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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

#111

Post by doh »

zeta0134 wrote: post #61
doh wrote: 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 played with lambda recently. It's further than Functions [0] but it has a lot of limitations. We like to have control over our infrastructure, at least some kind of control.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/functions/

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

#112

Post by vgt »

user5994461 wrote: post #107
saurik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll add that the main issue seems to be with Google AppEngine of two years ago. For compute options Google Cloud has Compute Engine, Container Engine (Kubernetes), and even AppEngine Flex Environment these days.

(work at Google Cloud)

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

#113

Post by vgt »

bdcravens wrote: post #97
Veratyr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One more comment on storage.

Google Cloud storage has the same API for all its tiers. So to go from Multi-Region to Nearline, you just change the bucket designation. One API, one service, one interface and set of tools.

(work on Google Cloud)

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

#114

Post by doh »

nodesocket wrote: post #51
doh wrote: 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…

Awesome, would you mind sending me an email (in profile), I'd like to pick your brain a bit further.

We were sharing the same office for over a year [geekdom]. You can find my email in of the discussion chains.

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

#115

Post by lobster_johnson »

hhandoko wrote: post #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.

Googlers on HN have commented before that they're working on it. No ETA, though.

With AWS now offering both plain-old PostgreSQL and souped-up-PostgreSQL-on-Aurora [1], whatever Google produces needs to be great in order to compete. However, I fear they'll initially come out with something that's on par with the current MySQL support in Cloud SQL, which is just a vanilla MySQL server behind a UI/API. (For example, Cloud SQL's read-replica stuff is reportedly just MySQL binlog replication.) Better than nothing, of course.

Cloud SQL also has some annoyances (such as not supporting private IPs and the need for the Cloud SQL Proxy [2]) that I hope they're working on.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgr...

[2] https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-proxy

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

user5994461 wrote: post #88
swozey wrote: 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…

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by doh »

banachtarski wrote: post #60
doh wrote: 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.

There are many reasons why bare metal doesn't make much sense for us, at least at the moment. Here are couple:

- we're very small team (13 people). We would never be able to manage this kind of infrastructure

- we're growing incredibly fast. Just 6 months ago we were running on ~300 servers. We grew so quickly that we are now working with GCE's infrastructure planers to plan our resource needs

- even we're not suffering from massive bursts, we don't grow gradually but rather in massive jumps. It would take us months instead of days to grow this quickly on bare metal. This way we can grow in days.

- it is way more complicated to host in many geographic locations, especially in asia. We need to be present in many parts of the world and with GCE/AWS/Azure it's very easy and convenient.

- we did try to work with some bare metal hosters (like OVH), but they are not able to deliver the servers on the schedule we need. They require way longer times and obviously much longer commitments

- the pricing is actually not that different once you run on preemptible (spot) instances. The bare bone would give us some performance boost, but the freedom is worth every penny.

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

#118

Post by doh »

geggam wrote: post #59
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…

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

I answered this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13260805

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

#119

Post by geggam »

user5994461 wrote: post #108
Turing_Machine wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can tell you less than 1000 servers in AWS runs around 200-300k US / month

I am not sure what he is doing at 25k servers but you can see real world math puts this in a serious money range. Data centers can be built for less.

I wonder if the down voters on the hardware comments actually run services at scale.

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

#120

Post by saurik »

user5994461 wrote: post #107
saurik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The attitudes and competencies of organizations generally doesn't change over the time scale of only a year and a half (which is really not long at all... I mean... I've been using AWS now for over eight years and had a product deployed on App Engine six years ago; the people I work with who really like GCP have been using it for three or four years, and our conversations about it and their experiences track that far back: a little over a year is nothing...), and when it does it is generally due to a massive disruption, such as a changing of the guard at the upper echelons of management. This is particularly true of companies that are dominated by personality effects, as are most of these massive tech companies. FWIW, the serious complaints I would lodge against AWS today are the same things I was complaining about back in 2009 on the Amazon EC2 forums. Sure, the actual technical abilities of products change over a year and a half, but that is neither the complaint of this comment thread here, nor of the one I linked. Let me put it another way: the key issues people have with Google are generally issues that happen over longer scales of working with them: things are great for a half a year or even two or three years, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you (whether or not you are paying for the service and whether or not you are generating lots of revenue; I mean: look at the fate of Google Wallet); if you seriously are throwing out experience from as recently as a year and a half ago and seriously believe that after three years knowledge would have become fundamentally out of date, your article today about "use Google, not Amazon" is clearly also worthless as the real question users need to answer for themselves is "in three years will I have regretted my decision", and you believe articles and comments and experience (such as yours!) is not capable of guiding people, which is ludicrous.
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