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Google Cloud Platform
- cominatchu 11y agoI tried both Google Container Engine and Amazon EC2 Container Service recently for a docker deployment. Google was the clear winner: they have support for private registries (Amazon requires you to use a third party or set it all up yourself), Google gives you a preconfigured, Debian-based base image so you don't have to do any setup or maintenance (with keys already exchanged that allow login with the gcloud command, no work required), and Kubernetes itself (which Google Container Engine uses for orchestration) is really nice. Also Google cloud logging (currently free) just works out of the box with their container engine and streams your container's stdout to their logs. Kubernetes itself is open source so you always have the option to move on your own metal if your deployment grows to that size. Would highly recommend Google Container Engine.
- res0nat0r 11y agoAlso check out Joyent, you can launch containers natively from your laptop on their cloud bare metal, no underlying instances for you to manage are required. Plus their 128m size container is only .003c/hr and is billed by the minute.
- molecule 11y ago> their 128m size container is only .003c/hr... $0.003 / hr, 0.3c / hr https://www.joyent.com/public-cloud/pricing https://www.joyent.com/public-cloud/pricing
- tracker1 11y agoIt's also worth noting that it's shared cpu prioritization so you will get at least your allocation, but can burst much higher for cpu bound loads in practice... though I find that joyent's storage pricing is pretty far out of line compared to gce, aws and azure and that their pricing all around is a bit higher. That said, their technology stack for docker is pretty damned cool.
- benburton 11y agoI particularly love Cloud Platform's Nearline storage for personal media archival. Previously I was using Amazon's Glacier, but the interface was clunky and the load times were too slow. Cloud Platform's web UI, comparatively, has been an absolute joy to use at a roughly similar price point.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoNote that while Nearline's pricing is identical to glacier, it's response time is almost immediate, compared to ~4 hours for glacier.
- crazysim 11y agoThe pricing is actually no longer identical. Amazon's latest price refreshes dropped Glacier to below Nearline and introduced a new S3 object type (e.g. Reduced Redundancy Storage) called Infrequent Access that's a lot more like Nearline.
- sandstrom 11y agoI like the new Infrequent Access, but I'd like to understand the tradeoffs better. What's the downside compared to regular S3? It mentions 99.9% availability instead of 99.99%, but it would be useful to understand how that is manifested in reality, and what the underlying architectural difference is. I tried to ask jeffbarr here[1], but got no answer. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230937
- milesward 11y agodisclaimer: I am OP and work at GCP. Watch out for minimum file size on Standard-IA: it's 128kb, and if you write a file smaller than that they round up. It's little gotchas like this that can really burn you...
- jeffbarr 11y agoSorry I missed that, I have been working 16+ hours per day to get ready for re:Invent.
- sidcool 11y agoQuite bike claims made in the post. AWS is the unquestioned standard at my workplace. I am inkling to fund the GCP a try. Do they have some migration doc?
- boulos 11y agoOne of the folks in Developer Relations made this side-by-side service "mapping": https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-platform https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-clou... (some aren't really 1:1, but you know close enough). It's not a "migration doc" but at least gives you a sense of what pieces to put together. Some services have really easy mappings (say S3 => GCS which supports the S3 XML API except multipart uploads) while others have really obvious "conceptual" mappings (say EC2 => GCE). Does that help?
- sidcool 11y agoThat does give me a direction, thanks a lot!
- vladimirralev 11y agoJust less than an hour ago I got 10+ alerts that my monitoring agents on GCE machines are unreachable for 5 mins again and networking is down. I see this at least once a month, separately the cloud SQL has weird outages again about once-twice a month. I also run some real hardware machines in a datacenter and have none of these problems. I am not impressed with Google's cloud.
- boulos 11y agoSorry to hear that; which zone are you in? I don't see any notice of an outage, but I'd be happy to investigate for you (I work on Compute Engine). To your other issue with Cloud SQL, there is sadly a mandatory downtime with every release they do (often weekly). The team is working on it and knows it's unacceptable for serving workloads. Edit: Here's a link to the maintenance note in the FAQ for reference - https://cloud.google.com/sql/faq#maintenancerestart https://cloud.google.com/sql/faq#maintenancerestart
- vladimirralev 11y agoVery strange, you should be able to observe these in almost any monitor. I see this in multiple projects/networks. Outage today was on us-central1-a. I got alerts from multiple agents - new relic, zabbix and ssh monitor so I don't think it can be blamed on tools or something like this. It happened in two bursts, this is the first one http://imgur.com/XdzuJ2r http://imgur.com/XdzuJ2r with messages from both zabbix and new relic, the time zone in the emails is EEST. These are all different machines, no duplication.
- boulos 11y agoThis is what I get for not being in SRE (I don't get paged, I just poll our incident lists, etc.): there was definitely a blip at that time, people are on it right now looking into the root cause (but it was automatically remediated within just a couple minutes as you saw). Regardless, sorry for the blip and for being wrong about the all clear.
- mrmondo 11y ago
- spullara 11y agoGoogle doesn't realize that this isn't why AWS is winning. AWS has better support, more services, more options and is easier to use.
- amaks 11y ago- better support Need to prove this with some data - more services - more options Sure, because of earlier start. - and is easier to use How do you measure the ease of use? APIs? Documentation? Management UI?
- cwyers 11y ago> Sure, because of earlier start. So? AWS will always have that head start. If GCP can't catch up to or beat AWS on features, or find some way to differentiate from AWS, that's always going to be an AWS advantage. Customers buy based on what's best for them, not by comparing what two services look like at the same point in their lifespan.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kiyoto 11y agoCompared to GCP, perhaps, but AWS's support is pretty atrocious too. The real reason AWS wins is because they know how to sell platforms: as you said, it's about more services, more options, and yes, more _selling_. You can't just build the best components and wait for people to try them. You have to go listen to customers and propose how to build what they need using your platform. This is by far the biggest difference between GCP and AWS: the technical salesperson mindset.
- zwily 11y agoYour experience with AWS support is generally correlated with how much you pay. After many years of grumbling, we're finally at the highest level and support is pretty great. As it should be, given the price. You're exactly right about the "technical salesperson mindset". It's awesome see new features come out several times a year that feel like direct response to our feedback. Google is impressive, but I don't get the feeling they would be as responsive to customer requests.
- cwmma 11y agoUsing both GCP and AWS the one place GCP really stands out is container engine, it's much better then elastic bean stalk for deploying and managing apps. Otherwise: cloud storage has a more limited api then s3 (s3 allows you to query by start key, cloud storage only by prefix), cloud sql doesn't support postgres (which is a necessity Geospatial apps) and there is something weird with there network that causes server sent events to be unusable from compute engine instances.
- derFunk 11y agoYou should try ec2 container services. That's superior to beanstalk.
- cmdli 11y agoSomewhat off-topic, but what service do you guys recommend for someone who just wants a cheap server to play around with (maybe getting something like an rsync script or BTsync and a website running)?
- joetapeworm 11y agojust grab something from lowendbox or vpsboard's offers section.
- JorgeGT 11y agoCan confirm, $5 a year for a 1Gb RAM VPS (with NAT IPv4) and something like $10 for one with a dedicated IP. Search for deals, they are out there.
- TheDong 11y agoSome people might say Digital Ocean or Linode or Ramnode or whatev, but I would go straight to AWS. The 't2' class of servers are competitive with Digital Ocean in terms of pricing (roughly the same), especially if you do a 'reserved instance', and you get a ton of other benefits "for free", like a sane firewall and network, better monitoring tooling, snapshot tooling, and an easier path forwards if you do need to expand to other things like databases or s3.
- e12e 11y agoHow do you figure? The t2.micro is ~10 USD a month with 1GB of transfer. The comparable ~10USD/month plan at DO includes 2TB of transfer. And Amazon doesn't have a 5USD/Month plan, which is probably enough? Apparently 2TB out of a t2.micro comes to an additional charge of 0.09 * 1999 ~ 180 USD. What am I missing? That you probably don't want to use bandwith because no-one will use your hobby projects?
- callesgg 11y agoPersonally i would recommend you to set up your own server, so you can learn how stuff works. If you don't want that for some reason i have used Digital Ocean found their service to be very simple to use. I have also tried amazon's stuff and i found it to be expensive and not very user friendly. But when it comes to price i know there is other ones that are cheaper than Digital Ocean.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- frakkingcylons 11y agoI gave GCP a try recently because one of my workloads on DigitalOcean started to be come unreasonably expensive. I use AWS S3 for object storage, but while their other offerings seem to be pretty powerful, it's more complicated than what I need. As a hobby-level user, I'm really liking what I see with GCP so far. One GCP offering that I think deserves more attention is Managed VMs (part of App Engine). You provide your app + runtime in a Docker container, and App Engine will run that container in a Compute Engine VM and do a bunch of cool stuff for like health checking, autoscaling, and log aggregation. It's limited in a lot of respects, but it's a basic cluster manager like Kubernetes or ECS but easier to use for simple services IMO.
- stephen 11y agoWow. Kind of surprised such a borderline-desperate sounding post was allowed on the official Google blog. I basically read this as "we're so technically superior in several ways ... wtf is everyone still using AWS instead of us?" It reminds me of the attitude of one Google engineer I know, which is basically Google is such an amazing place, with such visionary leaders, and across-the-board smart engineers, that they can wander into any domain they want, and just assume they'll succeed/print money like AdWords. I'm paraphrasing and also probably putting words into his mouth, so apologies for phrasing it in the extreme to make a point. Part of me wishes it was that way: as long as you had the smartest people + biggest warchest (which they basically do), victory would be pre-determined. But capitalism has a way, if anything, of handicapping the existing giants, and you can't just wander into a field "because we're really smart" and assume you'll win. </armchair business insight>. Feel free to correct my assumptions/biases.
- milesward 11y agodisclaimer: I am the author, and work at Google Cloud Platform Stephen, thanks for the direct feedback, seriously! We weren't shooting for desperate, if anything I had a bit of geek pride in my voice when saying it at our GCP Next events, and then typing it down for this post. As I've been helping folks onboard and understand the platform, I found myself explaining these facts pretty frequently, so I figured having it written down might be helpful for others. Any suggestions on what kinds of content you'd like to see us deliver? Things you'd want to know? I'm game!
- thruflo 11y agoStyle in writing is about standpoint. Where are you coming from? Leading with: > Google Cloud Platform delivers the industry's best technical and differentiated features Is clearly the standpoint of someone trying to convince you of something and the tone certainly put my hackles up. It's often more effective [1] to adopt the position of someone sharing what they find most interesting about a topic. Instead of: > How can a cloud platform be both Better AND Cheaper? > Easy: it turns out that the same technology ... Maybe something like: > What's fascinating is that the same technology that allows cloud platform to perform better for these workloads also allows it to be cheaper. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Clear-Simple-Truth-Writing-Classic/dp/0691147434 http://www.amazon.com/Clear-Simple-Truth-Writing-Classic/dp/...
- jread 11y agoAlthough GCP has some distinguishing technical features like live migrations, based on my own independent availability monitoring, it hasn't been any more reliable than other cloud services including Azure and DigitalOcean. In fact, over the past year, EC2 has been much more reliable than GCE. The most common problems I've observed are network blips that may or may not get reported on the GCP status page. https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-google https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-google https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-aws https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-aws https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-azure https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-azure https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-digitalocean https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-digitalocean
- bsimpson 11y agoCan we fix the title? The official title is "Google Cloud Platform delivers the industry's best technical and differentiated features". "Google Cloud Platform" is a meaninglessly vague title, especially considering the source is the official GCP blog. That'd be like posting an article titled "Washington Post Delivering News to Best New Platforms" as simply "Washington Post". I realize that the original title is too sales-y, but if I knew it was marketing, I wouldn't have clicked.
- anodari 11y agoI would use, but still there is no data center in South America.
- milesward 11y agodisclaimer: I work for GCP Would connecting to our network locally scratch the itch? https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/ https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/