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AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

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Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#81

Post by iLoveOncall »

dark-star wrote: post #13

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?

It is clickbait, the real title should be "AWS vs. GCP on-demand provisioning of GPU resources performance is wildly different".

That said, while I agree that launch time and provisioning error rate are not sufficient to define reliability, they are definitely a part of it.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#82

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Reliability in general is measured on the basic principle of: does it function within our defined expectations? As long as it's launching, and it eventually responds within SLA/SLO limits, and on failure comes back within SLA/SLO limits, it is reliable. Even with GCP's multiple failures to launch, that may still be considered "reliable" within their SLA.

If both AWS and GCP had the same SLA, and one did better than the other at starting up, you could say one is more performant than the other, but you couldn't say it's more reliable if they are both meeting the SLA. It's easy to look at something that never goes down and say "that is more reliable", but it might have been pure chance that it never went down. Always read the fine print, and don't expect anything better than what they guarantee.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#83

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

endisneigh wrote: post #80
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would still call it "reliability". If the instance takes too long to launch then it doesn't matter if it's "reliable" once it's running. It took too long to even get started.

that's not what reliability means

> that's not what reliability means

What is your definition of reliability?

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#84

Post by pas »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #78
rco8786 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but not anywhere remotely near clearing the bar to simply calling that “reliability”.

I would still call it "reliability". If the instance takes too long to launch then it doesn't matter if it's "reliable" once it's running. It took too long to even get started.

true, the grammar and semantics work out, but since reliability needs a target usually it's a serious design flaw to rely on something that never demonstrably worked like your reliability target assumes.

so that's why in engineering it's not really used as such. (as far as I understand at least.)

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#85

Post by dheera »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #55
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not a 4xx, what should they return for instance not available?

503 service unavailable?

Using HTTP error codes for non-REST things is cringe.

503 would mean the IaaS API calls themselves are unavailable. Very different from the API working perfectly fine but the instances not being available.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#86

Post by somat »

rco8786 wrote: post #71
mikewave wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if your system elastically uses GPU compute and needs to be able to spin up, run compute on a GPU, and spin down in a predictable amount of time to provide reasonable UX, launch time would definitely be a factor in terms of customer-perceived reliability.

Sure but not anywhere remotely near clearing the bar to simply calling that “reliability”.

It is not reliably running the machine but reliably getting the machine.

Like the article said, The promise of the cloud is that you can easily get machines when you need them the cloud that sometimes does not get you that machine(or does not get you that machine in time) is a less reliable cloud than the one that does.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#87

Post by [deleted] »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #81
dark-star wrote: post #13

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?

It is clickbait, the real title should be "AWS vs. GCP on-demand provisioning of GPU resources performance is wildly different". That said, while I agree that launch time and provisioning error rate are not sufficient to define reliability, they are definitely a part of it.

[deleted]

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#88

Post by endisneigh »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #83
endisneigh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not what reliability means

> that's not what reliability means What is your definition of reliability?

unfortunately cloud computing and marketing have conflated reliability, availability and fault tolerance so it's hard to give you a definition everyone would agree to, but in general I'd say reliability is referring to your ability to use the system without errors or significant decreases in throughput, such that it's not usable for the stated purpose.

in other words, reliability is that it does what you expect it to. GCP does not have any particular guarantees around being able to spin up VMs fast, so its inability to do so wouldn't make it unreliable. it would be like me saying that you're unreliable for not doing something when you never said you were going to.

if this were comparing Lambda vs Cloud Functions, who both have stated SLAs around cold start times, and there were significant discrepancies, sure.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#89

Post by rmah »

dark-star wrote: post #13

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?

They are talking about the reliability of AWS vs GCP. As a user of both, I'd categorize predictable startup times under reliability because if it took more than a minute or so, we'd consider it broken. I suspect many others would have even tighter constraints.

Re: AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different

#90

Post by lelandfe »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #81
dark-star wrote: post #13

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?

It is clickbait, the real title should be "AWS vs. GCP on-demand provisioning of GPU resources performance is wildly different". That said, while I agree that launch time and provisioning error rate are not sufficient to define reliability, they are definitely a part of it.

> wildly different

For this, I'd prefer a title that lets me draw my own conclusions. 84 errors out of 3000 doesn't sound awful to me...? But what do I know – maybe just give me the data:

"1 in 3000 GPUs fail to spawn on AWS. GCP: 84"

"Time to provision GPU with AWS: 11.4s. GCP: 42.6s"

"GCP >4x avg. time to provision GPU than AWS"

"Provisioning on GCP both slower and more error-prone than AWS"

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