Live data from Hacker News

AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

freeman.vc

11–20 of 245 posts

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#12

A few weeks ago I needed to change the volume type on an EC2 instance to gp3. Following the instructions, the change happened while the instance was running. I didn't need to reboot or stop the instance, it just changed the type. While the instance was running. I didn't understand how they were able to do this, I had thought volume types mapped to hardware clusters of some kind. And since I didn't understand, I wasn'…

Assuming this blurb is accurate: " General-purpose SSD volume (gp3) provides the consistent 125 MiB/s throughput and 3000 IOPS within the price of provisioned storage. Additional IOPS (up to 16,000) and throughput (1000 MiB/s) can be provisioned with an additional price. The General-purpose SSD volume (gp2) provides 3 IOPS per GiB storage provisioned with a minimum of 100 IOPS"

... then it seems like a device that limits bandwidth either on the storage cluster or between the node and storage cluster is present. 125MiB/s is right around the speed of a 1gbit link, I believe. That it was a networking setting changed in-switch doesn't seem to be surprising.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#15
post #8

Is this testing for spot instances? In my limited experience, persistent (on-demand) GCP instances always boot up much faster than AWS EC2 instances.

In my experience GPU persistent instances often simply don't boot up on GCP due to lack of available GPUs. One reason I didn't choose GCP at my last company.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#16

I wonder why someone would equate "instance launch time" with "reliability"... I won't go as far as calling it "clickbait" but wouldn't some other noun ("startup performance is wildly different") have made more sense?

GCP also had 84 errors compared to 1 for AWS

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#19
> The offerings between the two cloud vendors are also not the same, which might relate to their differing response times. GCP allows you to attach a GPU to an arbitrary VM as a hardware accelerator - you can separately configure quantity of the CPUs as needed. AWS only provisions defined VMs that have GPUs attached - the g4dn.x series of hardware here. Each of these instances are fixed in their CPU allocation, so if you want one particular varietal of GPU you are stuck with the associated CPU configuration.

At a surface level, the above (from the article) seems like a pretty straightforward explanation? GCP gives you more flexibility in configuring GPU instances at the trade off of increased startup time variability.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#20
post #7

A few weeks ago I needed to change the volume type on an EC2 instance to gp3. Following the instructions, the change happened while the instance was running. I didn't need to reboot or stop the instance, it just changed the type. While the instance was running. I didn't understand how they were able to do this, I had thought volume types mapped to hardware clusters of some kind. And since I didn't understand, I wasn'…

Dunno about AWS, but GCP uses live migration, and will migrate your VM across physical machines as necessary. The disk volumes are all connected over the network, nothing really depends on the actual physical machine your VM is ran on.

How does migrating a vm to another physical machine work?
Post reply on HN