What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP • Hacker News Board

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#61

Post by matwood » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

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,…

AWS definitely feels like a product that has grown organically and needs some house cleaning. GC was able to look at AWS, take those lessons, and improve from the start.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#62

Post by boulos » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

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…

I don't understand your conclusion (Azure is best?). App Engine is far and away the most battle-hardened PaaS, going from tons of tiny toy apps to the scale of Snapchat.

I don't disagree that having a PaaS and "marketplace" is important, but I don't see how you seem to conclude that GCP is less relevant here.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#63

Post by shaftway » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:49 PM UTC

I've just got to say, this is probably the best article I've ever read, all thanks to Cloud-to-Butt.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#64

Post by boulos » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

tshtf wrote: post #56

Security conscious users would be best served by staying with AWS EC2 right now. GCP lacks all of the IAM functionality in AWS.

https://cloud.google.com/iam

This is very recent though, and not considered Generally Available yet across the platform (meaning fully hardened, supported, and backed by an SLA).

Take another look!

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#65

Post by wowoc » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

My main concern with GCP is its unreliability. BigQuery API randomly giving 40x/50x errors (that has been happening for over a year), signed URL API returning series of 50Xs every few days, CPU on instances going up to 100% for some unknown reason (they stay in that state until manually rebooted), and many other bigger or smaller issues. And they never respond to your questions.

The UI is also weird (at least by my taste), for example it is not possible to search instances by their addresses, it is not possible to spin up more than one instance at once, and so on. AWS has an ugly console, but it feels more productive.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#66

Post by defen » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

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,…

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.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#67

Post by lobster_johnson » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

Google's cloud does look extremely promising, but the one thing blocking us from migrating (which we would ultimately like, I think) is the lack of PostgreSQL support in CloudSQL. AWS's RDS is mature and pretty great.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#68

Post by mayank » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

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,…

> 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.

This is not currently true. Google has: Datastore, Cloud SQL, Bigtable, BigQuery and Cloud Storage [1]. Each is intended for a different use case, as are Amazon's offerings.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/overview#da...

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#69

Post by obulpathi » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #53

thesandlord wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

1. For micro-instance and 32 core instance, the difference AWS and Google is not a big deal. For rest of the instances, Google Cloud is 4 - 7 times faster. That's not a "synthetic" benchmark.

2. Yes, everyone should automate Ops, but if the Cloud provider takes away some of the pain, its a win.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#70

Post by kyledrake » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 8:07 PM UTC

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 kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it. A DDoS could make you declare bankruptcy.

I have a server with OVH I can theoretically push 100+TB per month through and only pay $100. I get DDoS protection included. It may not be perfect DDoS, but it's not the $6000/mo I'd need to pay for Cloudflare to get the same thing with GCP (I need wildcards), plus the $0.12 per GB for anything not cached by them.

I know from people in the industry that they pay less than a cent per GB. Google, if you want to differentiate your cloud services, start charging better prices for bandwidth and do something about DDoS (project shield should be baked into your offerings). $0.02 would be reasonable and you'll still make a profit. That goes for all the other "great value" cloud services that are actually very expensive for anybody doing work that actually needs bandwidth on the internet.