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Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

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Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#31

Post by colmmacc »

vgt wrote: post #27
rpedela wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS also has their own backbone. Starting at about 7 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPfQgatMko

Google's backbone is a little bit different. Google Cloud shares this backbone with Youtube, Maps, and the rest. Not only are there DC-to-DC cables, our backbone extends to a vast number of Edge POPS (more than AWS and Azure combined), detailed at [0]. Our DC-to-DC network is pretty great too, allowing things like Spanner to exist (minimizing P in CAP etc) at [1]. Here's what it means for you in practice: - Google's…

I work at AWS and I think there's definitely some similarities and differences. We do share our backbone with CloudFront, and hence our video traffic, of which there's quite a lot these days. We also advertise our network ranges broadly, it's our mission to carry the traffic as much as possible ourselves. So those aspects are very similar.

But a genuine difference is that we don't try to operate a global "seamless" network. The reason is that we optimize for the "A" in CAP. Our experience is that at the low-ish level of a network, it can be too easy for outages and availability issues to spread quickly. For example, with global networking then a misconfiguration or error can more easily propagate globally and bring everything down.

Instead, we have autonomous uncoupled regions and it's one of our core principles that faults and errors stay within these regions (or better yet, availability zones). That does mean that partitions can happen, but find that most customers use active-standby configurations (where it makes no real difference) for key data, and we also build the tools that work with partitionable networks at a higher level. For example Route 53 supports multi-region routing and failover, and does it measurably better than simple anycast routing can achieve.

Over time, we're offering more and more multi-region services, such as cross-region replication for data, but the coordination is done at higher levels where we can achieve higher levels of availability in simpler ways, built on top of a more solid foundation.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#32

Post by purespark2 »

bzz01 wrote: post #2

I've built this page since I often just want to pick a spot instance type that gives me biggest bang for the buck. Amazon's own pricing page is still very confusing, and ec2instances.info is great but it is a static website and adding spot prices there is nontrivial. I've also fixed a few minor things that annoyed me, such as correct sorting by instance type (so that r3.16x goes after r3.4x) and added a mode to displ…

This is very useful for me too. Thanks for putting it together!

For me, it would also be nice to see the total price/time unit on the same table as the price/gb.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#33

Post by lwansbrough »

nodesocket wrote: post #4

Pricing is yet another area where Google Compute Engine is superior. Automatic sustained use discounts[1], the ability to commit long term to a certain amount of cpus and memory and get a discount without any upfront cost[2]. Extended memory[3], basically you can craft a VM instance of any size. Need just 1 cpu but 32 GB of memory, no problem. AWS on the other hand... A labyrinth of pricing tables, spot instances, EB…

Worth mentioning that while Azure doesn't automatically provide the same sustained use discounts (MS' model is more similar to AWS') - Azure is considerably cheaper than either GCE or AWS for various configurations (but not all.)

I don't have a source handy at the moment. Please correct me if my knowledge is out dated a I haven't done a comparison myself recently.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#34

Post by pbarnes_1 »

vgt wrote: post #27
rpedela wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS also has their own backbone. Starting at about 7 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPfQgatMko

Google's backbone is a little bit different. Google Cloud shares this backbone with Youtube, Maps, and the rest. Not only are there DC-to-DC cables, our backbone extends to a vast number of Edge POPS (more than AWS and Azure combined), detailed at [0]. Our DC-to-DC network is pretty great too, allowing things like Spanner to exist (minimizing P in CAP etc) at [1]. Here's what it means for you in practice: - Google's…

Just in case you can forward this on... AWS EC2 eu-west-2 (London) to GCP Network Loader Balancer is about 12ms round trip for some reason. Most other anycast services located in London are 0.5-2ms round trip.

Just something I noticed recently. :)

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#35

Post by boulos »

colmmacc wrote: post #31
vgt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's backbone is a little bit different. Google Cloud shares this backbone with Youtube, Maps, and the rest. Not only are there DC-to-DC cables, our backbone extends to a vast number of Edge POPS (more than AWS and Azure combined), detailed at [0]. Our DC-to-DC network is pretty great too, allowing things like Spanner to exist (minimizing P in CAP etc) at [1]. Here's what it means for you in practice: - Google's…

I work at AWS and I think there's definitely some similarities and differences. We do share our backbone with CloudFront, and hence our video traffic, of which there's quite a lot these days. We also advertise our network ranges broadly, it's our mission to carry the traffic as much as possible ourselves. So those aspects are very similar. But a genuine difference is that we don't try to operate a global "seamless" n…

Yeah, at least one outage in the last year for us included the paraphrased "anycast is hard". There's definitely an advantage to limited-blast-radius services, but I wouldn't trade GCS's multiregional buckets for S3 CRR (the same applies to Datastore, etc.). We have strict reliability requirements for global services; our perspective is that some customers want regional control for regulatory reasons, and we're happy to meet those requirements. But composing a global or even multi-regional service on an untrusted, lossy network is "crazy".

Again, Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and this network existed when I got here!)

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#36

Post by mark_l_watson »

nodesocket wrote: post #4

Pricing is yet another area where Google Compute Engine is superior. Automatic sustained use discounts[1], the ability to commit long term to a certain amount of cpus and memory and get a discount without any upfront cost[2]. Extended memory[3], basically you can craft a VM instance of any size. Need just 1 cpu but 32 GB of memory, no problem. AWS on the other hand... A labyrinth of pricing tables, spot instances, EB…

I agree. While I think AWS is great, and I will happily use it if that is what my customers want, I think that GCP wins on price.

Having Diane Green in charge of GCP is an indication that developing GCP as a business is a high priority.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#37

Post by vosper »

boulos wrote: post #23
zjfroot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud maybe is superior in the pricing of compute, but it is actually more expensive on network egress traffic, object storage and block storage. I recently created a simple tool ( http://theprice.cloud/ ) to compare egress traffic, object storage, and block storage cost among AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. It seems like Googel Cloud is the most expensive one in egress traffic and object storage.

Our egress pricing (from all sources) is certainly higher because we operate a private backbone rather than just dumping your packets straight onto the internet. Your site seems to be hugged to death (so I can't see it), but there are lots of gotchas with S3 pricing (like rounding up file sizes with Infrequent Access and Glacier) that in our experience means our customers come out ahead. Glacier and Coldline also are…

Though Glacier is hooked to S3 (for obvious reasons) I don't think it's relevant to a discussion of bandwidth egress costs. If you're frequently pulling things out of Glacier then you're using it wrong.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#38

Post by boulos »

vosper wrote: post #37
boulos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our egress pricing (from all sources) is certainly higher because we operate a private backbone rather than just dumping your packets straight onto the internet. Your site seems to be hugged to death (so I can't see it), but there are lots of gotchas with S3 pricing (like rounding up file sizes with Infrequent Access and Glacier) that in our experience means our customers come out ahead. Glacier and Coldline also are…

Though Glacier is hooked to S3 (for obvious reasons) I don't think it's relevant to a discussion of bandwidth egress costs. If you're frequently pulling things out of Glacier then you're using it wrong.

I agree! Most conversations that somehow talk about GCS being more expensive usually are "oh actually, AWS just charges less for egress" (which isn't a non sequitur but is effectively orthogonal). Again, I'd respond directly if the site weren't hugged to death :).

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#39

Post by valarauca1 »

rpedela wrote: post #24
boulos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our egress pricing (from all sources) is certainly higher because we operate a private backbone rather than just dumping your packets straight onto the internet. Your site seems to be hugged to death (so I can't see it), but there are lots of gotchas with S3 pricing (like rounding up file sizes with Infrequent Access and Glacier) that in our experience means our customers come out ahead. Glacier and Coldline also are…

AWS also has their own backbone. Starting at about 7 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPfQgatMko

During/After the dot com crash Google purchased a lot of backbone fiber at dirt cheap prices.

The DC-to-DC interconnects google has are extremely robust.

Re: Show HN: EC2 prices per GB of memory

#40

Post by delhanty »

colmmacc wrote: post #31
vgt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's backbone is a little bit different. Google Cloud shares this backbone with Youtube, Maps, and the rest. Not only are there DC-to-DC cables, our backbone extends to a vast number of Edge POPS (more than AWS and Azure combined), detailed at [0]. Our DC-to-DC network is pretty great too, allowing things like Spanner to exist (minimizing P in CAP etc) at [1]. Here's what it means for you in practice: - Google's…

I work at AWS and I think there's definitely some similarities and differences. We do share our backbone with CloudFront, and hence our video traffic, of which there's quite a lot these days. We also advertise our network ranges broadly, it's our mission to carry the traffic as much as possible ourselves. So those aspects are very similar. But a genuine difference is that we don't try to operate a global "seamless" n…

>For example, with global networking then a misconfiguration or error can more easily propagate globally and bring everything down.

This sounds like Nassim Taleb's antifragile meme [1].

If I was running IT for some large enterprise (which I'm not!) then I might replicate services on both AWS and Google Cloud. A bit like Apple try to have more than one supplier for their hardware components.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile

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