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2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

cockroachlabs.com

41–50 of 124 posts

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#41

I remember that GCP claimed they will follow Moore's Law and drop the price for the same instance type over time. It was just BS marketing, unfortunately I believed them.

I’ve observed price cuts over time for Azure and AWS but very hard to get good published data.

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#42

I remember that GCP claimed they will follow Moore's Law and drop the price for the same instance type over time. It was just BS marketing, unfortunately I believed them.

AWS also stopped to drop instance price periodically. Sadly Moore law has stopped some time ago affecting everyone.

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and without comparing spot/interruptible prices, these results are meaningless for me.

You wouldn't typically run your database VMs on spot/interruptible instances.

But you would run expensive machine learning jobs on them, and these (GPU instances) tend to offer more significant absolute savings when they're pre-emptible.

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#44

> ...in 2018, AWS outperformed GCP by 40%, which we attributed to AWS’s Nitro System present in c5 and m5 series... In 2020, we see a return to similar overall performance in each cloud. How did GCP and Azure catch-up to AWS Nitro in one year which IIRC is a coming together of minimalistic micro-vms, hardware-accelerated network and IO cards, hardware offload for encryption and other maintenance tasks... a work that…

Meltdown and Spectre did a real number on the c5 and m5 instance types.

Amazon's original fix reduced performance substantially, which lot's of people noticed, but no one knew why till the vulnerabilities were announced.

Meanwhile Google built a clever workaround which minimized the pain. It was really a mic-drop moment from Google and I wish someone would dig in deep and tell the whole story.

At this point I'm sure AWS has merged Google's patches, but it showed how much Google was investing in their GCP offerings.

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#45
post #2

I wish they had benchmarked the arm instances on AWS, I'd like to see a 3rd party validate AWS's claims about performance.

I saw this just now on Twitter (performance/cost building FreeBSD): https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1206688489518985216

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#46
post #39

Looking at the Azure networking numbers I wonder if they got their configs correctly optimized. Azure networking was always tricky to get best performance when I used it heavily at my last co.

No, I contacted them directly after seeing this report and confirmed they did not even use accelerated networking (which is a free, but opt-in service on Azure), much less things like placement proximity groups (which only recently went public). So machines were communicating across availability zones (separated physically by miles and logically by additional networking layers) and a bunch of networking was happening…

Why is accelerated networking opt in? It seems like making it default would improve these comparisons a lot and would help a lot of your customers who likely haven't found this setting either.

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#48
post #44

> ...in 2018, AWS outperformed GCP by 40%, which we attributed to AWS’s Nitro System present in c5 and m5 series... In 2020, we see a return to similar overall performance in each cloud. How did GCP and Azure catch-up to AWS Nitro in one year which IIRC is a coming together of minimalistic micro-vms, hardware-accelerated network and IO cards, hardware offload for encryption and other maintenance tasks... a work that…

Meltdown and Spectre did a real number on the c5 and m5 instance types. Amazon's original fix reduced performance substantially, which lot's of people noticed, but no one knew why till the vulnerabilities were announced. Meanwhile Google built a clever workaround which minimized the pain. It was really a mic-drop moment from Google and I wish someone would dig in deep and tell the whole story. At this point I'm sure…

Interesting! Do you know of any resource where I can read more about this?

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#49

They should also have included oracle which will soon surpass google (making it 5th most popular) cloud

Oracle's cloud is an also-ran. Just follow the investment the cloud giants are making. Oracle is not even in the same league. From:

https://www.platformonomics.com/2019/02/follow-the-capex-clo...

"Google’s incremental CAPEX spend in 2018 is about what cloud pretender Oracle has spent on CAPEX throughout their entire history."

Re: 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure

#50
I wonder why they stuck to the "standard" machine types on GCP. Unlike with AWS you get to vary the config there somewhat, so if your workload benefits from more CPU you can add jus the CPU. Same for RAM. That will affect the per-dollar figures because you can tailor your instance to your workload pretty exactly.
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