4 ms·

"We deeply understand" - the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not so

by nikolay 11y ago

"We deeply understand" - the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things (wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another CloudFront!

pbarnes_1 11y ago
The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV... They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.
- nikolay 11y ago
  What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      I'd chose Azure before Google Cloud if I look for AWS alternative. I see more fruitful imagination in Microsoft than in Google! I am highly disappointed by Google - they've missed so many opportunities when it comes to Cloud Computing! They started the negative trend with the ridiculous and pricey AppEngine! And now they continue to lag severely behind Amazon! Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!
      - wstrange 11y ago
        Last time I priced out AWS, Azure and GCE, Azure was by far the most expensive - by a long shot - at least for our usage. I think Microsoft is looking to capture their F500 base that are highly Windows/AD-centric.
        nikolay 11y ago
        Well, I guess, GCE has won the price war. I haven't checked pricing recently, but it looks vastly cheaper than Azure here: https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp Am I missing something?
        tedmiston 11y ago
        Well Microsoft also started giving $120k (first 12 months) in free credit to startups that went through most accelerators, whereas equivalent AWS credit has been exhausted by most of us. Note that for YC, the number is $500k.
        nikolay 11y ago
        I've heard about this as well - a friend's startup has a vast free infrastructure on Azure using the same program, but I think though you'll be in troubles having to migrate to AWS/GCE when you run out of the free credits and your startup survives one year and migration is the last thing you wanna deal with at that time. :)
  - wstrange 11y ago
    Honest question: Have you actually used GCE for any length of time? Having used both AWS and GCE, and I vastly prefer GCE. It is simply easier to use and offers better price/performance.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      Easier to use? If you understand "cloud computing" as "VMs in the cloud" than Digital Ocean is much cheaper and easiest to use. To me, "a cloud" is a few steps beyond just the rudimentary VM hosting - I get a lot of services from AWS that I need to implement and maintain myself with GCE or other cloud vendors. Okay, I agree, Google is catching up, but AWS is still years ahead with things like CloudFormation, OpsWorks, ElastiCache, RDS, Elastic Transcoder, WAS, SQS, and the likes.
    - azazqadir 11y ago
      I have used both GCE and AWS. Current I have website that is hosted on GCE, but I am using Cloudways managed platform because I am not good with server configuration thing. GCE is definitely better in performance and cheaper in pricing than AWS. Their block storage is more than AWS and they have native load-balancing technology which AWS does not have have. The only downside I have felt with GCE is that they are present in less regions than AWS. Google should also work on expanding their presence to more regions.
      - nikolay 11y ago
        Well, there's spot instance pricing and reserved instances with AWS that nobody can touch. What "native load balancing" are you referring to that has no equivalent with AWS? There are many options for EBS - including magnetic storage. I doubt you can beat the speed of EBS with provisioned IO! Maybe you weren't using the right type for your need!
        azazqadir 11y ago
        From AWS article on Best Practices in Evaluating Elastic Load Balancing, section Pre-Warming the Load Balancer: "In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected, or in the case where a load test cannot be configured to gradually increase traffic, we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer "pre-warmed". We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request/response that you will be testing." Edit: This means ELB could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.
  - pbarnes_1 11y ago
    CloudFront and what Google has shipped here are completely different things. I don't really understand your anger here TBH. Might be worth playing with GCP again if you haven't in a while. It's much better than AWS and Azure.
lolobkk 11y ago
Good point. Isn't the Fastly VCL configuration proprietary? What if you need to move to another CDN?
- nikolay 11y ago
  Sorry, I had to clarify: VCL [0] stands for "Varnish Configuration Language", i.e. you can move to another CDN that supports VCL (although I'm not aware of any other) or move to your own Varnish servers. [0]: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html

by nikolay 11y ago

pbarnes_1 11y ago

The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV... They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.

nikolay 11y ago
What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    I'd chose Azure before Google Cloud if I look for AWS alternative. I see more fruitful imagination in Microsoft than in Google! I am highly disappointed by Google - they've missed so many opportunities when it comes to Cloud Computing! They started the negative trend with the ridiculous and pricey AppEngine! And now they continue to lag severely behind Amazon! Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!
    - wstrange 11y ago
      Last time I priced out AWS, Azure and GCE, Azure was by far the most expensive - by a long shot - at least for our usage. I think Microsoft is looking to capture their F500 base that are highly Windows/AD-centric.
      - nikolay 11y ago
        Well, I guess, GCE has won the price war. I haven't checked pricing recently, but it looks vastly cheaper than Azure here: https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp Am I missing something?
      - tedmiston 11y ago
        Well Microsoft also started giving $120k (first 12 months) in free credit to startups that went through most accelerators, whereas equivalent AWS credit has been exhausted by most of us. Note that for YC, the number is $500k.
        nikolay 11y ago
        I've heard about this as well - a friend's startup has a vast free infrastructure on Azure using the same program, but I think though you'll be in troubles having to migrate to AWS/GCE when you run out of the free credits and your startup survives one year and migration is the last thing you wanna deal with at that time. :)
- wstrange 11y ago
  Honest question: Have you actually used GCE for any length of time? Having used both AWS and GCE, and I vastly prefer GCE. It is simply easier to use and offers better price/performance.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    Easier to use? If you understand "cloud computing" as "VMs in the cloud" than Digital Ocean is much cheaper and easiest to use. To me, "a cloud" is a few steps beyond just the rudimentary VM hosting - I get a lot of services from AWS that I need to implement and maintain myself with GCE or other cloud vendors. Okay, I agree, Google is catching up, but AWS is still years ahead with things like CloudFormation, OpsWorks, ElastiCache, RDS, Elastic Transcoder, WAS, SQS, and the likes.
  - azazqadir 11y ago
    I have used both GCE and AWS. Current I have website that is hosted on GCE, but I am using Cloudways managed platform because I am not good with server configuration thing. GCE is definitely better in performance and cheaper in pricing than AWS. Their block storage is more than AWS and they have native load-balancing technology which AWS does not have have. The only downside I have felt with GCE is that they are present in less regions than AWS. Google should also work on expanding their presence to more regions.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      Well, there's spot instance pricing and reserved instances with AWS that nobody can touch. What "native load balancing" are you referring to that has no equivalent with AWS? There are many options for EBS - including magnetic storage. I doubt you can beat the speed of EBS with provisioned IO! Maybe you weren't using the right type for your need!
      - azazqadir 11y ago
        From AWS article on Best Practices in Evaluating Elastic Load Balancing, section Pre-Warming the Load Balancer: "In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected, or in the case where a load test cannot be configured to gradually increase traffic, we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer "pre-warmed". We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request/response that you will be testing." Edit: This means ELB could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.
- pbarnes_1 11y ago
  CloudFront and what Google has shipped here are completely different things. I don't really understand your anger here TBH. Might be worth playing with GCP again if you haven't in a while. It's much better than AWS and Azure.

lolobkk 11y ago

Good point. Isn't the Fastly VCL configuration proprietary? What if you need to move to another CDN?

nikolay 11y ago
Sorry, I had to clarify: VCL [0] stands for "Varnish Configuration Language", i.e. you can move to another CDN that supports VCL (although I'm not aware of any other) or move to your own Varnish servers. [0]: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html