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

thehftguy.com

101–110 of 179 posts

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

#101

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) Increase your limits.

The time I opened a new account on AWS to do some disaster recovery. I had to send Amazon ~ 30 tickets for increasing limits and wait for a week :D

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

#102
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…

I have to wonder if their Lambda service might be worth looking into. Any reason you're using full on servers rather than some kind of a compute engine? I don't have the great fortune of getting to work with those kinds of numbers, so forgive my ignorance here, I'm really curious about your setup. :)

I'm not the original commented but I have analyzed Lambda for some tasks and found its costs prohibitive. Moreover, aws Lambda has a 300 second timeout limit so it is not feasable for heavy processing.

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

#103

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.

Have you found any compelling hosted Postgres RDS alternatives?

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

#104

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) Increase your limits. The time I opened a new account on AWS to do some disaster recovery. I had to send Amazon ~ 30 tickets for increasing limits and wait for a week :D

My concern isn't with limits, it's that they're not real time.

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

#105
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.

Depends on who you ask in the company and how you word the question.

For starters, most of the people here don't need to know anything about AWS. They just fill a [sortof] spreadsheet with a goal-team-instancetype-count-zone and they get servers up and running fully provisioned 5-15 minutes later. There's another lists with load balancers and security groups if they wanna do fancy stuff.

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

#106
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everythin…

Amazon also suffers from the bewildering-array-of-confusingly-named-services syndrome.

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

#107
post #99

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

Honestly. I would ignore any comment that is that old.

Running anything on AWS or Google 3 years ago. That must have been hell.

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

#108
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.

> Unless they're really bursty

Last I checked. AWS has hourly billing and Google Cloud has sub-hour billing.

If they are really bursty, they are in troubles with AWS pricing model.

> the number where it makes more economic sense to build out your own data center.

I would think that this number doesn't exist... unless you have already built datacenters for yourselves and you have a major internal expertise in that.

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

#109
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Just the sheer number of instances the OP is using has put the usage FAR into the territory where the premiums spent on virtualized instance costs far outweigh any clever strategy one might use to make things cheaper in the cloud. It has nothing to do with what the infrastructure is, and everything to do with raw volume.

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

#110
post #86
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 !

What do you mean? We use them for many sorts of tasks. We have only couple of fixed servers that are keeping the state of the whole infrastructure and databases that keep the data.
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