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

thehftguy.com

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

#41
post #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.

YouTube red support seems excellent (the one time I used it).

And my father asked support for help with his Google Home routers with a very specific question and support was absolutely phenomenal. No going through lame troubleshooting steps; it was clear we got connected with a well qualified network engineer immediately.

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

#42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number of servers

Wow, your bill must be gigantic.

Well, it's not small, but definitely not that crazy. We're running an immutable infrastructure and the majority of the servers are a "cattle".

To be more specific, we redeploy servers from images instead of replacing just the code. The majority of servers (99.9%) is preemptible (meaning that they will be deleted every 24 hours) and thus we get a huge discount. Also our whole communication is through pubsub so the servers don't communicate directly between each other.

Thanks to all these optimizations, we run only what we need at any given time, which keeps the cost low. It's still much larger that anything I've ever expected, but I'm still trying to convince myself that this is the sign of success.

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

#43
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…

Sounds like there's a lot of money in DMCA take downs.

We don't do takedown. We do this https://blog.pex.com/the-daily-wars-of-online-video-platform...

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

#45
I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest.

I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting plus the immense fees if you somehow manage to get decent traffic together.

Once my reserved instances run out I'll probably either check out GCE or DO, either seems to be a better option, though GCE seems to be more expensive.

Anyways, the console in AWS is a mess and I'm quite sure that I leaked my entire IAM settings to the internet because some switch somewhere isn't set right.

Since everything recommends to setup IAM users you'll have to setup the permissions, a procedure which I enjoyed about as much as getting my fingernails slowly removed by a glowing red iron.

Calculating any sort of sustained cost is a pain in the backplane if the total doesn't exceed three digits a month.

And lastly the login process is probably the biggest pain I've encountered across many many providers. There are atleast 4 login forms I've discovered, 2 of which I have to use and one of those always asks for a captcha with such low quality that a brain-damaged AI running on my calculator could figure it out, not mentioning never knowing if the 2FA setup was correct or maybe probably blew up somewhere because giving some feedback from the UI is plain impossible.

TL;DR Don't use AWS, anything else is better.

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

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like there's a lot of money in DMCA take downs.

We don't do takedown. We do this https://blog.pex.com/the-daily-wars-of-online-video-platform...

Actually that's super neat.

I grew to envy you as I read. It looks like interesting work.

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

#47
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…

[deleted]

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

#48
post #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.

The author(s) have a high proportion of strongly pro-GCP articles; so many, and so emphatically worded, that I began to distrust the source.

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

#49
One reason why I still can't use GCE in 2016. No PostgreSQL support for CloudSQL.

I can find alternatives for other services, but I don't want to compromise on the choice of relational database.

Note: I understand there are third-party providers for PostgreSQL, but I'd rather have Google's.

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

#50
post #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.

Yea but those 1000 server are going to do the job of 100 dedicated servers. You still have to provision them, and there aren't too many use cases (there are some) where you have to all the sudden jump 10x of demand. The reason cloud soars is because in developed economies the cost of human resources is astronomically high. The savings are from having fewer people deal with stuff. Even 100k/year bill is okay if that means that 1 person has to deal with it rather than 2 or 3. So if you have money then cloud makes all the sense in the world, if you don't have money and have a bit of free time dedicated servers make a lot of sense until you have money.
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