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Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

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21–30 of 73 posts

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#21
post #13

AWS, Azure and GCP instances are completely different to Linode, DO, Vultr, etc... With the first three you get dependable performance characteristics with minimal variation (excluding t* EC2), this is the exact thing you need to do reliable horizontal scaling. Linode and Vultr and DigitalOcean etc.. are great for the price point but if I'm CPU bound and about to scale the identical service to N boxes then it's a poo…

didn't get your last remark re bandwidth. If 1TB alone costs $90 at both GCP/AWS, how is 3TB + 2 CPU instance for $20 is a poor choice?

You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of tenants is exponentially more than physical cores), so I maintain if your CPU bound and horizontal scaling these are poor choices. The cost of provisioning high performance networking is very real, Linode/DO/Vultr don't expect 98% of their customers to use anything close to 1TB and this nicely fit with the idea that they are poor choice for horizontal scaling - hence why AWS Lightsail isn't a threat to main cloud offerings. If you're just getting start and no where near the limit of single node then fine, I even use Linode for a few clients myself "Bandwidth: 39GB Used, 13961GB Remaining, 14000GB Quota ".

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#22
Good luck with DO, the last time I checked they still shut down your instances as you hit sustained 300Mbps incoming traffic [0]. Could never work with a service that weak on the policy side. Also remember the disaster with surge [1].

[0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw...

[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj35w/nra-compla...

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

didn't get your last remark re bandwidth. If 1TB alone costs $90 at both GCP/AWS, how is 3TB + 2 CPU instance for $20 is a poor choice?

You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of…

Did you know that DigitalOcean provides "High CPU" droplets?

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do that serves 1.2mm requests / second? I don't disbelieve you, I'm just wondering what type of site that is since English Wikipedia is several orders of magnitude lower than that.

Ads, one of the most shitshow industries in the world.

Can add to that, I worked for a few months in a small mobile ad network and the throughput of that was insane for the size of the company. Also a shitshow of a company on many levels.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#25
post #20

More of a rant. There's time you need more flexibility. I'm serving 1.2MM requests per second from 3 GCP regions, managing instances and GKE clusters with terraform, and I cannot see how could I possibly set that up in a resilient fashion with DigitalOcean. I think DO is perfect for certain scale apps. You usually care about UI things mostly when you spin up couple servers; but when you operate hundreds of machines y…

It's interesting that 130k connections/core is limiting to you. Care to share some more details? Are those websocket connections? If yes what do you use as your backend? Something custom?

Those mostly are slow user connections. Most of the direct user connections to our backends performed using slow mobile connectivity so request taking 4 seconds considered normal and that exhausts connection limit.

Ended up serving most of the traffic from n1-standard-16 or lower.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of…

Did you know that DigitalOcean provides "High CPU" droplets?

Interesting, I missed this announcement. This is definitely a step in the right direction to competing for CPU bound workloads. "Achieve up to 4x more CPU performance on High CPU vs Standard Droplets." I guess we can take this to mean that standard droplets virtual CPUs are contended at 4:1 - I would of thought it be higher.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#27
“Goodbye cloud, hello nice UI for VPS hosting”.

If Google’s own premium speedy network, anycast IP, global load balancing and security features bring no benefit to your web operations, then your math might be right.

If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google?

F/W default “Everything within a project should allowed”? Sorry, but no way.

Not familiar with other DO capabilities, but cloud platform is not just about a VPS available throu REST API, it is way far beyond.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#29
post #27

“Goodbye cloud, hello nice UI for VPS hosting”. If Google’s own premium speedy network, anycast IP, global load balancing and security features bring no benefit to your web operations, then your math might be right. If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google? F/W default “Everything within a project should allowed”? Sorry, but no…

> If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google?

The same options every business that needed them has done for decades? Renting dedicated servers én masse, colocating, or running own datacenters? And doing this in multiple countries?

What I'd suggest for a start is renting dedicated servers or colocating in a few places (EU-Central, US east, US west), and running on that.

Dedicated servers, even with having to maintain them, are always cheaper than GCP. Even more so is the network traffic.

I've started with dedicated servers with a few European hosters myself where I'd be able to get servers and traffic for 40€ a month that would have cost me upwards of 14'000€ a month with GCP, AWS or Azure (180TB+ traffic per month, I don't have the exact numbers again, but I used each service's cost calculator for this). Sure, if I want high quality networking, I'd have to pay another 360€ per month extra with these hosters, but that's still cheap enough that it means I can basically run a 180TB/month serving service on a hobbyists budget.

Re: Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

#30
post #19

I think this is called maturity. GCP finally knows who the target customer is, and they're building features for them. DO has really nice and simple UI, but try to spin 5,000 servers and you will see what a hot mess it is. GCP shines at a very large scale. For us, what makes the difference, is the spending predictability and massive discounts coming from running preemptible servers or simply committing to certain usa…

+1 you said what I was going to say. GCP probably doesn’t want the business of small web sites and portals. I think that under Diane Green they have a clear vision of who their target (large/huge) customer base should be and what they need to do to attract those customers.

For small projects, especially when I am paying the bills, it is difficult to beat OVH and DigitalOcean on costs.

That said, GCP is still my favorite provider, largely because using GCP makes me a little nostalgic for the time I worked as a contractor at Google - really enjoyed their infrastructure.

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