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What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

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Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#111

Post by dcgoss »

autotune wrote: post #51
obulpathi wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did a performance analysis of Google Cloud vs AWS. The results are in line with what is published in the post. The biggest thing that we can not quantify is "ease of use". Google Cloud is a pleasure to work with. AWS feel so clunky compared to Google Cloud. Don't take my word for it. Create a VM, login into it on AWS and Google Cloud, you will change your opinion about what a good cloud is.

If you're using the GUI to manage your resources rather than going the Infrastructure As Code route, you're probably doing it wrong. You should be using a tool like Terraform, which lets you use multiple cloud providers ( https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/ ), and can actually tell you if there are any immediate errors before attempting to launch a resource, so is friendly with Jenkins or any other CI tool you p…

Terraform has worked incredibly well for us so far. Definitely deserves a look by anyone.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#112

Post by dcgoss »

As others have said, the simplicity of GCP has made it a pleasure to use.

It has a great UI (material design), and the UX makes sense (the dashboard shows you a summary of your resources, resources are organized by project, notification/status icon animates when resources are changing, etc). Going back to the AWS dashboard feels clunky.

There aren't a million different image types for each region and zone - simple, autoupdated base images are available for Ubuntu, CoreOS, etc.

It has easy to understand base machine types and custom machine types with tailored specs can be created if needed. Product/service naming is clear (ex. Compute Engine vs EC2, Cloud Storage vs S3).

Addons like one-click secure web SSH sessions and Cloud Shell are amazing, no more key pairs to worry about.

Google Container Engine, with a hosted Kubernetes master, is a great concept and more transparent than closed source AWS ECS.

Their on-demand per minute pricing with sustained usage discounts is almost always significantly cheaper than AWS on demand instances, and your discounts are given automatically. Try the two calculators for yourself: Google (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/), AWS (https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html).

Also, I have seen Google engineers all over HN (look at the comments on this post!) and other sites responding, commenting, and blogging - they seem actively engaged while I have seen very little from AWS.

That is not to say GCP is without problems. AWS IAM is still superior - it is easier to grant access to specific services for specific users, or have an account for a web server to upload to S3. Part of that is due to the fact that there is more plug-and-play tooling available for AWS today - boto comes to mind (boto GCP integration isn't as seamless as with AWS), as well as WAL-E. AWS's new certificate manager with free, auto-renewed SSL certs and installation on EC2 is awesome. S3 is cheaper than Google Cloud Storage. AWS has a longer free tier.

Luckily, tools like Terraform allow us to mix and match services from each cloud.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#113

Post by sofaofthedamned »

mikecb wrote: post #97
AdamN wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

To shut down GCP, they would be shutting down the same services and infrastructure that power their own services. The dogfooding memo from years back is being taken to heart, and you're seeing more and more exposure of internal services and infrastructure. The scary thing would be if it ends up reducing the rate of innovation because they worry about changing APIs or services too much; obsolete accumulates quickly wh…

Exactly. If it wasn't making the money they'd just be shutting the public interface to this thing. It's not like it's orthogonal to their usual business, which is lots of computers and storage doing random workloads.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#114

Post by sofaofthedamned »

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…

I used to be with OVH, but now my servers are with online.net and I see what you are saying.

If I had a startup - i'd have a few of these servers as the baseline, then i'd scale up with AWS. I assume i'd be using Kubernetes for this or something similar. Basically i'd be using the cloud for what it's supposed to be - taking the extra load off.

Does anybody do this?

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#115

Post by frostmatthew »

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…

> Guess what AWS was developed for.

EC2 being developed for internal use is more myth than fact. The original idea was for internal use, but didn't exist much beyond a "short paper"[1] until it was green-lighted (by Bezos) as an external/sellable service.

[1] http://blog.b3k.us/2009/01/25/ec2-origins.html

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#116

Post by lobster_johnson »

dcgoss wrote: post #112

As others have said, the simplicity of GCP has made it a pleasure to use. It has a great UI (material design), and the UX makes sense (the dashboard shows you a summary of your resources, resources are organized by project, notification/status icon animates when resources are changing, etc). Going back to the AWS dashboard feels clunky. There aren't a million different image types for each region and zone - simple, a…

> It has a great UI (material design) ...

I disagree here. I find Google's UI to be the clunkier one. Sure, AWS is positively antique, but it's clean, readable, understandable and predictable in a homely Web 2.0 (or even 1.0) way.

Google's UI seems haphazardly put together by comparison, from the super tiny font to how common tasks are too often hidden away — the hamburger menu and the project selector being two examples. The progress of a task is also often hidden away and fairly inscrutable, such as when creating a container cluster.

When I started looking into the container support, I found that there's basically no web console for it. You can create clusters and see some summary of status about the cluster, but you can't see pods, replication controller settings, etc. — it turns out that the "Container Engine" is little more than a prebuilt Linux image with a startup shell script that starts up Kubernetes. AWS's ECS is the same way, but at least it has screens for creating jobs, adjusting resource settings and so on.

Google Cloud seems pretty great, but the web console definitely has a long way to go.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#117

Post by johansch »

StreamBright wrote: post #96
johansch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-dow... http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2015/08/amazon-product-ads-d... http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2015/10/amazon-text-ads-disc... http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/09/amazon-discontinues-disappoin... http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-discontinues-amazon-ele... :)

Nice, is there anything in the AWS side of the business that was shut down? I can't remember if there was.

https://aws.amazon.com/devpay/

See e.g. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=162701

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#118

Post by zbjornson »

eloff wrote: post #102
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.

On the contrary, this is one of the factors where GCP wins hands-down. In addition to the benchmark shown in the OP, check out one I posted on slide 14 of [1]. GCP achieves Gbit speeds on almost all instance types, and has higher speeds than AWS's biggest machines.

[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1B1jvWWh0ACaDv4ryEzLl...

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#119

Post by abrookewood »

vgt wrote: post #103
StreamBright wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That should probably be emphasised a bit more in both the article & in general. It's fairly common to have wasted RAM or CPU or whatever because you had to pick a particular instance type in AWS ("I need better networking, so I'll have to pick a larger instance ... pity I don't need those extra cores").

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#120

Post by abrookewood »

obulpathi wrote: post #57
autotune wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using the GUI to manage your resources rather than going the Infrastructure As Code route, you're probably doing it wrong. You should be using a tool like Terraform, which lets you use multiple cloud providers ( https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/ ), and can actually tell you if there are any immediate errors before attempting to launch a resource, so is friendly with Jenkins or any other CI tool you p…

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,…

Long-time user of AWS. I've never had a NAT service fail, nor a micro-instance disappear. I haven't had much exposure to GCE, but the removal of zones etc is interesting. How do you guarantee that your servers aren't sitting in the same data centre?
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