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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

#71

I'd be interested to know why the OP never considered Heroku

Heroku is hosted on AWS, and so you inherit the performance, but lose the ability to control it (no way to select local SSDs or enable IOPS, as far as I know, for example), while at the same time paying a large premium for the convenience of using their platform.

Thanks lobster_johnson, yeah I know Heroku is ephemeral so data is stored in a DB or somewhere else, often S3.

Just wondering what kind of work he's doing that took him from AWS straight to GCE without stopping to think about Heroku.

Maybe you've hit the nail in the head, he's writing to disk a lot for some reason?

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

#72
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.

Hah, Adwords must be an exception then - support is total crap. You're lucky if you get a canned response that doesn't begin to answer your question..

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

#73
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The actual people doing the tier 1 support at Google also got through the Google hiring process. 6 years and 250k on a CS masters from Stanford and they'll set you up helping people with home routers :) it's really not just a meme that Google massively underutilizes their talent.

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

#74
post #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.

I don't think this is nitpicking. This is probably the single biggest issue with Google right now: Don't know how to call their services.

GCE - GCP - Google Cloud - Google Compute Engine - Google Cloud Platform ???

I can see on that blog's analytics that people are looking for various terms which result in different articles and ranking.

This needs to be unified by Google. Personally, I think I'm gonna call everything "Google Cloud".

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

#76
post #55
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you're basically setting up a datacenter if you aren't using Beanstalk. I see complaints all the time about how complicated the networking is, IAM, etc is. But it's far more simple dealing with VPCs then having to buy and hop onto a bunch of F5s/Brocades etc that tend to require their own network engineers on staff. The issue always seems to be that someone tries to move a company onto AWS but they lack the e…

I totally agree, AWS is great if you are basically screwing in the racks yourself anyway (metaphorically speaking). But for running a few hobbyist/amateur servers on it, it's absolutely horrifyingly complicated, especially when I'm not really a networking engineer, I like tinkering in the backend but not to that degree.

AWS did just introduce Lightsail, which is for people who just want a VPS. It's funny because I worked for a VPS hosting company back when EC2 first came out. At the time I thought it was the death knell for that type of web hosting, but now ten years later Amazon is going to try and grab that same market.

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

#77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 25k servers / day one would think pulling this into real hardware and doing capacity planning would be cost effective.

That's what I was thinking. Unless they're really bursty (so they only need the 25k servers for an hour at a time or whatever), I would think that 25k servers would be well beyond the number where it makes more economic sense to build out your own data center.

[deleted]

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

#78
post #2

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

Thought I would chime in here since I didn't see anyone comment here about gold. We have GCP gold support. They answer all the questions / issues quickly and there aren't any limits to ticket counts I am aware of. During both the outages we have been affected by (~1.5 hour google load balancer outage, >3 hour bigquery outage) in the past few months, the support feels pretty bad even though there is nothing they can do I guess. However during the bigquery one, it was "outage will have an update by some time". There proceeds to not be some update for well past that time. Also 3 hours later its still we will have an update by some time but no more info when both of these were past SLA. Overall feels good and they answer any weird / general questions too which is nice (although sometimes on every reply they say I am going to close the ticket).

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

#79

Looking forward to the day Google Cloud provides on-demand GPU-backed machines. Currently AWS is the only game in town for that, as far as I know.

Coming early 2017: https://cloud.google.com/gpu/

You should add that Google will allow to attach up to 8 GPUs to any type of instance.

That will put Google Cloud seriously ahead of the competition in terms of GPU computations.

Long term: Google has a better trajectory. IMO.

Note that AWS announced something similar at reinvent 2016 but it ain't coming any time soon. Not sure about the status, is it even real anymore?

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

#80
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

You should have moved to bare metal months/years ago. Things like making your servers preemptible is like putting a bandaid on a gaping bullet hole.

I may be missing something, why is bare metal better in this case (immutable/premptible servers)?
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