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What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

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Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#101

Post by obulpathi »

StreamBright wrote: post #43
obulpathi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. That's right.Google has built their custom networking. It's like when a machine A sends packet to machine B, the packet is handed over to Google SDN (Software-defined Network), which carries to over their private network and then injects the packet into machine B. Googles network is an order of magnitude faster compared to AWS.

You mean if AWS has 50ms data center latency than GCP has 5ms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster.

Reference: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-comp...

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#102

Post by eloff »

StreamBright wrote: post #23

I am not sure about the technical merit of this link. Best of show: "Google probably has the best networking technology on the planet." How do we quantify this? "This is important for several reasons. On EC2, if a node has a hardware problem, it will likely mean that you'll need to restart your virtual machine." I would much rather create a service that can tolerate single node outages than relying on "live migration…

Best networking is a dubious claim. On the bigger AWS instances you can bypass the hypervisor with SR-IOV. AFAIK you still can't do that with GCP. So if you really need maximum network performance AWS will likely win, especially on latency.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#103

Post by vgt »

StreamBright wrote: post #88
jsolson wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Disclaimer: I work on the hypervisor that lives under Google Compute Engine) 1. PerfKitBenchmarker includes meaningful benchmarks for things like Redis, Aerospike, Memcache, etc. We expect GCE to score well on these when measured in terms of performance/$, and chunk of why we expect that is from superior network performance. Even small instance sizes tend to saturate their provisioned network long before they satura…

1. Thanks Jon, this is exactly the sort of comment I was looking for. Yes I totally agree, if you have a memcache use case your are going to hit network limitations before you hit CPU. I was just pointing out that HTML rendering is different from running memcache or a distributed disk persisted key-value store. Amazon figured out the need for different use cases and introduced R3 instance types with few cores, large…

Google Cloud platform offers Custom Machine types specifically to help you configure the most optimal CPU/RAM combinations:

https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/

Quizlet's post alludes to Google's attitude as well. With exception of GPU instances, Google's VMs are generic. You are able to get incredibly fast SSDs, best in class networking, etc, on just typical instances. Benefits are pricing is simpler, spot instance/preemptible VM market is simpler, and you get much more architectural flexibility.

(Disclaimer - work on Big Data @ Google Cloud)

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#104

Post by vgt »

outside1234 wrote: post #34
obulpathi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Support is much better on GCP than AWS. Reference: https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in... One of the reasons why Spotify went with Google Cloud is because of their superior support.

Spotify is one datapoint, and I hate to be cynical, but was probably paid off (in free / drastically reduced priced cloud services ala Netflix on AWS) by Google to write all of that. Even if not, they are such a large well known name that they probably got special treatment. The real proof in the pudding is the support that the 99% get, not the special case 1%.

At the end of the article, Quizlet noted their experience with GCP support:

"Overall it was a smooth transition and we're very glad that we picked GCP as our provider - we've received excellent support and scaled up our deployment with few incidents."

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#105

Post by gizzlon »

kyledrake wrote: post #70

I see a lot of these sort of articles, and I really have to bring this up, because I don't understand why people don't realize it when they decide where to host their infrastructure: Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive. $0.12 per gigabyte, upwards of $0.19 per gigabyte for Asia. Paying $0.12 for every time you send an Ubuntu ISO is crazy. A bored script kiddi…

"A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it"

This is really interesting and I wonder if it's true? Do you know of this happening? I don't. Is that just because no-one thought about it or is it maybe not as easy as it seems? Or is there another reason?

The bandwidth costs under normal circumstances should be trivial to calculate, right? I guess many services do not serve that much outgoing data, especiall after caching. But, of course, use the right tool for the job etc :) If the job is serving ISOs, then maybe PaaS it not the right tool.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#106

Post by kyledrake »

gizzlon wrote: post #105
kyledrake wrote: post #70

I see a lot of these sort of articles, and I really have to bring this up, because I don't understand why people don't realize it when they decide where to host their infrastructure: Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive. $0.12 per gigabyte, upwards of $0.19 per gigabyte for Asia. Paying $0.12 for every time you send an Ubuntu ISO is crazy. A bored script kiddi…

"A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it" This is really interesting and I wonder if it's true? Do you know of this happening? I don't. Is that just because no-one thought about it or is it maybe not as easy as it seems? Or is there another reason? The bandwidth costs under normal circumstances should be trivial to calculate, right? I guess many ser…

We're entering a new phase of the web, where almost every home internet is going to have 1Gbps connections, upwards of 10Gbps in some areas (US Internet has already started providing 10Gbps to home customers in Minneapolis).

The idea that datacenter egress bandwidth can continue to be this expensive is ridiculous. A company using AWS or GCP is missing out on opportunities that are about to be created by very fast internet connections. It's an entire "disruptive tech" innovation that these cloud services will be ineligible to compete with (16-30x markups!) I've run the numbers on switching to AWS and GCP numerous times, and the numbers never add up to something I could sustain for Neocities.

I might consider AWS if I'm just making internal apps for a giant company that thinks it's a great deal because their previous vendor was charging 10x more, but as a small startup doing something internet-facing, there's no way I could ever operate safely with that infrastructure risk. I would need success insurance or something. Short term I'd be fine, but long term AWS would be eating my profit margin and possibly even my company.

To say nothing of malicious bandwidth leeching attacks. It's just dangerous all around. I'm not even sure this has a name yet - Economic Service Attack? I remember reading a story of how GreatFire got DDoSed by China and got a $10-30k+ bill from Amazon because of it.

The rest of their offerings are more or less reasonable (their EC2 instances are a bit overpriced IMHO, but reasonable). But the bandwidth prices are just simply not. GCP could get massive switchover from AWS if they simply lowered their bandwidth egress prices.

It's fairly telling to me, lastly, that AWS/GCP/etc. charge nothing for incoming bandwidth and then charge a LOT for outgoing. Just making a backup of the sites on Neocities from S3 to another service would cost over $20 each time I did it (I can do it based on timestamps if I track all the files stored there in a database (double databases == yuck), but I'd much rather have access to something like integrated rsync support to make this process simpler and much more efficient).

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#108

Post by seanp2k2 »

defen wrote: post #66
obulpathi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't use GUI to manage our resources. We use CloudFormation for AWS and Deployment Manager for Google. Let me tell you a couple of things about those services. In AWS some resources are zonal, some regional and some are global. It's a mess to work with. For example, same AMI image has different ids in different regions. You need to create maps and stuff to make your code work across regions. Come to Google Cloud,…

For me, GCP comes with unquantifiable existence risk. As in, how do I know that it won't get shut down in 5 years when some VP sees that it's not bringing in as much money as it should? I trust Amazon more in this regard, and their offering is not "so bad" that I feel a need to switch.

Not just the whole platform, but specific APIs / services being deprecated / shut down too. Amazon isn't untouched by this problem (see also: VPC migration from EC2 Classic) , but I agree that given their reputation, I don't trust Google to keep even very useful widely-loved stuff around forever.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#109

Post by gizzlon »

kyledrake wrote: post #106
gizzlon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it" This is really interesting and I wonder if it's true? Do you know of this happening? I don't. Is that just because no-one thought about it or is it maybe not as easy as it seems? Or is there another reason? The bandwidth costs under normal circumstances should be trivial to calculate, right? I guess many ser…

We're entering a new phase of the web, where almost every home internet is going to have 1Gbps connections, upwards of 10Gbps in some areas (US Internet has already started providing 10Gbps to home customers in Minneapolis). The idea that datacenter egress bandwidth can continue to be this expensive is ridiculous. A company using AWS or GCP is missing out on opportunities that are about to be created by very fast int…

I'm not arguing that cloud is always the best option, but clearly there are many examples where profit per client far exceeds the cost per client. And btw, bandwidth is probably the simplest thing to calculate :) There are pros and cons with cloud, no doubt, but you seem to be ignoring the pros.

Anyway, on to the much more intereting question of misuse. I found these links interesting:

http://serverfault.com/questions/231116/amazon-ec2-bandwidth...

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=294632 (linked from the 1st)

Seems like the answer is that you must deal with it yourself, or get cloudflare or similar to help you. I'm my limited experience, other most data centers / hosting providers charge for traffic, AWS etc. are just more expensive.

Edit: This is not "Denial Of Service Attack" btw, it's a "Bankrupt by Cloud Costs Attack" :D

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#110

Post by dcgoss »

AdamN wrote: post #76
defen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, GCP comes with unquantifiable existence risk. As in, how do I know that it won't get shut down in 5 years when some VP sees that it's not bringing in as much money as it should? I trust Amazon more in this regard, and their offering is not "so bad" that I feel a need to switch.

Existence risk here is HUGE. If GCP doesn't move the needle, Google will shut it down. AWS is a much more living organism and I can't see Amazon shutting it down before their drones take over ...

Right after they sealed the huge deal with Spotify? Seems like a near-term shutdown is unlikely.
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