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Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

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Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#191

Post by dragonwriter »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #176
domdip wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when that chance is perceived to be particularly high at Google people will act accordingly. Even if you think it's equal, we're probably in a regime of "nobody got fired for building on AWS".

AWS DevOps here (besides my many other jobs titles/responsibilities). When was the last time AWS EOL'd a service? Honestly, I can't remember, and I've been using AWS (S3/EC2 to start) since 2007. GAE, storage, etc could be close to free, and I'll still stick with Amazon; I'm paying for consistency and the long-term lifecycle of AWS as a system.

> When was the last time AWS EOL'd a service?

When was the last time Google Cloud Platform EOL'd a service? I mean, if you are asking about AWS and not Amazon, you should ask about Google Cloud Platform, and not Google.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#192

Post by prodigal_erik »

grkvlt wrote: post #187
bcantrill wrote: post #50

Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE. In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently)…

> they should pull across a marquis commercial AWS IaaS customer [...] a marquis AWS IaaS customer [...] how about just a marquis* Google customer I don't understand this, or at least cannot re-parse 'marquis' into something relevant. Can you explain?

They meant "marquee". A name that's impressive enough to put out on display.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/marquee

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#193

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

tburch wrote: post #96
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Datastore. Yeah. I kinda like Datastore though. Maybe I'm just use to it. The limitations just make sense if you want to scale. They also have a RDBS you can use though ... I've never used it. Still haven't figured out a clean way to do geospatial stuff with Datastore, so that is one big caveat.

I'm not sure what you're doing, but using GeoHashes on GAE worked pretty well for me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

What did you do to get around the grid adjacency problem, where adjacent points can have different prefixes?

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#195

Post by donavanm »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #176
domdip wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when that chance is perceived to be particularly high at Google people will act accordingly. Even if you think it's equal, we're probably in a regime of "nobody got fired for building on AWS".

AWS DevOps here (besides my many other jobs titles/responsibilities). When was the last time AWS EOL'd a service? Honestly, I can't remember, and I've been using AWS (S3/EC2 to start) since 2007. GAE, storage, etc could be close to free, and I'll still stick with Amazon; I'm paying for consistency and the long-term lifecycle of AWS as a system.

Amazon has deprecated & disabled old API versions, SOAP & security issues and the like. I think they removed some of the old SimpleDB eventually consistent Query calls & made strongly consistent Select. Some of the regional API implementation around S3 and the original "us-standard" region were changed. But yeah, AWS has never turned off a service or major feature that I canrecall.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#196

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

rogerbinns wrote: post #167
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are building on Google App Engine. We have enough trust in Google that we aren't worried about App Engine disappearing. I think this trust deficit is mostly in the eyes of Google's competitors. For my part, I was more worried about not being able to execute 3rd party modules that aren't supported on App Engine ... but even that apprehension disappeared with today's announcement of managed VMs. App Engine is a no b…

Have you found the configuration in appengine where you can limit the number of instances? It is highly annoying to us that Google is happy to run unlimited instances (all of which benefit them financially) but provide no way for customers (we are on their Enterprise plan) to limit that. Heck they can't even show us what the various charges are and point to a third party chrome extension.

You can configure the metrics that cause a new instance to be launched. I forget where that particular setting is ... somewhere in the console I'm sure.

We aren't live yet, so I haven't needed to think about that stuff yet. However, I've talked to people that have applications live on App Engine, and that hasn't come up in conversations ... so there must be some solution ... if not the exact one you want.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#197

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

jmagoon wrote: post #153
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are building on Google App Engine. We have enough trust in Google that we aren't worried about App Engine disappearing. I think this trust deficit is mostly in the eyes of Google's competitors. For my part, I was more worried about not being able to execute 3rd party modules that aren't supported on App Engine ... but even that apprehension disappeared with today's announcement of managed VMs. App Engine is a no b…

Do you have a link or some info about the languages they are adding? We're very curious over here--would love to know if they plan to add support for something we already have.

I don't have any links ... but Dart support is coming (already have Python, Java, Go, and PHP).

Also, with managed VMs you can basically run anything you want and still get Google to manage things for you. Manage VMs give you a sort of script you can define that apt-get installs the packages you need. You can also use Docker if you like to make your own VM images.

Haven't used it yet, but it looks good based on the demos. They showed a demo with Node.js today.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#198

Post by niketdesai »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #175
massev wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself. Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobil…

> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android. Mind you, I'm a huge Google…

It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set of groups, technologies, and directions.

Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity most people won't fathom) and do it well.

I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things work.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#199

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #175
massev wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself. Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobil…

> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android. Mind you, I'm a huge Google…

[deleted]

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#200

Post by rogerbinns »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #196
rogerbinns wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you found the configuration in appengine where you can limit the number of instances? It is highly annoying to us that Google is happy to run unlimited instances (all of which benefit them financially) but provide no way for customers (we are on their Enterprise plan) to limit that. Heck they can't even show us what the various charges are and point to a third party chrome extension.

You can configure the metrics that cause a new instance to be launched. I forget where that particular setting is ... somewhere in the console I'm sure. We aren't live yet, so I haven't needed to think about that stuff yet. However, I've talked to people that have applications live on App Engine, and that hasn't come up in conversations ... so there must be some solution ... if not the exact one you want.

There is no solution in the admin settings, nor according to their enterprise support. It is plain old tough luck.

The vast majority of our traffic is from devices that retry later if anything goes wrong. It is analytics information and hence there is no human affected by it.

Despite having identical settings and code across a number of appengine apps, we see variance in the number of instances they decide to run (eg they will start 4 at once even though only 1 is needed for the load).

At one point they were starting hundreds of instances due to some of our aggressive inter-app traffic (thundering herd problem). Things would have worked fine if we could limit the number of instances, but tough luck there. It required considerable engineering and tuning to make the problem go away that would have trivially been solved (in the short/medium term) by limiting instance numbers.

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