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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

#81

Post by lobster_johnson »

Thaxll wrote: post #70
tscs37 wrote: post #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 con…

DO is nothing for serious business, it's fun to use when you want to do a PoC at home. AWS is by far the most advanced platform when you need to do something backend related, they have large number of useful services.

Depends. We've been on DO for 3 years (we're slowly migrating to GCP for various reasons), and it's great if all you do is run your own VMs and manage everything yourself, and don't have a huge number of them.

Bandwidth, CPU and local disk performance, reliability -- all on par with AWS based on my experience. Of course, DO only has VMs -- they don't have things like EBS (though some data centers now have attachable storage), any of the add-on services like S3, or ability to tweak performance by IOPS etc.

DO is a bare-bones VM provider, and it is very good for what it is. It's not a toy.

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

#83

Post by user5994461 »

tscs37 wrote: post #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 con…

Short version: NEVER use AWS if you're not in a professional environment.

Try Digital Ocean. That should be easier for you.

Here's an article from the same blog to help you choose a cloud provider: https://thehftguy.com/2016/06/08/choosing-a-cloud-provider-a...

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

#84

Post by lobster_johnson »

holografix wrote: post #71
lobster_johnson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A lot of the article's focus was on network performance, local SSD availability and I/O performance. I think it's safe to say his use case involves a lot of I/O. If "thehftguy" means HFT == high frequency trading, then that's not surprising.

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

#85

Post by mfrye0 »

tscs37 wrote: post #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 con…

Yeah, I totally understand what you mean. I felt the same when I first got on AWS.

What helped me immensely was taking a job where they had the whole stack on AWS, and I had the chance to learn by doing.

Secondly, I signed up for this class on Udemy and that taught me the details of setting up a legit infrastructure.

https://www.udemy.com/aws-certified-solutions-architect-asso...

I agree it's challenging at first, but once you understand what's going on it's fucking awesome. You can configure every little thing and I have my system decently optimized to cost next to nothing.

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

#86

Post by lma21 »

doh wrote: 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…

Based on which criteria do you preempt your servers? 25K sounds like a lot !

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

#87

Post by Thaxll »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #81
Thaxll wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DO is nothing for serious business, it's fun to use when you want to do a PoC at home. AWS is by far the most advanced platform when you need to do something backend related, they have large number of useful services.

Depends. We've been on DO for 3 years (we're slowly migrating to GCP for various reasons), and it's great if all you do is run your own VMs and manage everything yourself, and don't have a huge number of them. Bandwidth, CPU and local disk performance, reliability -- all on par with AWS based on my experience. Of course, DO only has VMs -- they don't have things like EBS (though some data centers now have attachable…

It's not very good, it's average, the fact that the kernel version was set in the panel was a huge issue. You provide a VM and you can't upgrade the kernel wtf?

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

#88

Post by user5994461 »

swozey wrote: post #53
tscs37 wrote: post #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 con…

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…

> If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc).

Disagree. You definitely need that staff.

Just because it's point and click UI (or script and execute terraform) instead of physical cables doesn't mean you don't need highly skilled network guys to design and configure it.

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

#89

Post by fuayenaha »

snvzz wrote: post #20
bhouston wrote: post #13

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/

Really bad support. And if you get packetstormed, they just nullroute you and call it "DDoS protection". Over the years, I've had plenty enough of ovh/kimsufi/hetzner/etc. For dedicated, I favor online.net and their alternative brand scaleway. Else AWS. I haven't played with GCE yet.

Being fair, nullrouting you is a DDoS protection... for them.

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

#90

Post by user5994461 »

aluminussoma wrote: post #8

AWS premium support is the best support experience I have encountered so far and should absolutely factor into choosing a cloud provider. Reading frequent stories of Google support nightmares across all their services makes me think twice about using GCE. GCE must find a way to counter this. Also, the AWS premium support fee is negotiable for some customers from what I have heard. They don't like to negotiate down, t…

Strange. I'd qualify them as the most useless support I've ever encountered.

In the year 2016, among maybe a hundred tickets, there was only ONCE where they could change something (an ELB issue).

And well, I'm not sure whether the fix was related to their changes or if it was just an intermittent error that happened once. Thus their implications in the only time something happened has yet to be proven.

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