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GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

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Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#61

Post by zeta0134 »

doh wrote: post #42
nodesocket wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, your bill must be gigantic.

Well, it's not small, but definitely not that crazy. We're running an immutable infrastructure and the majority of the servers are a "cattle". To be more specific, we redeploy servers from images instead of replacing just the code. The majority of servers (99.9%) is preemptible (meaning that they will be deleted every 24 hours) and thus we get a huge discount. Also our whole communication is through pubsub so the ser…

I have to wonder if their Lambda service might be worth looking into. Any reason you're using full on servers rather than some kind of a compute engine? I don't have the great fortune of getting to work with those kinds of numbers, so forgive my ignorance here, I'm really curious about your setup. :)

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#63

Post by afarrell »

tscs37 wrote: post #45

I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest. I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting plus the immense fees if you somehow manage to get decent traffic together. Once my reserved instances run out I'll probably either check out GCE or DO, either seems to be a better option, though GCE seems to be more expensive. Anyways, the con…

> it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting.

The developer experience when you just want a box on the internet to ssh into is pretty frustrating. DO is fantastic for this use case.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#64

Post by lobster_johnson »

inopinatus wrote: post #38

I have serious trust issues with Google. Their history of discontinuing services, dismal support (even for a paid service), and neglect of bugs in SDKs/APIs - all three of which I have experienced first-hand - has left a long-term bitter taste. No doubt some individuals are fantastic, but the organisation as a whole gives me an enduring impression of being systematically arrogant and aloof. AWS by contrast have demon…

It seems to me that Google is highly siloed internally. The GCP team is very visible (they engage on HN and elsewhere), and GCP has excellent support. Very different from other parts of Google.

I have problems with Google as a whole, but I have as much faith in their cloud as I have in AWS or Digitial Ocean (we currently use all three).

The Kubernetes team is also highly engaged on Github (they also occasionally show up on the official Slack channels). The Go community suffers from a depressing abundance of hostility, intransigence and arrogance, and some of Google's projects (e.g. Protobuf, the Go project itself) reflect this, but I was delighted to find that the Kubernetes people are not like this at all. It's a very friendly, quality-focused community. I think they have to be since Kubernetes is still emerging tech that's craving adoption. Same goes for GCP -- Google doesn't hide the fact that they're aggressively courting customers to migrate.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#65

Post by Turing_Machine »

geggam wrote: post #59
doh wrote: post #7

We moved back and forth between AWS and GCE (based on who gave us free credits). Once we ran out, we chose GCE and never regretted it. GCE has many quirks, for instance the inconsistency between API and the UI, it misses the richness of the services offered by AWS but everything GCE does offer is just faster, more stable and much more consistent. One of the biggest problems with AWS is that once you outgrow the assig…

At 25k servers / day one would think pulling this into real hardware and doing capacity planning would be cost effective.

That's what I was thinking. Unless they're really bursty (so they only need the 25k servers for an hour at a time or whatever), I would think that 25k servers would be well beyond the number where it makes more economic sense to build out your own data center.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#66

Post by xiaoma »

Veratyr wrote: post #27
ungzd wrote: post #2

> AWS Premium Support is mandatory Is Google Cloud support even acceptable? Google is known for poor or no support for most services.

Google's known for poor or no support on their free services but their paid services often have decent support. Personally, I've found GCP, GSuite, Project Fi, Google Store and Pixel support to all be pretty great but haven't found any support at all for Gmail, YouTube etc.

Google nearly wreaked a business that was making them bank and is now doing 20MM/year without them. Support wouldn't even talk to the founder: https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-penny-hoarder-with-kyle-t...

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#67

Post by lobster_johnson »

holografix wrote: post #62

I'd be interested to know why the OP never considered Heroku

Heroku is hosted on AWS, and so you inherit the performance, but lose the ability to control it (no way to select local SSDs or enable IOPS, as far as I know, for example), while at the same time paying a large premium for the convenience of using their platform.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#68

Post by gdgtfiend »

Two points here really hit home with me about AWS (not in comparison to GCE though since I've never tried it).

1) Reserved Instances: I think the pricing model for this has become very outdated since the beginning of AWS, and it is definitely becoming cumbersome (and therefore scary) to use.

2) ELB + Traffic Spikes: I have tried (unsuccessfully) to pre-scale an ELB to prepare it for the traffic it was about to receive. I tried to pre-scale for this project 3 different times, in coordination with support and without them. I could not do it. Very frustrating.

I think these are all signs of extreme growth, and a strange organization of engineering units inside of AWS. However, as OP descried.. we are much to heavily invested in AWS to consider an infrastructure shift at this point

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#69

Post by lobster_johnson »

nhumrich wrote: post #44

Because of speed of light/latency issues, I won't move to GCP until they have an RDS-postgres equivalent

According to comments from googlers elsewhere on HN, they're working on it. It's pretty much the number one thing people are asking for.

Re: GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

#70

Post by Thaxll »

tscs37 wrote: post #45

I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest. I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting plus the immense fees if you somehow manage to get decent traffic together. Once my reserved instances run out I'll probably either check out GCE or DO, either seems to be a better option, though GCE seems to be more expensive. Anyways, the con…

DO is nothing for serious business, it's fun to use when you want to do a PoC at home. AWS is by far the most advanced platform when you need to do something backend related, they have large number of useful services.
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