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

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

#91

Post by tejasmanohar »

gdgtfiend wrote: post #68

Two points here really hit home with me about AWS (not in comparison to GCE though since I've never tried it). 1) Reserved Instances: I think the pricing model for this has become very outdated since the beginning of AWS, and it is definitely becoming cumbersome (and therefore scary) to use. 2) ELB + Traffic Spikes: I have tried (unsuccessfully) to pre-scale an ELB to prepare it for the traffic it was about to receiv…

We also manually sync up with AWS support to "warm up" our ELBs... I guess they don't expose an option to avoid abuse, but it really does seem like an implementation caveat.

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

#92

Post by lobster_johnson »

Thaxll wrote: post #87
lobster_johnson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be fair, that's no longer the case. I personally had no issues with that.

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

#93

Post by rahrahrah »

GordonS wrote: post #72
Veratyr wrote: 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.

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..

Hmm sounds like you might have to increase your bids.

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

#94

Post by vgt »

tomassre wrote: post #78
ungzd wrote: 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 d…

I hear ya.

Check out the postmortem for the BigQuery Streaming API outage [0]. Relevant paragraph:

"Finally, we have received feedback that our communications during the outage left a lot to be desired. We agree with this feedback. While our engineering teams launched an all-hands-on-deck to resolve this issue within minutes of its detection, we did not adequately communicate both the level-of-effort and the steady progress of diagnosis, triage and restoration happening during the incident. We clearly erred in not communicating promptly, crisply and transparently to affected customers during this incident. We will be addressing our communications — for all Google Cloud systems, not just BigQuery — as part of a separate effort, which has already been launched."

(Work on Google Cloud and was on BigQuery team in the past)

[0] https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/bigquery/18022

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

#95

Post by user5994461 »

patwolf wrote: post #6

What reason is AWS premium support mandatory? I ask because I'm currently building out SaaS offering on AWS and haven't yet hit any issues requiring support. Can I expect to start seeing issues as traffic scales up to a certain level?

Author of the article here.

It's not. It's utterly useless. After an entire year, where the support has never been of any help, my last action for the year 2016 was to call a meeting with everyone, subject line "we should cancel our support subscription with AWS".

It's clear that we (especially me) are way more qualified in all AWS offerings, from basics to special quirks, than they are. And they can't do anything that we can't do ourselves.

I think the support is useful when you first start out, they can answer a lot of general questions. You should subscribe for support the first year and see how it goes.

Note that some AWS managed services (e.g. RDS) can only be debugged by the support so you might be forced into support if you use these services. We don't.

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

#96

Post by shshhdhs »

chrisabrams wrote: post #16
aluminussoma wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you help me understand how much you define "a lot"? Is it about 2 tickets a month, or more? With AWS we do have a direct line to a Technical Account Manager which we utilize for the rare P1 (Prod down) situations. That gets things moving quickly if it wasn't already moving quickly with Support.

You have the same thing for gold and up on GCE. On the rare occasions I have to use it, I get every pennies worth. Also with P1 issues on GCE most of the time an enginner assigned to the case calls me. I've even spoken directly to the head of google cloud platform via hangouts.

What company do you work for?

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

#97

Post by bdcravens »

Veratyr wrote: post #25
bdcravens wrote: post #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.

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

AWS's limits are in real-time however. I don't mind the limits, I just don't like the fact that I can't run a quick test without it impacting me for the billing cycle.

I'll check out the GCS XML compatibility with the current tooling we use; it looks promising.

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

#99

Post by saurik »

inopinatus wrote: post #38

I have serious trust issues with Google. Their history of discontinuing services, dismal support (even for a paid service), and neglect of bugs in SDKs/APIs - all three of which I have experienced first-hand - has left a long-term bitter taste. No doubt some individuals are fantastic, but the organisation as a whole gives me an enduring impression of being systematically arrogant and aloof. AWS by contrast have demon…

This thread of comments from a year and a half ago, on the article "How Amazon took control of the cloud", is really epic on these points.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825

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

#100

Post by bdcravens »

swozey wrote: post #26
bdcravens wrote: post #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.

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 ca…

See my comment to sibling - I'm okay with limits, just wish I could tear down a project in real time to be able to add projects.

As for storage, as a developer I'm okay with command line tools and APIs, but there are some tools out there for non-developers where they can just drag and drop files without caring who the cloud provider is. However, it looks like it may be XML API compatible, so existing tools may still work.

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