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What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

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Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#81

Post by StreamBright »

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.

I have created more than a single VM on AWS, if I add together all of the companies that I used to work for it is close to 8000 instances (5000+3000). I am not sure what I am doing wrong not running into clunky stuff but I guess it is automation that makes the difference. With projects like Ansible, Terraform or even aws cli creating and managing these large clusters is a breeze. I understand that you are using the UI and having trouble with UX but it does not mean that every user experiences that or they have the same sentiments or conclusions.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#82

Post by jsolson »

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…

(Disclaimer: I work on the hypervisor that lives under Google Compute Engine)

1. PerfKitBenchmarker includes meaningful benchmarks for things like Redis, Aerospike, Memcache, etc. We expect GCE to score well on these when measured in terms of performance/$, and chunk of why we expect that is from superior network performance. Even small instance sizes tend to saturate their provisioned network long before they saturate provisioned CPU; GCE provisions more network (up to 2 Gbps/vCPU per our public docs).

This also applies to custom VM shapes. This allows workloads like memcache (which require very little CPU per request, typically) to be provisioned on small instances that still have relatively beefy networks with oodles of RAM with costs proportioned appropriately.

2. GCE handles instance failures differently from EC2. Certainly both platforms will have instance failures that cannot be solved with migration; this is absolutely something software stacks must work around. Live migration allows us to drive down the number of failure modes which cause an discontinuity in instance lifecycle, but obviously they cannot be eliminated entirely.

That said, when an instance in GCE fails it is by default restarted as quickly as possible (possibly on another host). To the guest this appears as an unplanned reboot. My understanding is that you can accomplish the same on EC2 by 'recovering' and instance[0], and that further you can automate this recovery with CloudWatch, but none of that is required on GCE.

I think we're in full agreement in terms of automating OPS, I'm just of the (obviously strongly biased) opinion that GCP is ahead in terms automating things on behalf of customers "out of the box".

[0]: I previously worked at Amazon, but in Retail at a time when the deployment tools for EC2 were... somewhat exotic. I lack experience with what the general best practices recommended to external customers is.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#83

Post by StreamBright »

matwood wrote: post #61
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,…

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.

Being late for the party has its perks. The also need more work on convincing people moving over and they do a good job with Spotify and other companies who talk openly about moving to GCP.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#84

Post by sharpy »

boulos wrote: post #64
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.

Interesting. It seems that Google IAM is very similar to AWS IAM yet very different in one aspect. In AWS, you can define exactly what subset of APIs/resources are accessible to a role, which is very flexible, but also can be very confusing. It seems Google has taken the approach of pre-defining sensible roles.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#85

Post by jsolson »

mayank wrote: post #68
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,…

> 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...

(disclaimer: I work on Google Compute Engine)

For queuing AWS has at least SQS and SNS, both of which solve roughly half of what's commonly desired from a queuing system. Google Cloud PubSub coalesces both of these behind a single API that provides clear support for common queuing patterns (1:1, 1:n, n:1, n:n).

In terms of storage, I think what the OP was referring to was S3 versus Glacier when compared against Cloud Storage (which offers competitors to both S3 and Glacier within the same API -- just mark a bucket as Nearline as pay less for cold stored objects).

If you count all of the additional AWS services that are logical equivalents to the Google ones mentioned you have SimpleDB, RDS, DynamoDB, and Redshift. So yes, many options for many different use cases, but Google coalesces things under a single API where the "verbs" are the same (as in the case of blob storage).

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#86

Post by boulos »

_delirium wrote: post #77
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?

I'm not sure, but that's why I would want to read a comparison to find out! For example, if their Linux VMs had a price/performance advantage in some category (networking, CPU, whatever), that would be interesting information to know. Or if the tools were better/worse.

I believe GCE has a price/performance advantage in basically all categories against both AWS and Azure (one wrinkle is we don't offer small slices of local SSD, instead pushing people to either our 375 GiB per unit local SSD or our Persistent Disk SSD product). For example:

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Year-...

As jsolson mentions elsewhere, we run PerfKit and compare ourselves all the time (both on raw performance and price/performance).

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#87

Post by gricardo99 »

gricardo99 wrote: post #46
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…

Anyone know where one can go to get a more quantitative, price/performance comparison of the various cloud services? I know, lots of dimensions for that comparison, but probably picking a few dimensions, or letting users select a few, could give a reasonable ranking of services and prices.

answering my own question, this looks pretty cool (no affiliation): https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#88

Post by StreamBright »

jsolson wrote: post #82
StreamBright wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Disclaimer: I work on the hypervisor that lives under Google Compute Engine) 1. PerfKitBenchmarker includes meaningful benchmarks for things like Redis, Aerospike, Memcache, etc. We expect GCE to score well on these when measured in terms of performance/$, and chunk of why we expect that is from superior network performance. Even small instance sizes tend to saturate their provisioned network long before they satura…

1. Thanks Jon, this is exactly the sort of comment I was looking for. Yes I totally agree, if you have a memcache use case your are going to hit network limitations before you hit CPU. I was just pointing out that HTML rendering is different from running memcache or a distributed disk persisted key-value store. Amazon figured out the need for different use cases and introduced R3 instance types with few cores, large amount of memory and enhanced networking support. This is why I found a little-bit unfortunate the make general statements like "4 core instance has better networking on GCP". Depends which instance type you are using.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/04/10/r3-ann...

2. Agreed, making it easier for the customers is always better.

Heh, I was working there when Retail moved to EC2, much fun! :)

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#89

Post by brianwawok »

boulos wrote: post #86
_delirium wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, but that's why I would want to read a comparison to find out! For example, if their Linux VMs had a price/performance advantage in some category (networking, CPU, whatever), that would be interesting information to know. Or if the tools were better/worse.

I believe GCE has a price/performance advantage in basically all categories against both AWS and Azure (one wrinkle is we don't offer small slices of local SSD, instead pushing people to either our 375 GiB per unit local SSD or our Persistent Disk SSD product). For example: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Year-... As jsolson mentions elsewhere, we run PerfKit and compare ourselves all the time…

That was on conclusion as well. I launched my baby startup on Digital Ocean and moved to GCE when I needed to do things like floating IPs (before DO had such a thing).

Overall GCE has worked well. I did have trouble fighting the beta logging agent (used 300+ MB of ram and 5% of my CPU when under no load), but logging is in beta so I guess I can't complain :)

Re: What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

#90

Post by boulos »

wowoc wrote: post #65

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 t…

Sorry to hear you've had a bad time. All of our Generally Available services have an SLA, including BigQuery:

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sla

which has a 99.9% monthly uptime target. Are you seeing errors more often than that?

Additionally (and this isn't required), do you have a support package? I'm curious where you've been asking questions without response. If it's StackOverlow, that is best effort, but we do really try.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

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