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What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

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Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#121

Post by abrookewood »

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.

Yes, unfortunately, GCE's reputation is tarnished by Google's approach to consumer-level services. I hope this changes over time - we need more competitors in this space.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#122

Post by abrookewood »

StreamBright wrote: post #93
Eugr wrote: post #75

They forgot to mention another nice feature of GCE - custom machine types. You can choose number of vCPUs and amount of memory and also the amount of local (ephemeral in AWS speak) storage in 375GB increments. This is a huge advantage. For instance, some of our jobs are computationally-intensive but relatively light on memory. In GCE I can run 32 core machine with 28GB RAM and it will cost me $887.68/month (without a…

This is good to know, I was running into the problem of not having the right instance type for my workload before. We ended up changing up our stack to make it fit better on AWS.

That's pretty annoying ... happened to us as well though. We had a requirement for PostgreSQL with 512GB of RAM. Can't do that on AWS, so we had to shard the database.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#123

Post by otterley »

obulpathi wrote: post #101
StreamBright wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-numbe…

What did you use to copy the file? If you used scp, your results are invalid and you must re-run the test again with a different protocol: you can't take advantage of large TCP window sizes with it because ssh uses a small, fixed send/receive buffer size. scp will penalize the performance of large transfers over high-latency links, even if the bandwidth between them is high.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#124

Post by jacques_chester »

shireboy wrote: post #49
brianwawok wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. If you are a 100% linux shop, what do you gain with Azure? Do they have better linux chops than GCE or AWS?

To me, the more interesting aspect of any of the clouds is the PaaS offerings. I like the idea of not knowing or caring what OS my stuff is running on or how many VMs back it. Throw some Node.js up into a cloud and have it run and scale automatically without me having to harden, patch, and maintain machines. Same with data - flip a switch and have a geo-redundant well managed database service as opposed to configurin…

If you want a PaaS to run on your IaaS, Cloud Foundry can run on AWS, OpenStack, vSphere, Azure and, pretty soon, it should be on GCE.

Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort on Cloud Foundry.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#125

Post by jacques_chester »

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…

> Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive.

It's cheaper if you use the CDNs they provide for this purpose.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#126

Post by Eugr »

abrookewood wrote: post #122
StreamBright wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good to know, I was running into the problem of not having the right instance type for my workload before. We ended up changing up our stack to make it fit better on AWS.

That's pretty annoying ... happened to us as well though. We had a requirement for PostgreSQL with 512GB of RAM. Can't do that on AWS, so we had to shard the database.

To be fair, GCE tops at 208 GB RAM currently, so you won't get your instance type there as well.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#127

Post by dcgoss »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #116
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 exam…

I believe Container Engine does a little more than you are giving credit for. Its main feature is that it hosts the Kubernetes master - you don't have to worry about setting up etcd, high availability, or anything else in regards to the master or connecting the nodes. Kubernetes also comes with a UI preinstalled on the master, allowing you to launch services and see info regarding pods, replication controllers, and more, as well as basic system resource usage: http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/ui/

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#128

Post by lobster_johnson »

dcgoss wrote: post #127
lobster_johnson wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exam…

I believe Container Engine does a little more than you are giving credit for. Its main feature is that it hosts the Kubernetes master - you don't have to worry about setting up etcd, high availability, or anything else in regards to the master or connecting the nodes. Kubernetes also comes with a UI preinstalled on the master, allowing you to launch services and see info regarding pods, replication controllers, and m…

I didn't know about the UI, thanks. But why isn't it built into the web console?

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#129

Post by eloff »

zbjornson wrote: post #118
eloff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I stand corrected. It also appears from those charts that the bigger GCP machines have more than 10gbps connection. It looks like 2x10gbps. That would explain why instances of all sizes are able to push more network traffic.

Mind you the benchmarks are for bulk transfer with 9001 MTU. With more jittery workloads with lots of small packets, like a webserver has to deal with, then you see the benefit of SR-IOV. So AWS may still have the advantage on some workloads, and some measures (maybe latency, maybe CPU usage per packet.) However, it's clear if Google can support SR-IOV in the future they will mop the floor with AWS on networking because their network infrastructure is obviously superior.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#130

Post by profeta »

boulos wrote: post #60
profeta wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they also used google reader for gmail (it was integrated on the top of the inbox). it didn't stop them from killing it.

This has been said a lot, but: - Reader wasn't a product that was explicitly bringing in lots of revenue, Cloud is (and we just hired Diane to run the business). - Lots of us regret that Reader was shut down ;). Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

The point is not the entire product. Everyone is afraid that the product will still be around, but the feature that drove them to it will be killed.

and there is no way you can disprove that fear from google products. You guys do that even with search.

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