5 ms·

I've been overall very impressed with the direction of Google Cloud over the last year. I feel like their container strategy is much better than Amazon's ECS in

by gtaylor 11y ago

I've been overall very impressed with the direction of Google Cloud over the last year. I feel like their container strategy is much better than Amazon's ECS in that the core is built on open source technology. This can wipe away a lot of goodwill, though. A worldwide outage is catastrophic and embarrassing. AWS has had some pretty spectacular failures in us-east (which has a huge chunk of the web running within it), but I'm not sure that I can recall a global outage. To my understanding, these systems are built specifically not to let failures spill over to other regions. Ah well. Godspeed to anyone affected by this, including the SREs over at Google!

sandGorgon 11y ago
Can you talk about this? I have been spectacularly unsuccessful at using ECS (and currently run my VMs on a vanilla Debian ec2 instance)
- jordanthoms 11y ago
  Switching from ECS to GKE (Google Container Engine) currently. Both seem overcomplex for the simpler cases of deploying apps (and provide a lot of flexibility in return), but I have found the performance of GKE (e.g. time for configuration changes to be applied, new containers booted, etc) to be vastly superior. The networking is also much better, GKE has overlay networking so your containers can talk to each other and the outside world pretty smoothly. GKE has good commandline tools but the web interface is even more limited than ECS's is - I assume at some point they'll integrate the Kubernetes webui into the GCP console. GKE is still pretty immature though, more so than I realized when I started working with it. The deployments API (which is a huge improvement) has only just landed, and the integration with load balancing and SSL etc is still very green. ECS is also pretty immature though.
  - huslage 11y ago
    I'm admittedly biased, but have you checked out Docker Cloud? http://cloud.docker.com http://cloud.docker.com
    - smargolis 11y ago
      Docker Cloud still requires BYO cloud, however.
    - jordanthoms 11y ago
      I hadn't heard of it, actually. However it doesn't seem to support GCP which removes it from contention for us unfortunately.
    - vhab 11y ago
      While not Docker Cloud specifically, when we eyeballed UCP we found it very underwhelming when pitted against Kubernetes. To us it appeared yet another in a sea of many orchestration tools that will give you a very quick and impressive "Hello World", but then fail to adapt to real world situations. This is what Kubernetes really has going for it, every release adds more blocks and tools that are useful and composable targeting real world use (and allow many of us crazies to deal with the oddball and quirky behavior our fleet of applications may have), not just a single path of how applications would ideally work. This generally has been a trend with Docker's tooling outside of Docker itself unfortunately. Similarly docker-compose is great for our development boxes, but nowhere near useful for production. And it doesn't help Docker's enterprise offerings still steer you towards using docker-compose and the likes.
    - kahwooi 11y ago
      I believe this is tutum that they bought some time ago. I tried tutum before with Azure. After deleting the Containers from tutum portal, it does not clean everything from Azure. Today the storage created by tutum is still in my Azure storage. LOL.
    - akanet 11y ago
      Not to bash, but the page you linked is classic Docker - it says literally nothing about what "Docker Cloud" is. "BUILD SHIP & RUN, ANY APP, ANYWHERE" is the slogan they repeat everywhere, including here, and it means even less everytime they do it. What IS Docker Cloud? Is it like Swarm? Does it use Swarm? What kinds of customers is Docker Cloud especially good at helping? All these mysteries and more, resolved never.
    - 11y ago
  - merb 11y ago
    The Problem is that GCP doesn't run an RDS service with PostgreSQL. And external vendors are mostly more costly than AWS RDS. Especially for some customer homepages where you want to run on managed stuff as cheap as possible.
    - bpicolo 11y ago
      This is what made me use aws as well
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      This is sad for sure. The new MySQL cloud 2.0 is really good, and if you use a DB agnostic ORM you can probably make MySQL work for quite a while. Sad to lose access to all the new PG features though, and I would love if Google expanded their cloud SQL offerings..
  - dcgoss 11y ago
    For the record, the Kubernetes dashboard comes pre-installed on all masters on GKE. So the UI is there, albeit not integrated into the Gcloud console.
- sk5t 11y ago
  Seconded--I can tell the ECS documentation is trying to help, but the foreign task/service/cluster model + crude console UI keeps telling me to let my workload ride on EC2 and maybe come back later.
  - sandGorgon 11y ago
    what I figured out much later was that ECS is a thin layer on top of a number of AWS services - they use an AMI that I can use, ec2 VMs that I can run myself and Security Groups + IAMs that I can create by my own. But the way they have built the ECS layer is very very VERY bad.. and I have an unusually high threshold for documentation pain.
    - nzoschke 11y ago
      I work on Convox, an open source PaaS. Currently it is AWS only. It sets up a cluster correctly in a few minutes. Then you have a simple API - apps, builds, releases, environment and processes - to work with. Under the hood we deploy to ECS but you don't have to worry about it. So I do agree that ECS is hard to use but with better tooling it doesn't have to be. I'm also a big fan of how GKE is shaping up.
MichaelGG 11y ago
I'm totally impressed with gcloud. Slick, smooth interface. Cheap pricing. The fact the UI spits out API examples for doing what you're doing is really cool. And it's oh-so-fast. (From what I can tell, gcloud's SSD is 10x faster or 1/10th the cost of AWS.) And this is coming from a guy that really dislikes Google overall. I was working on a project that might qualify for Azure's BizSpark Plus (they give you like $5K a month in credit), and I'd prefer to pay for gcloud than get Azure for free
- Artemis2 11y ago
  Same, was considering GCP for the future, but this is bad. I'm not using them without some kind of redundancy with another provider. I hope they write a good post-mortem, these are always interesting at large scale.
  - Gratsby 11y ago
    How bad is it really? They started investigating at 18:51, confirmed a problem in asia-east1 at 19:00, the problem went global at 19:21, and was resolved at 19:26. They posted that they will share results of their internal investigation. That kind of rapid response and communication is admirable. There will be problems with cloud services - it's inevitable. It's how cloud providers respond to those problems that is important. In this situation, I am thoroughly impressed with Google.
    - raymondh 11y ago
      I concur. The response was first rate. Behind the scenes, I'm sure they will iterate on failure prevention and risk analysis.
    - Artemis2 11y ago
      It's bad because it concerns all their regions at the same time, while competing providers have mitigations against this in place. AWS completely isolates its regions for instance [1], so they can fail independently and not affect anything else. That Google let an issue (or even a cascade of problems) affect all its geographic points of presence really shows a lack of maturity of the platform. I don't want to make too many assumptions, and that specific problem could have affected AWS in the same way, so let's wait for more details on their part. The response times are what's expected when you are running one of the biggest server fleets in the world. 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-re...
troymc 11y ago
Amazon S3 went down globally on July 20, 2008: http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html
- BlackjackCF 11y ago
  Sadly, I think a global outage was more acceptable in 2008 than it is now... Knowing Google though, they'll learn their lesson on how to improve their entire workflow right quick.
- nkristoffersen 11y ago
  Keep in mind, S3 was still a very new project at that point. Launched March 2006 and the first of its kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3

by gtaylor 11y ago

sandGorgon 11y ago

Can you talk about this? I have been spectacularly unsuccessful at using ECS (and currently run my VMs on a vanilla Debian ec2 instance)

jordanthoms 11y ago
Switching from ECS to GKE (Google Container Engine) currently. Both seem overcomplex for the simpler cases of deploying apps (and provide a lot of flexibility in return), but I have found the performance of GKE (e.g. time for configuration changes to be applied, new containers booted, etc) to be vastly superior. The networking is also much better, GKE has overlay networking so your containers can talk to each other and the outside world pretty smoothly. GKE has good commandline tools but the web interface is even more limited than ECS's is - I assume at some point they'll integrate the Kubernetes webui into the GCP console. GKE is still pretty immature though, more so than I realized when I started working with it. The deployments API (which is a huge improvement) has only just landed, and the integration with load balancing and SSL etc is still very green. ECS is also pretty immature though.
- huslage 11y ago
  I'm admittedly biased, but have you checked out Docker Cloud? http://cloud.docker.com http://cloud.docker.com
  - smargolis 11y ago
    Docker Cloud still requires BYO cloud, however.
  - jordanthoms 11y ago
    I hadn't heard of it, actually. However it doesn't seem to support GCP which removes it from contention for us unfortunately.
  - vhab 11y ago
    While not Docker Cloud specifically, when we eyeballed UCP we found it very underwhelming when pitted against Kubernetes. To us it appeared yet another in a sea of many orchestration tools that will give you a very quick and impressive "Hello World", but then fail to adapt to real world situations. This is what Kubernetes really has going for it, every release adds more blocks and tools that are useful and composable targeting real world use (and allow many of us crazies to deal with the oddball and quirky behavior our fleet of applications may have), not just a single path of how applications would ideally work. This generally has been a trend with Docker's tooling outside of Docker itself unfortunately. Similarly docker-compose is great for our development boxes, but nowhere near useful for production. And it doesn't help Docker's enterprise offerings still steer you towards using docker-compose and the likes.
  - kahwooi 11y ago
    I believe this is tutum that they bought some time ago. I tried tutum before with Azure. After deleting the Containers from tutum portal, it does not clean everything from Azure. Today the storage created by tutum is still in my Azure storage. LOL.
  - akanet 11y ago
    Not to bash, but the page you linked is classic Docker - it says literally nothing about what "Docker Cloud" is. "BUILD SHIP & RUN, ANY APP, ANYWHERE" is the slogan they repeat everywhere, including here, and it means even less everytime they do it. What IS Docker Cloud? Is it like Swarm? Does it use Swarm? What kinds of customers is Docker Cloud especially good at helping? All these mysteries and more, resolved never.
  - 11y ago
- merb 11y ago
  The Problem is that GCP doesn't run an RDS service with PostgreSQL. And external vendors are mostly more costly than AWS RDS. Especially for some customer homepages where you want to run on managed stuff as cheap as possible.
  - bpicolo 11y ago
    This is what made me use aws as well
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    This is sad for sure. The new MySQL cloud 2.0 is really good, and if you use a DB agnostic ORM you can probably make MySQL work for quite a while. Sad to lose access to all the new PG features though, and I would love if Google expanded their cloud SQL offerings..
- dcgoss 11y ago
  For the record, the Kubernetes dashboard comes pre-installed on all masters on GKE. So the UI is there, albeit not integrated into the Gcloud console.
sk5t 11y ago
Seconded--I can tell the ECS documentation is trying to help, but the foreign task/service/cluster model + crude console UI keeps telling me to let my workload ride on EC2 and maybe come back later.
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  what I figured out much later was that ECS is a thin layer on top of a number of AWS services - they use an AMI that I can use, ec2 VMs that I can run myself and Security Groups + IAMs that I can create by my own. But the way they have built the ECS layer is very very VERY bad.. and I have an unusually high threshold for documentation pain.
  - nzoschke 11y ago
    I work on Convox, an open source PaaS. Currently it is AWS only. It sets up a cluster correctly in a few minutes. Then you have a simple API - apps, builds, releases, environment and processes - to work with. Under the hood we deploy to ECS but you don't have to worry about it. So I do agree that ECS is hard to use but with better tooling it doesn't have to be. I'm also a big fan of how GKE is shaping up.

MichaelGG 11y ago

I'm totally impressed with gcloud. Slick, smooth interface. Cheap pricing. The fact the UI spits out API examples for doing what you're doing is really cool. And it's oh-so-fast. (From what I can tell, gcloud's SSD is 10x faster or 1/10th the cost of AWS.) And this is coming from a guy that really dislikes Google overall. I was working on a project that might qualify for Azure's BizSpark Plus (they give you like $5K a month in credit), and I'd prefer to pay for gcloud than get Azure for free

Artemis2 11y ago
Same, was considering GCP for the future, but this is bad. I'm not using them without some kind of redundancy with another provider. I hope they write a good post-mortem, these are always interesting at large scale.
- Gratsby 11y ago
  How bad is it really? They started investigating at 18:51, confirmed a problem in asia-east1 at 19:00, the problem went global at 19:21, and was resolved at 19:26. They posted that they will share results of their internal investigation. That kind of rapid response and communication is admirable. There will be problems with cloud services - it's inevitable. It's how cloud providers respond to those problems that is important. In this situation, I am thoroughly impressed with Google.
  - raymondh 11y ago
    I concur. The response was first rate. Behind the scenes, I'm sure they will iterate on failure prevention and risk analysis.
  - Artemis2 11y ago
    It's bad because it concerns all their regions at the same time, while competing providers have mitigations against this in place. AWS completely isolates its regions for instance [1], so they can fail independently and not affect anything else. That Google let an issue (or even a cascade of problems) affect all its geographic points of presence really shows a lack of maturity of the platform. I don't want to make too many assumptions, and that specific problem could have affected AWS in the same way, so let's wait for more details on their part. The response times are what's expected when you are running one of the biggest server fleets in the world. 1: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-re...

troymc 11y ago

Amazon S3 went down globally on July 20, 2008: http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html http://status.aws.amazon.com/s3-20080720.html

BlackjackCF 11y ago
Sadly, I think a global outage was more acceptable in 2008 than it is now... Knowing Google though, they'll learn their lesson on how to improve their entire workflow right quick.
nkristoffersen 11y ago
Keep in mind, S3 was still a very new project at that point. Launched March 2006 and the first of its kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3