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What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

quizlet.com

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Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#51

Post by autotune »

obulpathi wrote: post #50
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…

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 prefer to use as a result as well.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#52

Post by pbbakkum »

partiallypro wrote: post #8

"Azure was eliminated since its a Linux-second cloud" I have a feeling this person never really dove into Azure, and just wrote it off because it had Microsoft services built in; and of course various sysadmins still have a strong bias against Microsoft, especially if they are Open Source advocates. Seems like the entire article is mostly just comparing AWS to GCP instead of giving an actual overview of the cloud lan…

To be more explicit on this point - I think Azure is a good product and the growth that Microsoft is seeing speaks for itself. However, for our use case, which is at least somewhat representative of a rapidly growing Linux-based startup, we didn't see any compelling advantage in using the Azure compute product (we may use one of their ML products in the future). Hence, it made sense to narrow the focus somewhat to what we thought were the best options. We eliminated Azure from our list based on the fact that our preliminary analysis didn't uncover any big advantages to use it over the other clouds, we wanted a cloud focused more on linux, and we don't currently use any products in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Yes I know Azure runs Linux, let me unpack that point: We had run previously on a cloud that wasn't focused on Linux hosting as their flagship OS. The effect we observed was that Linux was a second-class citizen in terms of features and performance. Perhaps its unfair to project that onto Azure, but I think its true that AWS and GCP think about Linux first, and Azure doesn't. Running a company on the cloud means relying on the compute product (GCE/EC2) as the foundation for your infrastructure, so we think this makes a difference.

It would be valuable for a lot of people to see more comprehensive stats across all clouds - I would love to see this personally and I think it would help people make better decisions about cloud infrastructure.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#53

Post by StreamBright »

thesandlord wrote: post #47
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…

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud > "Google probably has the best networking technology on the planet." How do we quantify this? In the article they did a bunch of tests. Quote: GCP does roughly 7x better for the comparison of 4-core machines, but for the largest machine sizes networking performance is roughly equivalent. There is also https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/PerfKitBenchmarker if you want to benchma…

Disclaimer: I used to work for Amazon, does not own any AMZN anymore

1. AWS does explicitly tells you up front that smaller instance sizes come with smaller network throughput. This is well known and well communicated even when you browse the instance offerings. Doing 7x better for a 4 core instance is hardly relevant (depending on the actual CPU type though), being able to saturate your pipe would probably consume much of your CPU time and you could hardly do anything else on the box. You can prove me wrong on this one. Synthetic benchmarks are not really relevant for production use cases.

A good read in the subject: http://www.brendangregg.com/activebenchmarking.html

2. On reducing OPS. You are implying that these OPSy things are not automated. You should ask your SRE co-workers about this one. For running a website this scale, you absolutely need to automate cases when the server is rebooted. Meaning, on shut down it needs to remove itself from the load-balancer or from the resource pool, and when it comes back it has to put itself back. Worst case scenario you can just terminate the instance and let auto-scaling do its job. All of these are completely human attention free operations in most cases, but I do understand that some smaller customers are not so advanced with automation and GCP might be optimizing for those clients.

3. I do not have any question, as I pointed out that in the article the author is talking about EBS while it might appear to the reader that he is talking about some sort of local SSD.

4. Great! I would like to know it too! We should petition together. :)

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#54

Post by bcantrill »

mwcampbell wrote: post #37

I wonder why Quizlet didn't just stick with Joyent but switch from SmartOS to the newer Linux-based infrastructure containers and/or Docker containers. Joyent put a lot of effort into reviving LX-branded zones on Illumos precisely to address the concern that this article raises with using an OS other than Linux. Also, why dismiss DigitalOcean as a niche provider for hobbyists? The simple pricing, with lots of data tr…

(I'm the CTO of Joyent.)

Sadly (and despite repeated pleading), Quizlet didn't bother to do anything -- at all -- with LX-branded zones. This was a bit dispiriting because they were part of the motivation for the work (namely, a customer of ours that was upfront with the "impossible" demand of the performance they saw in a SmartOS container but with their Linux stack). I think that even by the time the LX-branded zone work was clearly on a production trajectory (i.e., late 2014), they had already implicitly decided to move away from Joyent to a more established brand. That's fine, and I don't fault them for it (and I definitely appreciate their kind words for Joyent in general and our support and engineering teams in particular) -- but I do wish they'd been more upfront about their rationale.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#55

Post by wmf »

mwcampbell wrote: post #37

I wonder why Quizlet didn't just stick with Joyent but switch from SmartOS to the newer Linux-based infrastructure containers and/or Docker containers. Joyent put a lot of effort into reviving LX-branded zones on Illumos precisely to address the concern that this article raises with using an OS other than Linux. Also, why dismiss DigitalOcean as a niche provider for hobbyists? The simple pricing, with lots of data tr…

It seems clear from the article that they want actual Linux, not "I can't believe it's not Linux" LX-branded zones, not Linux running in a VM on Solaris, and not Linux running in a VM on Hyper-V. This is somewhat irrational, but people are that way.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#57

Post by obulpathi »

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…

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, no more zonal/regional/global fuss. An image is a global resource. It's available by the same id in all regions. Your infrastructure template looks much cleaner. Combine the power of Jinja, you can create far powerful templates and evaluate them on the fly. AWS has "three" queuing systems, "two" storage solutions with different API's and different quirks. Google just has one and its nails the use cases for queuing and storage. AWS micro-instance go poof, without any notice. Their NATS are known for being unreliable. Load balancers can't scale. Every service that I looked into, Google is way better than AWS.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#58

Post by wmf »

jessaustin wrote: post #14

So much drama for reserved instances. Different prices for different terms of service is a centuries-old business practice. If it's not for you, then don't buy it.

Pointing out that automatic discounts are strictly better than reserved instances sounds like actionable information, not drama IMO.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#59

Post by boulos »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #42

When we were using GCP, it would live-migrate our db almost once a day, which caused us problems that were hard to figure out. I don't believe the frequency of a live-migrate was anywhere near as close on AWS. I don't know if GCP still does that as often since this was about 1-2 years ago.

The rate of host failure on AWS versus the rate of our live migrations isn't apples-to-apples. There are a lot of reasons we perform live migration, and host failure is just one of them (see https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/03/Google-Compute-...).

While I'm surprised by your "almost once a day" (seems high), we have also made a lot of improvements in the last year to make them even less impactful.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#60

Post by boulos »

profeta wrote: post #32
brazzledazzle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if they demonstrate that they dogfood it the way Amazon does it will go a long way. Based on talks I've seen I know some internal teams use it (or at least did when it was free for them).

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.

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