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Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#21

Post by rogerbinns »

trimbo wrote: post #10

Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?

We are having amusing problems with appengine. For example they provide no way to limit the number of instances they decide to start. If for example you run out of datastore i/o capacity (it doesn't scale with how much you pay) they will quite happily start more instances even though they won't help in any way, and actually make things worse.

We switched to premier which supposedly gets us all sorts of extra stuff, but for some bizarre reason will no longer show your daily charge breakdowns.

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#22

Post by recuter »

Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution as well as any kernel or software you like. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD.

====

Finally! I'm going to try and make TinyCore run: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux

10MB images, 28MB of RAM, should boot in under 10 seconds.

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#23

Post by regecks »

jhgg wrote: post #14

I really look forward to a price / performance comparison between GCE and AWS. Persistent disk performance and no charge for IO looks really nice. It'll be great to see some real world numbers and benchmarks. Some key metrics I'm looking for are disk performance, CPU performance (how fast a single core is rated relative to amazon's ECU) and network performance!

There are some initial benchmarks here: http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#24

Post by bgoldy »

tlb wrote: post #15
codex wrote: post #13

One salient new feature: Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenan…

I'm curious about how regular hardware maintenance improves reliability. Are you just cleaning out dust? Or do you do periodic stress tests to catch failures early?

regular maintenance helps with reliability because we do a lot of work proactively with power, hvac, switches, etc. which reduces likelihood of failure. Being able to perform maintenance in general is generally good for the stability of our system.

-Brian

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#25

Post by bgoldy »

regecks wrote: post #23
jhgg wrote: post #14

I really look forward to a price / performance comparison between GCE and AWS. Persistent disk performance and no charge for IO looks really nice. It'll be great to see some real world numbers and benchmarks. Some key metrics I'm looking for are disk performance, CPU performance (how fast a single core is rated relative to amazon's ECU) and network performance!

There are some initial benchmarks here: http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine

The guys at Scalr were working on some benchmarking AFAIK. It's not up yet but I expect it will be soon-ish. http://blog.scalr.com/

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#26

Post by bgoldy »

rogerbinns wrote: post #21
trimbo wrote: post #10

Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?

We are having amusing problems with appengine. For example they provide no way to limit the number of instances they decide to start. If for example you run out of datastore i/o capacity (it doesn't scale with how much you pay) they will quite happily start more instances even though they won't help in any way, and actually make things worse. We switched to premier which supposedly gets us all sorts of extra stuff, b…

Roger, sorry to hear this. Can you ping me at bgold at google.com so I can make sure you are getting the right help? Thanks!

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#27

Post by bgoldy »

threeseed wrote: post #19
lerchmo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

support is fantastic, we have a large cluster on GCE. I don't know how support will scale with general availability though.

You know it seems very suspicious to create a new account to say this. Especially since the common wisdom (and from my personal experience as well) is that Google's support is woeful.

I know that's the historical wisdom but we are working very and investing heavily to make sure that isn't true in general, and specifically for Cloud Platform. We've scaled our support team dramatically to support the influx of paid support with GA and are working hand-in-hand with lots of customers everyday. It's obviously never perfect, but I can assure you it's important to us and we are doing everything we can to make the experience with support as good as we can.

-Brian

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#28

Post by Strom »

rogerbinns wrote: post #21
trimbo wrote: post #10

Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?

We are having amusing problems with appengine. For example they provide no way to limit the number of instances they decide to start. If for example you run out of datastore i/o capacity (it doesn't scale with how much you pay) they will quite happily start more instances even though they won't help in any way, and actually make things worse. We switched to premier which supposedly gets us all sorts of extra stuff, b…

There's no way to limit the number of instances that are started, but there is a way to limit the number of idle instances that you are paying for.

Re: Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

#30

Post by Intermernet »

bgoldy wrote: post #27
threeseed wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it seems very suspicious to create a new account to say this. Especially since the common wisdom (and from my personal experience as well) is that Google's support is woeful.

I know that's the historical wisdom but we are working very and investing heavily to make sure that isn't true in general, and specifically for Cloud Platform. We've scaled our support team dramatically to support the influx of paid support with GA and are working hand-in-hand with lots of customers everyday. It's obviously never perfect, but I can assure you it's important to us and we are doing everything we can to…

Perhaps, and I'm not trying to be facetious, a detailed blog post regarding firstly, that this (customer service) has been an issue in the past, and secondly, the measures that have been taken ("We've scaled our support team dramatically") to ameliorate the support problem.

I see Google developing a bad reputation for customer service (on HN at least. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837249 for the most recent example) and some honest recognition of the problem could go a long way to restoring this.

I apologize if you aren't the correct person to direct this to; perhaps you can divert it to the correct channel.

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