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Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2: Video Transcoding

blog.zencoder.com

31–33 of 33 posts

Re: Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2: Video Transcoding

#31
post #2

How could transfers from Google to Amazon be so much faster than from Google to Google?

Google's infrastructure wasn't build to be used 3rd parties, and it shows. It is lipstick on a pig, and Google is absolutely looking like a dinosaur in the IaaS cloud computing world.

Re: Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2: Video Transcoding

#32
post #24

This is nice, simple experiment design. However, I'm really surprised they only ran this once - or indicate trial counts and indicate range/distribution. I'd be curious if video transcoding is so consistent that a single measurement is enough to draw a conclusion; certainly network/storage transfer is not. Sure, time and bandwidth are not free...

Hi DMV - we ran the transcoding tests a few times, but transcoding performance is pretty steady across multiple runs (here and elsewhere).

Network obviously isn't; the numbers here include about a dozen test runs. We should make that more clear. Even a dozen isn't enough to be a scientific test, so hopefully we (or someone else) will do more benchmarking in the future.

Re: Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2: Video Transcoding

#33
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the SFX film industry is not using GPUs, at least not for final renders because differences floating point precision.

Floating point precision isn't the problem - when your output is 8 or 10 bit resolution, floating point differences aren't a big deal. The biggest blocking factor is amount of code that needs to be ported to make it work. High end SFX companies spend virtually all their man hours implementing new stuff. They don't have the time to go back and reimplement everything, and their customers aren't so cost sensitive that t…

Well, I know of at least one very large SFX shop that skipped GPUs for now because the results were not consistent with results from the host CPUs. But you're correct, man-hours to rewrite are more expensive than the CPU time in that application.
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