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Ask HN: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
Few years ago, I would have chosen AWS over GCE. Now, I am starting new project and need to reexamine which cloud provider to use. If you are starting new project in 2016, which cloud provider do you choose? AWS or GCE? They both seems to provide the services I need such as database, storage, scalability etc.
Correction: I meant to say Google Cloud Platform instead of GCE.
- Mizza 10y agoAWS, hands down. They're years ahead, and the support is just as lousy.
- ktRolster 10y agoSerious question, when would you need to use support? I always wonder that when people say Microsoft is better than Linux because it has support, but actually I've never had a time when I needed Linux support.....
- dmourati 10y agoI've had to use their support many times for many complex problems around things like networking, outages, feature requests, and so on. It is truly a mixed bag. They have highly competent people working there. The problem is, they have layered in an intentionally incompetent tier of people in front of them. That's support.
- takno 10y agoI've never got much use out of AWS support for single-server installations, and my natural inclination is just to let things ride or work around them anyway. Once you are committing yourself to SLAs, and you've hired someone a bit shoutier to keep operations running they will suddenly find a lot more things to call up and try to get fixed, or at least get a story on why they went wrong and what we can do to mitigate. As you start to spend the sorts of money where the Enterprise support is economical it gets very useful indeed, with people to call who can actually chase down problems and make things happen.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- xorgar831 10y agoHere are the cases you need support: - instance needs to be force stopped, that doesn't always work in the AWS console, you have to open a support case - scaling things up: s3 buckets that get sudden amounts of traffic need to be manually partitioned, ELBs as well - they have more logs on the backend you can't see: ELB logs aren't complete for example, they have more detailed logs only support has access to - RDS failovers: determining if a RDS failover was due to a maintenance period or a hardware problem - SNS/SQS errors: 5xx from SNS/SQS due to backend issues you have no control over - Accidently used the official CentOS AMI? Oops, that AMI is "locked" and doesn't let you mount the image on another instance to get your data, you have to use support to get them to remove market codes - New instance types don't alway boot correctly, this happened with i2s, they'd just fail to boot sometimes - Accidently use CloudFormation to deploy your stacks? Lots of support tickets to fix all the backend problems with that, but at least Terraform solves that now :)
- edoceo 10y agoI've had to use the support to find out why their LB kept marking my machines offline. My logs showed all 200 OK responses, time were good. The ELB logs showed success too! But then, magically, every other month ELB would shit. The "support"? Just make a new ELB. Which we did. Nice thing about cloud: don't diagnose issues, just make a new instance of X
- _jezell_ 10y agoIf you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a single provider's services.
- freerobby 10y ago> Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a single provider's services. Just be sure to stay mindful of the costs of being on multiple providers. In this example, it doubles your outage footprint, because a regional outage on either provider would disrupt your service. It will also moot some of your cost savings, as you can't take advantage of the free local transfer (e.g. EC2 > Elastic Transcoding > EC2 is free; GC > Elastic Transcoding > GC is not).
- whalesalad 10y agoAlso keep in mind that when you are inside of a cloud (or at least a region within a cloud) you typically do not pay fees between things like EC2 and S3, for example. If you were to build parts of your infra on AWS and other parts on GCE you would pay for data to go between those deployments.
- obulpathi 10y agoGoogle Cloud if feature equivalent of AWS. If you build inside AWS, you have to pay for cross-region bandwidth like transferring data between the east region and the west region. If you choose Google Cloud, cross-region bandwidth is also free!
- xorgar831 10y agoGCE is less expensive than AWS for on-demand instances, but not compared to AWS's RIs. Unless there's a specific feature that you need in GCP, AWS is a safer bet from scalability, stability, support and cost. GCE has an edge on performance, per minute billing, custom machine types, and some datacenters in areas AWS doesn't cover, however they're learning how to be a public cloud, so you will run into beta level bugs, scalability issues, support issues (they also limit how many people can open a ticket in your org), and stability problems. If you do go GCP, make sure you have a rep and a high level support contract, otherwise it's going to be hard when you run into issues.
- simonebrunozzi 10y agoI think it's a complex question. AWS is far ahead in terms of maturity of the service, breadth of services, ecosystem support. On the other hand, Google Compute Platform is "up and coming", and in general it is trying to attract customers by offering lower-than-AWS prices on most comparable services. AWS is also a safer bet. At the same time, Google is big enough that betting on it is not as risky as betting on another "startuppy" provider.
- babo 10y agoGCE is pretty much based on Google internal technologies and infrastructure. They had a low profile on GCE, they services are more hand picked, but it's a mature and complete service offering.
- brianwawok 10y agoAnd in general, the comparable GCE offerings are LIGHTYEARS ahead in performance. Compare instance launch times. Compare internal network performance. I just cannot fathom using AWS for a new project. I guess if you MUST have some of the SAAS apps built on top of AWS and don't want to consider how you would run the same thing on GCE... but I think GCE would be a fantastic default cloud for 90% of people.
- teh 10y agoDo you have benchmarks on that? Not my experience for network speeds and CPU of individual machines but it's been 6 months since I checked.
- obulpathi 10y agoGoogle Network and SSDs offer an order of magnitude more performance / price. Disks and Storage are about 2 times fast. Booting is 5 times fast. Not just the performance, all Google Cloud services are fully managed (Think of S3 and Lambda on AWS). No servers! On AWS, only a couple of services are fully managed. Rest of them are a thin layer on top of EC2. If AWS is DevOps, Google Cloud is NoOps.
- dmourati 10y agoUse Spinnaker and chose both or decide later. http://www.spinnaker.io/ http://www.spinnaker.io/
- awinter-py 10y agothe 1-click GCE image for spinnaker is estimated to cost ~$200 per month; not much next to payroll but surprisingly beefy.
- FlyingLawnmower 10y agoHow do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
- babo 10y agoAzure is fine for a Windows oriented company. It's not mature enough, but soon will be a serious competitor, even for a linux shop. Watch out!
- jen20 10y agoSerious question: have you had to _use_ the Azure portal for anything? Like much enterprise software, the new side-scrolling mess which hides necessary information has the distinct smell of something that was built to sell on golf courses to clueless middle and upper management, and not for people who actually need to do the work. The load times are horrible because of the number of HTTP requests and the weight of their payloads, making it practically unusable on, say, plane wifi or tethering outside of LTE service. Practically this might not be the worst thing ever, because it might encourage people to describe their infrastructure as code instead of a pointy-clicky mess, but sadly this still appears to be outside the Microsoft-blessed way to do things - so most never will.
- FlyingLawnmower 10y agoNo, not for anything serious. I get some free credits every month for being a student, so I've used it minimally for configuring a few things for hobbyist projects, but I have never used it in production ready environments. Thank you for your perspective!
- janpieterz 10y agoUse it everyday, we host basically everything there. Have played decently with Amazon and my preference certainly is with Azure, but I'm quite biased (.NET developer). The ease of certain things (the integration with Visual Studio for example) simply surpasses anything I've played with for Amazon. I use the portals less though, and mostly rely on the tools provided in Visual Studio (explorers, deployment managers etc).
- babo 10y agoIt depends on your state and needs. It's a no brainer if the majority of your customers are in a specific region where AWS has a nearby datacenter or when you need some specific service from AWS like DynamoDb, IAM, CloudFormation, ActiveDirectory, Workspaces etc. GCE is preferred for any kind of big data or analytics scenario. It's a cheaper service with way better networking or disk io, fit's very well for an engineering oriented organisation. Per minute pricing or very fast scaling of the services are huge advantages.
- ticku 10y agoAre they even comparable? AWS offers full virtual machines. I was under the impression that GCE offers a more high level platform where you run your code in their proprietery environment? If I am not mistaken, using GCE means you are locked in and cannot migrate away easily. That's why I never looked into it closely. I don't want to be at the mercy of a provider.
- pki 10y agoGCE ~= EC2 GAE ~= Elastic Beanstalk
- bpicolo 10y agoGCE is just VMs
- xrstf 10y agoGoogle Compute Engine offers virtual machines, Google App Engine is the special app platform where you have no control over the individual instances that your app runs on.
- davidcgl 10y agoMy guess is OP meant to say AWS vs GCP (Google Cloud Platform) instead of GCE (Google Compute Engine).
- dmourati 10y agoThat's my read as well. Google has a bit of a hurdle to overcome in explaining their acronyms. AWS has a 10-year head start.
- jtokoph 10y agoI've been using AWS for years, but the recent downtime for GCE got me to take a look at what Google was offering. (Makes no sense right? All publicity is good publicity?) I was blown away by the UX of both the console and the instances themselves. Example: when you add a new user/public key in the console, it propagates to instances automatically. Sure, you could do that yourself, but the default features are just really nice to have.
- xorgar831 10y agoYou have to run their images however, but yeah, that's a nice feature esp. if your org uses GA already.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- waych 10y agoFor users that are using their own images, we also provide source for all our customization to the images so you can integrate functionality into yours as required. The code used on Linux to integrate the OS with the platform for ssh keys, startup script, auto-expanding root-disk, etc: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-packages https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-package... For Windows, ssh keys aren't supported, however the platform has password reset built-in and starter scripts via metadata are also supported. Here's the code for the Windows agent: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-windows https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image-windows If running Windows, you will also need device drivers: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-windows-drivers https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-windows-drive...
- sandGorgon 10y agoAre you talking just about the VMs ? Because if you're talking about the platform, then just the fact that Amazon has Postgresql RDS to take care of your databases is killer. And if I'm already locked in to AWS for one service...
- owaislone 10y agoLack of managed PostgreSQL is the reason I've not tried GCC for anything serious yet
- oskari 10y agoAiven provides managed PostgreSQL in Google Cloud, please check out https://aiven.io/postgresql https://aiven.io/postgresql and https://youtu.be/m1T0SHUoa8U https://youtu.be/m1T0SHUoa8U for a quick introduction to it.
- ktamura 10y agoI think OP means GCP: Google Cloud Platform. There's GCE, Google Compute Engine, as part of GCP. GCE is also different from another GCP product Container Engine.
- inlined 10y agonit: GCE is Google Compute Engine, which is a raw VM product most analogous to EC2 in AWS. Google Container Engine is "GKE", which I guess is a clever resolution strategy since it's a hosted Kubernetes service (http://kubernetes.io/ http://kubernetes.io/). GKE is another compute-based offering, but helps you deploy autoscaling services on Docker.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Nux 10y agoI'd use multiple smaller providers, preferably non-US ones when possible.
- feiss 10y agoHow about using https://cloud.google.com/storage/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/ for personal backup (photos, videos, files..)? It seems much less expensive than paying a fee for a big Google Drive. The bandwidth needed for GCStorage would be minimum (just uploading from time to time)
- ap22213 10y agoI work with 40+ partner companies, and they are all using AWS. Moving big data sets around is cheap and super easy. And, it's not been very expensive to process large data sets on AWS. On average, I crunch through 20 TiB for like $50 a pop. Given that no company that I work with uses Google's cloud, I'm curious who is using it. They're marking hard obviously. Makes me wonder what's an ad and what's not.
- nohorseinthisra 10y agoOff the top of my head, Spotify, Apple, and Snapchat run at least some part of their businesses on Google Cloud products.
- vargalas 10y agoSo practically nobody ;) These are just garage firms.
- Scrayos 10y agoI'd go for AWS since it has already proven its trustability, stability and usability in the context of daily routine/providing solid solutions for hosting high access-content. GCE is interesting however, I'll definitely keep that in mind for future "testing" but at the moment I'd take AWS as my "out of the box"-solution.
- obulpathi 10y agoGive GCE a try and I am sure you will be blown away!
- obulpathi 10y agoGoogle Cloud wins hands down! Places where Google Cloud shines over AWS: Excellent UI, Ease of use, Scalability, Security, Data services, Big Data, Machine Learning, Network, Disks. The only place where Google loses to AWS is Relational Databases. Google Cloud Network and SSDs are about an order of magnitude better (in terms of performance / price) compared to AWS Network and SSDs. Googles Big Data tools (BigQuery, PubSub, Bigtable, Dataflow) can scale to petabyte scale without any problem. AWS can be OK for terabyte scale data workloads, but beyond that, it's hard to scale and manage. Other pieces like Kubernetes, TensorFlow and Dataflow (Opensource, if you want to run in-house) and available as native Cloud services, all services are fully managed makes Google Cloud the best Cloud.
- nazka 10y agoI am very interested about Google Cloud and Machine Learning. Did you try to use other libraries than TensorFlow? What is your experience?
- jlawer 10y agoGCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a significant portion of our audience. AWS is what we use for cloud provisioning, with Rackspace still hosting some legacy systems. We are moving our workloads off Rackspace as the cost is higher. Azure is a possibility but unlikely as they are as expensive as AWS and offers nothing that we feel is especially compelling as a Linux shop. If Digital Ocean, Linode or similar offered an Australian hosting option I would be willing to look at it if the cost was under 2x that of a US region, as I could get a similar functionality having SaltStack handle provisioning. However knowing bandwidth and related costs in .au I really doubt many want to go through the cost & effort. Most of the domestic providers are either too expensive ($40-$80 AUD a month for a 1 core / 1gb instance w/ HDD backed storage & 100 GB transfer), and/or aren't run to the scale that you can have confidence that they will be an ongoing competitive business.
- meta_AU 10y agoCheck out Vultr. They used to only offer 1/10th bandwidth to AU, but pretty sure you get full bandwidth now. They are coming close to feature compatible with DigitalOcean (BSD, DNS, anycast dns)
- jlawer 10y agoHadn't heard of Vultr, but they look awesome and prices appear right. BGP is an awesome feature for my use case (mail), but unfortunately 32gb instances aren't available in Sydney and one of the virtual appliances I run have that as the recommended config for the traffic level I am pushing. Other feature that would be really good would be some bulk storage to hold backups on (in addition to the automatic backup feature). Additional Block storage isn't available in SYD. Thanks for the recommendation.
- Veratyr 10y agoOVH recently sent out surveys suggesting that they're expanding to APAC soon and as others said, Vultr offers Australian instances, albeit with Australian bandwidth prices (thanks Telstra).
- jaequery 10y agoanyone know where GCE stands in terms of PCI compliance? i know AWS is a level 1 PCI-compliant service provider and makes it a bit easier during the audit process.
- Veratyr 10y agoI'm not going to pretend I understand PCI compliance but their certifications are here: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance They appear to be PCI DSS v3 compliant?
- viglesiasce 10y agoHere is the recently published solution on how to accomplish PCI-DSS. https://cloud.google.com/solutions/pci-dss https://cloud.google.com/solutions/pci-dss
- pbbakkum 10y agoWe thought a lot about this question to pick a cloud for Quizlet (~200 cloud machines) and ended up going with GCP. Here's a summary of our analysis, hope its helpful: https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp