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For startups planning to host their infrastructure on AWS, a better alternative might be to go with Google Cloud or other cheaper alternatives. This can signifi

For startups planning to host their infrastructure on AWS, a better alternative might be to go with Google Cloud or other cheaper alternatives. This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the operational costs. Google Cloud lacks some bells and whistles at this point but it shaves off 50% of your AWS bill. Edit: Here is why Google Cloud can save 50% of your aws bill "1X" is AWS Compute: VMs Price: 30% less + Per minute billing Boot time: ¼ X Network between VMs: Same region: 4X Across regions: 10X BigQuery vs Redshift : ½ -20X Big Data (Hadoop and Spark): 3X Disks: Read throughput: 1X Write throughput: 4X (Ephemeral); 2X (Persistent) Local SSDs: Read throughput: 8X Writes throughput: 4X Storage (S3): Throughput: 2X Latency: 3X (initial); ½ X (for subsequent reads)

patio11 11y ago
This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the operational costs. There is an old saying in business: "overhead walks on two legs." People are expensive; everything else is cheap in comparison. This is particularly true for most software companies, where payroll (and other expenses directly sensitive to number of employees) typically dominates every other expense. There are software companies which do $100 million a year in revenue on $50k a year in infrastructure costs. Bloat that crazily for a B2C startup making, let's say, generous time-to-market and inhouse-expertise-required tradeoffs. Even if you're spending $50k a month on Amazon, shaving off half of that buys you 1~2 extra FTEs.
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Let's look at Google vs AWS from people's time: * Ease of use: Google Wins(Cloud Shell, SSH into instance from browser). Its far easier to spin up an instance and manage it on Google Cloud than AWS with VPC mess. * Platform Cohesivity: Google Wins (See the comparisio below) * AWS has 2 storage solutions with different APIS: S3 and Glacier; Compare that to Google. Just one storage solution to serve all needs. You get a backed in CDN for free! * AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) and still require the developer / admin to adjust the scaling of infrastructure. Google has just one Pub/Sub. You get push notifications on top. No need to tune knobs to get extra scale. It just works. * AWS load balancers and persistent disks need warming up before high usage. If you are running a website on global scale, you need to use DNS geo load balancing on top. Google load balancers are global (as opposed AWS regional load balancers), no need of DNS tricks. No need of prewarming. Google persistent disks need no prewarming. You can mount a single persistent disk on multiple instance and share data easily. * Security: Google encrypts data at rest and at wire by default. Try doing that on AWS. Google takes care of SSH key provisioning and management. AWS: You have to do it by yourself. * AWS NATs and micro instance are known to be unreliable. Google has live migration. If something goes wrong with instance they work their magic behind the scenes so that you don't have to worry about migrating the instance to another physical host. * Automation: Instance id are not global on AWS. Have fun creating maps and stuff inside CloudFormation templates. Google Cloud resources are global. All resources (images ids) have a global identifier. No more messing with zonal vs regional vs global resources. Google Cloud can save money by saving your time too!
  - ZitchDog 11y ago
    Google cloud is missing RDS though, and DBA tasks are a giant headache.
    - vgt 11y ago
      Google Cloud SQL 2.0 is pretty neat
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    Google Cloud has MySQL for RDS. Agree that its lacks Oracle, MSSQL and Postgres. You can use managed Postgres by Enterprise if you like. If you are startup and running Oracle in AWS / Google Cloud, that's probably not a wise choice (You don't get the benefits Oracle, which is performance in AWS / Google Cloud). A startup using MSSQL in cloud? May for a niche purpose. If you are a big company with lots of legacy apps built with Oracle / Postgres / MSSQL, AWS makes more sense in short run.
  - kasey_junk 11y ago
    I don't actually have much of an opinion specifically about Google Cloud vs AWS. I will say for your argument to make sense you have to first prove that 1) these differences make for cost savings that aren't a rounding error when it comes to employee costs and 2) these differences aren't overwhelmed by the smaller ecosystem (tooling, availability of talent, etc) of aws vs google cloud. Also as a nitpick: >AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) This is a feature, they offer different promises/behaviors. In fact, Pub/Sub does not offer one of the important ones that Kinesis does (strictly ordered delivery).
    - vgt 11y ago
      The latter use case is easily handled by Dataflow (something that AWS lacks. See https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the-dataflowbeam-and-spark-programming-models https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the...). One may also say that Google has a single Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service and Amazon has two that are neither global nor seamlessly scalable. Firehose is AWS itself admitting to this argument... And then there's firebase :)

patio11 11y ago

This can significantly increase the startups runway, by lowering the operational costs. There is an old saying in business: "overhead walks on two legs." People are expensive; everything else is cheap in comparison. This is particularly true for most software companies, where payroll (and other expenses directly sensitive to number of employees) typically dominates every other expense. There are software companies which do $100 million a year in revenue on $50k a year in infrastructure costs. Bloat that crazily for a B2C startup making, let's say, generous time-to-market and inhouse-expertise-required tradeoffs. Even if you're spending $50k a month on Amazon, shaving off half of that buys you 1~2 extra FTEs.

obulpathi 11y ago
Let's look at Google vs AWS from people's time: * Ease of use: Google Wins(Cloud Shell, SSH into instance from browser). Its far easier to spin up an instance and manage it on Google Cloud than AWS with VPC mess. * Platform Cohesivity: Google Wins (See the comparisio below) * AWS has 2 storage solutions with different APIS: S3 and Glacier; Compare that to Google. Just one storage solution to serve all needs. You get a backed in CDN for free! * AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) and still require the developer / admin to adjust the scaling of infrastructure. Google has just one Pub/Sub. You get push notifications on top. No need to tune knobs to get extra scale. It just works. * AWS load balancers and persistent disks need warming up before high usage. If you are running a website on global scale, you need to use DNS geo load balancing on top. Google load balancers are global (as opposed AWS regional load balancers), no need of DNS tricks. No need of prewarming. Google persistent disks need no prewarming. You can mount a single persistent disk on multiple instance and share data easily. * Security: Google encrypts data at rest and at wire by default. Try doing that on AWS. Google takes care of SSH key provisioning and management. AWS: You have to do it by yourself. * AWS NATs and micro instance are known to be unreliable. Google has live migration. If something goes wrong with instance they work their magic behind the scenes so that you don't have to worry about migrating the instance to another physical host. * Automation: Instance id are not global on AWS. Have fun creating maps and stuff inside CloudFormation templates. Google Cloud resources are global. All resources (images ids) have a global identifier. No more messing with zonal vs regional vs global resources. Google Cloud can save money by saving your time too!
- ZitchDog 11y ago
  Google cloud is missing RDS though, and DBA tasks are a giant headache.
  - vgt 11y ago
    Google Cloud SQL 2.0 is pretty neat
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Google Cloud has MySQL for RDS. Agree that its lacks Oracle, MSSQL and Postgres. You can use managed Postgres by Enterprise if you like. If you are startup and running Oracle in AWS / Google Cloud, that's probably not a wise choice (You don't get the benefits Oracle, which is performance in AWS / Google Cloud). A startup using MSSQL in cloud? May for a niche purpose. If you are a big company with lots of legacy apps built with Oracle / Postgres / MSSQL, AWS makes more sense in short run.
- kasey_junk 11y ago
  I don't actually have much of an opinion specifically about Google Cloud vs AWS. I will say for your argument to make sense you have to first prove that 1) these differences make for cost savings that aren't a rounding error when it comes to employee costs and 2) these differences aren't overwhelmed by the smaller ecosystem (tooling, availability of talent, etc) of aws vs google cloud. Also as a nitpick: >AWS has two queuing systems (SQS and Kinesis) This is a feature, they offer different promises/behaviors. In fact, Pub/Sub does not offer one of the important ones that Kinesis does (strictly ordered delivery).
  - vgt 11y ago
    The latter use case is easily handled by Dataflow (something that AWS lacks. See https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the-dataflowbeam-and-spark-programming-models https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/02/comparing-the...). One may also say that Google has a single Global seamlessly scalable durable message delivery service and Amazon has two that are neither global nor seamlessly scalable. Firehose is AWS itself admitting to this argument... And then there's firebase :)