCP, and 2 main issues made it hard to consider moving: 1) quickly bumped into project limits just doing some tests, and the fact that you have to wait until billing cycle to reset the counter was quite jarring (I presume there's a way to increase) 2) Better tooling for S3 than Google Cloud Storage - non-technical members of our team need to work with files, and there's many nice third-party tools for s3.

You can increase the quotas under IAM> Quotas. They're extremely low on new projects, but I've never waited more than a couple of hours to have them increased significantly. Like 75 to 500 cpus, etc. One annoyance that they seriously need to lock down is that every time I request an increase they ask for a deposit or a project name that I own that has $xyz money spent on it already. I don't understand how/why they can't see the other 5 GCE projects attached to my organization. I've begun putting it in the quote notes because if I don't I'll wait a couple of hours for the "Please deposit $250 or send a project-name" then a few more hours after my reply to push it through.

It's not a terrible system, AWS does the same thing, you just need to be aware of it when you begin new projects and deal with it before you get rolling.

I use gcloud compute copy-files all of the time and it's extremely simple. I haven't used AWS much this year so I'm not sure how far along aws-cli or third parties have have come. I do generally prefer s3, it's far more feature full than GCS right now. The UI right now blows GCS out of the water. Your file revision numbers, etc are directly accessible from the UI, things like that.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#27
post #2

> AWS Premium Support is mandatory Is Google Cloud support even acceptable? Google is known for poor or no support for most services.

Google's known for poor or no support on their free services but their paid services often have decent support. Personally, I've found GCP, GSuite, Project Fi, Google Store and Pixel support to all be pretty great but haven't found any support at all for Gmail, YouTube etc.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#28
post #2

> AWS Premium Support is mandatory Is Google Cloud support even acceptable? Google is known for poor or no support for most services.

Support for things like the Nexus devices and anything you can buy on their store is very good.

Also, Google My Business support is also pretty good.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#29

I really like OVH's SoYouStart in terms of its pricing for CPU/memory intensive computations, their prices just destroy AWS/GCE: https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/

In terms of raw machine cost it generally goes owning a DC But each level down you go is another level of expertise you have to employ someone for and a loss of flexibility.

The strength of the cloud has never been cost, it's always been flexibility, the ability to scale up 1000 servers in 5 minutes without any preparation or management.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#30

This was referenced in the previous thread, but here is what amounts to a stl;dr: > "Unfortunately, our infrastructure on AWS is working " > "I learned recently that we are a profitable company, more so than I thought. Looking at the top 10 companies by revenue per employee, we’d be in the top 10."

I'm a bit interested in what their company's response would be to this article.
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