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How Google Is Challenging AWS

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Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#61

Post by user5994461 »

dekhn wrote: post #48
ranman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I do think that GCE offers cheaper instances, but the 50% overall price reduction claim is unsubstantiated. The author compared completely different instance types. Monthly discounts does make GCE cheaper but for many instance types without that discount it's actually more expensive on GCE.

Don't forget, GCE VMs also support per-minute pricing while EC2 is still per-hour (don't think that changed in the past few months, happy to be corrected). many users spin up a VM, use it for 20 minutes, then kill it (all the data remains in persistent disk).

Author of the polemic post here! :D

@ranman: You could start by disclosing that you work for AWS ;)

I'll stand by my word. I can present the pricing comparison at reinvent 2017 if you'd like.

1) The equivalent instances are cheaper on Google.

2) Automatic discount is significantly superior and more customer friendly that reserved instances.

3) Google is faster or more flexible, usually both. That means that when you have specifications to achieve (IOPS/bandwidth/SSD), AWS has to get severely over-provisioned compared to Google cloud.

1 + 2 + 3 = https://thehftguy.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/aws-vs-gce-pri... the actual difference I expect on the bills depending on the type of workload ;)

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#62

Post by rrdharan »

naner wrote: post #40
mixmastamyk wrote: post #27

I would like to try out google cloud due to its lower costs, but don't trust them with my data--partially perception I know. Also Amazon has never failed me over the last 15 years I've been doing business with them, so I'll probably continue despite the clunkiness of their products.

I'm not sure if Google's commercial products are as bad as their consumer-facing offerings, but if we can't get someone on the phone when a support issue arises then we'd never consider using them for any cloud services.

[Disclaimer: I work on GCP at Google]

GCP Gold and Platinum support packages include phone support: https://cloud.google.com/support/

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#63

Post by justicezyx »

fumar wrote: post #16
justicezyx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dirt cheap computing is like the life line of Google. W/o that, nothing Google did can sustain at all.

Just curious on your thoughts, are not most modern companies (startups) dependent on cheap computing (+ smart folks)?

Google is probably the one company is most dependent on their computing efficiency.

Google's most prominent products are possible only because they could deliver those with the unprecedented computing efficiency. This is not to be found anywhere else. For example, search, Gmail, Youtube.

Before AWS, Amazon care about efficiency. But fundamentally, Amazon do not depend on computing efficiency to support the company's bottom line, or at least only in a degree that is far less important compared to Google.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#64

Post by ben_jones »

seregine wrote: post #25

Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matte…

App engine is the biggest enigma. On paper it is a near perfect cloud experience. It has a huge range of services covering the needs of most web applications: task queues, caching, RDBMS, storage, monitoring, logging, a fantastic dashboard; the list goes on and the scope of GCP and GAE in general is truly massive. At first glance the documentation is exhaustive, support quick, and you get the feeling that the product has the full backing of Google with many hundreds of engineers continually improving and iterating.

Yet then you get into the trenches of it and (IMO) you realize the sum of its parts is much less then the value of the individual pieces. You feel the pain of the documentation writers who had to transcribe examples and helper libraries to ten languages, "beta" features that have been out for years, "examples coming soon" in README's that are two years old.

Want to use python3? That's cool, use the flexible environment. But it doesn't support taskqueues or many other features.

Need websockets? Thats cool, we kinda have this socket API and similar for some languages and environments. It doesn't really work in the flexible environment though sorry :X.

All our python examples are in framework X, that's sufficient for everyone using framework Y, right?

Don't get me wrong, my company uses GAE and its benefits outweigh the costs for us. But there is a very real "Googliness" to the failings of the platform. The shear breadth and requirements of "fixing" and iterating on GAE must not be a very fun project to work on.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#65

Post by dimfeld »

pbreit wrote: post #51
aikah wrote: post #18

tldr; competition is good. Google Cloud UI is vastly superior to AWS. It's clear to me AWS didn't put a lot of effort into their interface, Google console is nice too in order to quickly experiment with the platform. On the other hand, it seems to me that AWS is still cheaper than GCloud right now.

Does Google have a $5-10/month "normal" offering (ie, a plain ole server)?

The closest it comes are the f1-micro and g1-small instance types, at $4 and $13 per month, respectively, with a full month's usage. These seem most comparable to AWS's t2.nano and t2.small types though it's not an exact comparison. And you still have to attach a network drive, which may go against your definition of "plain ole server."

GCE Pricing Page: https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#66

Post by daxfohl »

> Yes, this meant that Windows was by design a worse platform in terms of the end user experience than, say, Mac OS, but it was far more powerful and extensible, an approach that paid off with millions of line of business apps that even today keep Windows at the center of business.

Is there any validity to this? I don't do much OS-level programming, but is the Win32 API really that much more powerful and extensible?

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#67

Post by CobrastanJorji »

brilliantcode wrote: post #46

If Google released an IDE with tight integration to Google Cloud like Azure + Visual Studio, that's a potential killer app that lowers the perceived switching cost. If you told me to use Azure two years ago I would've laughed you out of the room. But here I am in 2016, using Azure, using ASP.net + IIS on Visual Studio. that's some powerful shit and currently AWS has cost leadership and perceived switching cost as the…

I haven't used Azure, so I'm a bit confused. Do you mean something with different capabilities than Google Cloud Tools for Visual Studio? https://cloud.google.com/visual-studio/

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#68

Post by serge2k »

btilly wrote: post #52
seregine wrote: post #25

Having worked at both places for ~4 years each, I would say Amazon is much more of a product company, and a platform is really a collection of compelling products. Amazon really puts customers first. Their platform and organization are made up of small teams that own services with well-defined interfaces, accountable for customer metrics. All profits are reinvested, so resources and perks are scarce, efficiency matte…

I would state the tradeoff very differently. Amazon gives each team independence. Therefore it is virtually impossible to insist on consistency between what different teams do. Each team makes sense on its own, but the whole can be very, very confusing. Google has a process that results in much greater internal consistency. It may not be a great UX, but it is consistent. Inside and out. For small systems, Amazon is g…

> But for a complex system, I prefer what Google will produce

Having worked there in teams near to their tablets I really think Amazon would have a hard time producing software of the complexity of Android or Chrome.

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#69

Post by user5994461 »

fumar wrote: post #16
justicezyx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dirt cheap computing is like the life line of Google. W/o that, nothing Google did can sustain at all.

Just curious on your thoughts, are not most modern companies (startups) dependent on cheap computing (+ smart folks)?

Not at all.

Most modern companies don't need cheap computing. They have a lot of users generating revenues, and they usually need little computing resources.

Google always worked by giving everything free to people. (Google, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, Android, Chrome). And they have extremely infrastructure intensive applications to run (e.g. just gotta copy the entire internet to index it + serve years of videos per second :D).

For every paid click/page a user will see, he will go through hundreds of page paying nothing, and Google will have to make thousands of pre-computations to be able to serve it in the first place.

That's the world Google lives in. They had to be hyper efficient since day 1 or they couldn't survive.

(Also note that they started > 15 years ago. The available hardware was 2^5 smaller at the time).

Re: How Google Is Challenging AWS

#70

Post by daxfohl »

Frankly I still like the Heroku model the best. Do one thing and do it well. Have third-party plugins handle the other things. It fits the "cloud" vision better, than consolidating all your functionality with one provider. That seems like a regression. I just wish Heroku was cheaper at scale. I don't understand why it's not. It seems like they could reduce prices and still remain profitable, while increasing their visibility greatly.
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