31 ms·

Google Cloud is 50% cheaper than AWS

598 points by yarapavan 10y ago

0xmohit 10y ago
Lots of discussion here too: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE? [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515505
jakozaur 10y ago
Good article though I would disagree about AWS Reserved Instances. Though they are way more complicated, they can give 40%+ discount and in many use cases you can run quite a lot of them.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Isn't it true that those require a 1-yr or 3-yr commitment? You can't move a reserved instance to another region. IIRC, its tied both to a region and AZ. OTOH, spot instances can be cheaper but then you should be prepared for those to vanish anytime.
  - needcaffeine 10y ago
    As of September 2016, you can buy a convertible reservation that allows you to move a reserved instance to a different AZ within a region. Your greater point still stands but I just wanted to correct one piece of it. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-update-convertible-ris-and-regional-benefit/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-updat...
    - 0xmohit 10y ago
      Thanks for the update. The change appears to be relatively recent, and I'm not surprised being unaware :)
thevivekpandey 10y ago
Does someone know why Google Cloud can afford to be so much cheaper compared to AWS? Are the costs to Amazon for AWS so much higher than the costs to Google for Google Cloud? Why?
- notyourwork 10y ago
  My guess is economics are trying to steal AWS business. Low pricing will draw a % of AWS customers over to GCE and the prices will balance out. Frankly I am more interested in Google's support quality compared to AWS. I don't have any experience with Google but I know Amazon is founded on the premise of customer experience which carries into their support. How is google's support?
  - StreamBright 10y ago
    I am not familiar with GCP support but with their product support. Once I bought a device from Google and it broke on the first day. The device was completely dead, did not even turn on. When I engaged their support and explained the situation to the customer representative she kept asking me which light is on even though I explained to her 10 times that the device is completely dead. I was lucky because I bought the device through Amazon. I visited the website clicked on the dead device needs to be replaced button and in 10 minutes the replacement was on the way to my home. I do not want to draw any conclusion here but when it comes to which company gets my money decision I always prefer Amazon. The following applies to customer trust too: "It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute." ― Will Rogers
- jonathanyc 10y ago
  It's Google using their typical strategy: spend lots of advertising cash to develop and then provide something for free / less than competitors, with the goal of pulling you into their ecosystem. Under the Obama administration we didn't see any antitrust/antidumping actions because of how much Google managed to embed themselves into the administration. Don't know if it will change. EDIT: fixed a typo
  - 10y ago
mikebay 10y ago
But problem is that, google will delete your accounts without any warning, if you are too opinionated against mainstream what google is pushing. Thats why I will use amazon more likely. No thanks google, your business is censoring peoples opinions and I do not support your services.
joaoqalves 10y ago
Comparing only instance prices is not fair, imho. Amazon charges that because all of the services/ecosystem they have. Google Cloud is stepping up their game though, leading to cheaper prices in AWS.
- vgt 10y ago
  Amazon has a very broad offering of great fully managed services, but Google's no slouch. In fact, many of Google's offerings can be very compelling - BigQuery, Bigtable, CloudML, PubSub, GKE to name a few. Just in the "only instances" space you mention Google has a different strategy. A couple things to mention: - Google doesn't have a broad spectrum of instance types. No storage-optimized or networking optimized. Instead, any instance can just get great storage attached to it, and any instance gets best-in-class networking. - Google's Preemptible VMs are like Spot instances but fixed 75-80% off. Again, with less fragmentation against instance types + fixed cost, much easier to rely on Preemptible VMs imo. - Google's Load Balancer is global, scalable, anycast IP driven, and backed by Google Network. If your packets originate in, say, New Zealand, they'll be talking to a "GCLB instance in our pop in Sydney", which will carry packets on Google's backbone to the VMs. - Custom VM sizes - you can set your own VM/RAM combination for instances. - Live Migration. Google manages instance health and maintenance for you, without forcing restarts. (Work at Google but not on GCE.. and I don't get paid to post here)
  - novembermike 10y ago
    I'm not sure I'd agree that Google has a broad spectrum of instance types. You can boost up individual components, but for example if I wanted an EC2 instance with as much local SSD space as I can get I could have 6.4 terabytes, while on GCE I could have 3 TB. If I want memory, Google's willing to give me 200GB, Amazon offers 10x as much. My impression is that Google has a first class general purpose instance but you don't really get the breadth of options that EC2 will give you.
    - vgt 10y ago
      You bring up a good point. Amazon does give you a better "vertical scaling" story. I'll still challenge you on the "breadth" when it comes to EC2 - the philosophy is just very different. Why do you need a "IO optimized instance" if you want just fast disk - that notion just seems very foreign and arbitrarily-constrained on Google Cloud. You bring up Local SSD. Google's Local SSD is just badass by comparison: - 680,000 Read and 360,000 Write IOPS included in the cost [0] - $0.218 per GB per month. Instance cost is separate. - Again, you can attach these to any instance type (hence the point on fragmentation of instances on EC2) - AWS goes up to 365,000 Read and 315,000 "First Write" IOPS. Only if you buy an i2.8xlarge [2] - An i2.8xlarge is $6.82 per hour. You do the math :) And someone else did more comparisons here [1] [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance [1] https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-amazing-price-to-performance-2a58e7d9b433#.r131j8yfe https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-a... [2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instances.html#i2-instances-diskperf http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instan...
nucleardog 10y ago
In any comparison on "cheapest way to run a linux box somewhere" I would expect AWS to lose. AWS is a platform, not a server rental service. You start to see value when you build to the platform.
- ed_blackburn 10y ago
  This. Some of my clients are on one of the spectrum with lots of PaaS offering in use especially features such as queues. Others prefer to be agnostic and won't use any specific features. I guess it depends on what you want and how comfortable you are administering Rabbit etc.
- rms_returns 10y ago
  Even when the comparison is with a web-hosting provider such as GoDaddy or Digital Ocean? I want to host a few custom developed web apps on a VPS and I'm confused between AWS and DO/GoDaddy. Which one would you suggest?
  - minxomat 10y ago
    Web apps on VPS sounds like something fit for micro or tiny instances, in which case a month pre-commitment might actually be cheaper if you look at OVH's Kimsufi programme: https://www.kimsufi.com/en/vps-ssd.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/en/vps-ssd.xml. These are cheap, but in my experience reliable (after multiple suboptimal experiences with DO) KVMs. While KS is probably more important for EU customers, the KS-VPS line has three regions to choose from: Gravelines (Northern France), Strasbourg (Eastern France) or Beauharnois (North-America). You can also DIY your own cloud with https://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-cloud.xml https://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-cloud.xml, though I've never tested this. Personal point: I may be very old-fashioned, but after using GCE and AWS for various tasks, I still prefer the transparency of pre-committed billing. E.g., I don't know if this changed by now, but I ran into dozens of inexplicable administration errors with GCE, to the point where I couldn't manage my own projects anymore. Plus, after creating billing details, I couldn't detach my credit card from the platform. The only way around that was to disable all projects, but that still left me with an uneasy feeling. I don't have automatic billing setup for KS/OHV. I get billing reminders 30/15/7 days before each cycle and authorize each payment.
ed_blackburn 10y ago
How much do google use their own cloud internally? I'm curious and would better appreciate Google Cloud if I could see it being dogfooded with something substantial.
- ChrisAntaki 10y ago
  In July, Anvato joined Google. They're using Google Cloud to power video processing solutions for customers like NBCUniversal and Univision. http://www.anvato.com/anvato-joins-google/ http://www.anvato.com/anvato-joins-google/
- gkop 10y ago
  My understanding is GKE on GCP is kinda sorta a rewrite of the Borg system Google has used internally for years. Internal services at Google are encouraged to use GKE, but there's little incentive to migrate from the Borg infrastructure that has a long track record for reliability. So currently only a marginal amount of Google services use GKE, but as old services are retired and new ones developed, the share of services on GKE should grow steadily over time.
lordnacho 10y ago
I didn't see any mention of Google's preemptible instances. I've used them, and they're much cheaper than ordinary instances. They happen to fit my use case, which is a simple copybigfile-simulate-writeresults done over hundreds of days of market data. Preemption does happen, but it tends to happen very early on in a simulation. Also you don't get billed if it's in the first 10 minutes. For some reason GCE won't let you auto-restart that instance, but you can just write an API call that accomplishes the same. There's also the added benefit that your instance will die after 24 hours, so you won't get billed for leaving something on by accident.
- tener 10y ago
  If you create an instance group of preemptible instances it will automatically try to fulfill your demand - no need to write a thing!
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    And it's amazing. Over 99% uptime for 1/4 the price.
- lordnacho 10y ago
  One thing I forgot to mention is I've had a couple of "we will shut you down" emails. Something about the automated abuse detection seems to not quite work, and so I've gotten emails saying the account is suspected of DDOSing other internet users. It's a bit unnerving, but they've been pretty prompt at getting back once an explanation was put forward.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  To be fair, wouldn't you then need to compare to AWS spot instance pricing?
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Nor any mention of AWS spot instances.
desireco42 10y ago
While most will still use AWS, it is great that there are alternatives and competition. A lot of good points raised here about Amazon as ecosystem.
jbyers 10y ago
"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation." While I agree that Google's pricing model is superior, the author's position on reserved instances accounts for ~40% of the cost difference. In a drag race between instances AWS tends to lose. If you value the enormous feature and service surface-area that AWS provides it's a different story. Either way we win; both companies will engage in a brutal price and feature war for many years to come.
- vgt 10y ago
  I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in Google Cloud. Google's ecosystem of fully managed services is very rich broad and compelling, and in many ways far ahead of competition. (work on Google Cloud but don't get paid to post here)
  - Fiahil 10y ago
    > I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in Google Cloud. RDS instances with Postgresql.
    - vgt 10y ago
      This is the one that comes up. Hit me up offline. Also, you can always use any number of partners that provide this functionality. Let me know if there are any others.
      - chronic6l 10y ago
        > Also, you can always use any number of partners that provide this functionality. Like AWS?
        vgt 10y ago
        Yup, both leverage partners where their offerings are not present.
baybal2 10y ago
well, both still loose to budget app hostings if you count only cost
coredog64 10y ago
Is there another source for the 220Mbit/s limit for m4 class instances? I was under the impression that you could get enhanced networking with those, and double the speed when paired with placement groups.
- user5994461 10y ago
  The 220Mbits/s is for the m4.large instance, not all the m4 family. The bigger instances get more. It is with HVM and enhanced networking. You can "wget http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip" http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip" and see what speed you get.
- ranman 10y ago
  The 220mbps limit is entirely false. Between two m4.large in two different AZs. Test Complete. Summary Results: [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 3.13 GBytes 449 Mbits/sec 39391 sender [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 3.13 GBytes 449 Mbits/sec receiver CPU Utilization: local/sender 1.4% (0.0%u/1.5%s), remote/receiver 7.2% (0.8%u/6.4%s)
tzaman 10y ago
I can confirm that first hand; We're just moving our whole stack from AWS to GC and right now we're running everything in parallel with roughly the same amount of resources. AWS monthly bill: ~$1000, GC monthly bill: ~$600
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  How many months will you need to run in GC to break even on the engineer time spent moving at $400/month savings?
  - chronic6l 10y ago
    Assuming a $400/month engineer, 1 month.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      How many servers did you have to move? I'd assume that you can count them on your fingers if the bill is only $1000/month. That's a "reasonably" small scale migration, if not locked in on AWS services.
      - notyourwork 10y ago
        Yep, we spend around $45-$50k/month and are quite happy with our support from AWS.
      - tzaman 10y ago
        Agreed, we have 10 instances on AWS, but it's hard to judge the complexity of the migration just based on that because these servers vary in size, requirements, and purpose. But all in all, yes, it is a fairly small scale migration.
      - jamiesonbecker 10y ago
        Generally speaking, the number of servers has very little to do with complexity of migration or existential threat from downtime, relative to company size.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ggregoire 10y ago
A bit off-topic, but - AWS has a 12 months free tier [1] - Google Cloud has a 2 months free trial [2] That will make a huge difference when I'll have to choose. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/free https://aws.amazon.com/free [2] https://cloud.google.com/free-trial https://cloud.google.com/free-trial
- vgt 10y ago
  Great point. I think it's a matter of different philosophies, and both are great for customers! - AWS gives you specific usage allotments per-month for specific services. - Google gives you $300 cash for 2 months to use however you please. just don't mine bitcoins or generate email spam :) - Some folks did the math on AWS free tier to total $247.20 [0]. That is, if you 100% utilize all the allotments. - Google BigQuery, Firebase, and AppEngine also have perpetual free tiers. [0] http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/How-much-are-free-cloud-computing-services-worth http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/How-much-are-... (work on Google Cloud)
  - ggregoire 10y ago
    Thank you for the clarification. :)
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Talking of EC2, AWS free tier only allows t2.micro instances (1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM). Might not serve any use to many.
- alberts00 10y ago
  It seems like Google Cloud free trial in several countries (at least in LV,LT,EE) is only available to businesses. I wanted to give the free trial a go, but wasn't able to register because it did not let me choose account type as "individual".
avtar 10y ago
Does anyone know if either Google or Amazon provide credits for non-profits like Microsoft does [1] for Azure? I haven't been able to find any details but also not sure if it's something they do offline on a case by case basis. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/philanthropies/product-donations/products/azure https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/philanthropies/product-donat...
- 13498RtgbDwl 10y ago
  It looks like AWS has a credit program for non-profits[0]. GCP has one for education[1], and a program to use GCP to protect journalists[2], but I'm not seeing anything for non-profits. You may be able to get credits by asking them, however. -- [0] https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/ https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/ [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/06/new-Google-Cloud-Platform-Education-Grants-offer-free-credits-to-students.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/06/new-Google-Clou... [2] https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/ https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/
  - avtar 10y ago
    Thanks! Not sure how I missed that Amazon page. I'll get in touch with them since having access to Postgres via RDS is very appealing.
jacques_chester 10y ago
I've worked with both AWS and GCP (my day job is working on Cloud Foundry). In every area that I've looked, GCP is so much better than AWS that it's offensive, bordering on obscene. It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually comprehensible. The APIs are consistent. There's a single console, rather than a fruit salad of conceptually different consoles under a single domain. The console is, in fact, navigable without invoking curses. Not even a small one. AWS has the massive advantage of inertia. If you're deeply woven into the higher-level AWS services, I'd probably stay put. But if you aren't, or you're just beginning, then holy moly you owe it to yourself to look.
- ranman 10y ago
  >It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually comprehensible. The docs have more 404s than trumps twitter account... who payed/paid you to write this?
  - vgt 10y ago
    >>It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually comprehensible. >The docs have more 404s than trumps twitter account... who payed/paid you to write this? (ranman works at AWS..and talking to an AWS premier partner... the delicious irony)
    - ranman 10y ago
      Great job addressing those 404s.
      - vgt 10y ago
        Again, a weird thing for an AWS employee to say about an opinion from an AWS customer and an AWS platinum partner, and then accuse them of expressing those opinions due to monetary compensation.
        10y ago
sirn 10y ago
Slightly unrelated, but since there seems to be some Google Cloud people in this thread: I see that Google Cloud account is linked to my Google Account. What happen to my Google Cloud instances if my Google Account got suspended by Google due to other reasons (e.g. Pixel stuff from the other day, or because of YouTube, or etc.) and I did not bought support tier?
- halite 10y ago
  I don't think that should be a concern as both providers in theory can block or suspend your account. Maybe use a separate account for Google cloud for running world-changing-billion-user app.
- gist 10y ago
  This is a great question. Common sense wise to me it's an issue. And given how large a company google is I don't think it even matters what the google cloud people who might respond say. It makes sense to simply isolate things like this.
  - robalfonso 10y ago
    Slightly related - had a AWS account, the account tied to it was for business use only - at some point I had credits/balance on the business account and someone gained access to the regular amazon account and bought some digital goods, so I notified amazon. They locked the account AND locked me out of AWS. This particular account was not important, but it took weeks to get access back. I finally had to call my rep at AWS and said - you are putting your business with us in jeopardy (On other accounts that we spend significant money on) because its taken me so long to resolve this. Got it unlocked in 24 hours, but the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. I suspect Google WILL have this issue as well, it has the potential to be a huge issue for your business. Alternatively never had this issue when I've COLO'd - food for thought.
    - gist 10y ago
      > Alternatively never had this issue when I've COLO'd Taking it one step further in precaution (and from experience): We have some servers colo'd at a small datacenter. We use it strictly for our operating website and don't put anything for customers in that data center at all even though it would be convenient and save money. The reason is we don't want any bad actors that we might have as customers potentially impacting our main operations. This is in addition to vetting customers as well actually.
BonoboIO 10y ago
I would use Google Cloud Storage or S3 Storage but their Traffic charges are HUGE. 500 GB Storage (Google Cloud Storage Nearline) Storage Fee= $0.01 x 500 = 5 Dollar Retrieval $0.01 x 500 = 5 Dollar Bandwith Charges $0.12 x 500 = 60 DOLLAR I mean SIXTY DOLLAR just for downloading my backups, they are crazy. Both companys. Would use rClone for my backups but OVH OpenStack is kind of buggy and could not get it to work.
- user5994461 10y ago
  The traffic is free if it's coming from an instance in the same region. This is really intended for business. Definitely not a good fit for a personal backup solution.
  - BonoboIO 10y ago
    Well i would use it as server backup but in this moment i got rclone woth OVH running :D https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/storage/object-storage.xml https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/storage/object-storage.xml 10 times cheaper than GC oder AWS
- alainv 10y ago
  I'd suggest Arq + Amazon Drive.
  - BonoboIO 10y ago
    Its Server Backup
novaleaf 10y ago
sorry, but parts of this article are a bit.... dumb. for example, "minimum production instance", it's comparing a 2cpu aws instance vs a 1cpu gce. no wonder its "50% cheaper". I use GCE over AWS, and run aprox 50 vm's. GCE is cheaper, but not nearly as much as the article claims. the savings is for hardware. data egress cost is basically the same.
daemonk 10y ago
Is there a spot instance-like mechanism with google cloud? I regularly request high memory spot instances (r3.8xlarge) on AWS for 1-2 days processes (genomic analysis). With spot-pricing it can be pretty cheap.
- alainv 10y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/
- dgacmu 10y ago
  Yes. Google calls them "preemptible instances". Unlike the AWS spot instances, they're fixed price at a discount.
  - phonon 10y ago
    Preemptible Instances only can be used for a max of 24 hours, so would not fit the above usage pattern...though I don't know if AWS spot instances are really meant to be used for that long either. Of course both allow you to use the regular non-preemptible on-demand pricing. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible
- jpatokal 10y ago
  Cloud Genomics is intended for use cases like yours: https://cloud.google.com/genomics/ https://cloud.google.com/genomics/
- arrogantrobot 10y ago
  A very clever way to run genomic analysis on GCP is via WDL ( https://software.broadinstitute.org/wdl/ https://software.broadinstitute.org/wdl/ ) workflows executed on the Cromwell ( https://github.com/broadinstitute/cromwell https://github.com/broadinstitute/cromwell ) service. Using WDL you define tasks, and compose those into workflows, then Cromwell executes those tasks on GCP using the pipelines api ( https://cloud.google.com/genomics/reference/rest/v1alpha2/pipelines https://cloud.google.com/genomics/reference/rest/v1alpha2/pi... ). So you don't need to set up any instances at all, each stage of your pipeline, a task, is executed in its own docker instance, with files from google cloud storage being materialized on that instance for you. When that task is done, outputs are sent to cloud storage buckets, and everything is torn down. Picard can pull reads directly out of the google genomics API, and more of the Broad tools are adopting the GA4GH api, so this means an increasing amount of core tools anyone doing genomics will want to use, will work directly with google genomics.
benjojo12 10y ago
Now, If only I could use it in the UK. Seriously. Every time I sign up, I have no option to sign up as a individual, only company. Friends in other regions of the world can sign up as individual, but it appears google ( in the UK/EU ? ) as decided for whatever reason ( I assume VAT calculation ) they won't offer it. I can sign up to and use AWS ( as much as I really don't really want to ) as myself. Yet there are all of these really nice things coming out of GCP that I can't use because I simply can't enable billing. (that being said, I do use google app engine for my blog, and it's fantastic)
nhumrich 10y ago
Once GC has a RDS like service for postgres, I will switch right away.
xiaoma 10y ago
Here's a thought: Things often go wrong. Would you rather have your mission critical apps relying on Google's customer service or on Amazon's customer service?
- Yabood 10y ago
  This.
- imperialdrive 10y ago
  We pay 10+k/mo for our AWS support, and it has never paid off, even with multiple phantom errors and failures... the top level support supposedly being paged out of bed for me doesn't have answers. Always had to simply restore from backup without a good report to share with mgmt.
  - ignoramous 10y ago
    That's deeply concerning. Can you pls share your aws account ID with me? If you're not comfortavle doing that, pls share email ID where I can contact you. Thanks.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - nodesocket 10y ago
    I've actually had good experiences with AWS support. Use the phone call option. Online replies tend to take over 24 hours.
  - pwelch 10y ago
    We've actually had good luck with AWS Support and have a dedicated representative that is always there to push urgent issues through support.
  - dmourati 10y ago
    Agree. It takes an act of congress to get through to an actual AWS engineer. AWS status site is a joke with how degraded a service needs to be to register a change: https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/.
mrwnmonm 10y ago
what makes me choose AWS, is i can survive a year using it without paying too much money, while in GC you got 300$ to spend in 3 months, which would get you more powerful machine for this period but you should start paying after it so if you really don't have money to start with, you have to choose AWS
- Buge 10y ago
  I don't understand. Why not just use a normal amount for the first 60 days.
  - mrwnmonm 10y ago
    doesn't matter, it still just 60 days
    - Buge 10y ago
      Just 60 days for what? You get full functionality before and after. And you pay less than AWS before and after.
      - mrwnmonm 10y ago
        60 days without paying, for free. while on AWS https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ you could not paying for a year if your usage is low
        frag 10y ago
        what AWS is giving for 1 year is really really minimal for a PoC or testing stuff. A small website would already get into trouble
usaphp 10y ago
I wonder how do they compare to digitalocean?
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  That's not a good comparison to make.
jread 10y ago
GCE is a great platform with many competitive advantages including networking, flexible configurations and sustained use discounting. However, I'd argue that using different data points and comparison criteria the opposite hypothesis could be made in favor of EC2 - e.g. burst instance/storage, spot and reserve pricing, local SSD and magnetic storage, and others.
- vgt 10y ago
  I agree, you can go into higher granularity a-la-carte on both fronts.. but I don't think "spot pricing" is that, and neither are local SSD + magnetic storage (take a look at my local SSD post in this thread).
mixmastamyk 10y ago
I find AWS annoying in that the east coast is always cheaper and the price reductions linked mention more reductions on that side. Who of the cloud companies is treating California as a first class citizen?
- hrez 10y ago
  Oregon region is on par with east coast.
plandis 10y ago
This guy has some other really great articles. My favorite is: "GCE vs AWS in 2016: Why you should never use AWS" [1]. [1] https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/ https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-201...
StreamBright 10y ago
If any cloud project was a single dimension problem. For me it does not matter how much cheaper I could run an instance in GCP simply because we rely on services from AWS that do not exist in GCP yet. Another issue for me with Google is how they handle account problems. I do not want to find out the hard way that I should have done some extra safety measures just to keep our entire production environment safe. With AWS I do not need to worry, their customer first approach proved to be extremely useful over the years, and they were very patient with us even when we did something that was against their policy. My customer trust is not something that is up for sale and I have been disappointed with Google's customer support several times, this is simple cannot happen in a cloud infrastructure situation. I like GCP and Azure because they make sure that I get a good deal on AWS.
kristopolous 10y ago
Azure is even cheaper
- kristopolous 10y ago
  Correcting my comment, Google has apparently undercut Microsoft recently.
- Ducki 10y ago
  Concerning the Virtual Machine pricings on the discussed platforms, I'd like to mention that – on very small machines – running Windows Server is significantly more expensive on Google Loud than on AWS or Azure, because Google charges you the license fee directly whereas Azure or AWS seem to have a mixed calculation. Having the smallest Windows VM on AWS is like 6-7$/month, whereas on GCE you're at at least 14.60$ higher due to the license.
iagooar 10y ago
Does anyone know if there are any plans to support Postgres by the Cloud SQL? Because currently it's the major deal breaker to me. I have a SaaS business that works on Postgres and we don't plan to replace it with any major SQL alternative.
- htn 10y ago
  There's some indications that Google would support Postgres as part of the CLoudSQL in the future. But there are already multiple DB-as-a-Service offerings that provide PostgreSQL in Google Cloud. My company, Aiven (https://aiven.io https://aiven.io) is one of the providers and I believe Compose, DatabaseLabs and ElephantSQL also provide managed PG in Google Cloud.
  - iagooar 10y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation, we will give it a look for sure.
pascalxus 10y ago
I recently visited the google cloud pricing page and had a hard time making any sense of it all. The pricing isn't at all clear. DigitalOcean on the other hand, you take one glance at their pricing page and know exactly what your getting. Google can learning something from that.
- spangry 10y ago
  Thank god I'm not the only one. I keep hearing about how opaque AWS pricing is compared to GCP, yet I personally cannot make any sense of google's pricing. It's difficult to explain, but I struggle ti figure out how much I'll be paying over, say, a month for a GCE instance. It seems like there are too many variables to keep in my head. But I'm just a tinkerer/hobbyist. So maybe the reason is because I don't have a clear idea of what my monthly utilisation is going to look like, or whether it's going to be consistent. I imagine this would be much clearer for those running businesses. I dunno...
  - manigandham 10y ago
    GCP pricing is far simpler than AWS - just visit any of the product pages to see the unit costs. And they have a calculator: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ If you're talking about Compute Engine utilization for billing discounts, they just mean how long you have it running continuously over the course of a month.
snissn 10y ago
i recently moved a database off of RDS onto a "bare metal" VPS and my queries are > 10x faster
sebringj 10y ago
This is why Werner Vogels sweats so much.
meow_mix 10y ago
This is good news for GCS but they will need to compete on more than price if they want to gain market share. Saving 500$ / month is minuscule compared to the time it will cost engineers to migrate from AWS to GCS and get used to the new service.
- movedx 10y ago
  Look at Terraform. With the right infrastructure tooling, it's not hard to move at all. Look at Ansible (or Puppet, Chef, Salt, etc.) With the right configuration management tooling, it's much, much easier to migrate services.
- rotten 10y ago
  The web interfaces for Google Compute Engine/Disks/Networking are much more intuitive. The pricing calculator is built right in. And - they offer free consulting services to help you migrate out of AWS. We are moving out of AWS to Google Compute Engine and it has really gone fairly smoothly and within a couple of weeks was already saving us money.
cdevs 10y ago
In response to Reserve pricing is bs.. We are moving to aws before the end of the year and it will be a 50% price cut from the dedicated providers we have been using. Our dedicated servers are just about out of space and their bs cloud environment is about 350$ for what you get for 70-80$ on linode. When we need 10-50 processing servers quickly cloned up we go to linode do our work and try to sling the data back ...it's all too annoying now. We're moving to aws, reserving some instances for our client front ends and and booting up what we have to when we need it for mapreduce jobs. For us reserve pricing isn't so bs.
- gtaylor 10y ago
  It gets a lot more challenging once you outgrow your initial reservations. Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes. As you add more reservations, it will become something that you are dealing with constantly. It's terrible.
  - cthalupa 10y ago
    >Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes You can resize RIs within the same family (ie 1 m4.xlarge to 2 m4.large) http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...
    - gtaylor 10y ago
      Yes, you can. But doing this is not "free", in that you are spending time doing this (potentially often) instead of an infinite number of other more productive things. This alone isn't going to kill your productivity, but it's one of many of the annoyances of managing a large fleet using RIs. It's a cumulative burden, between figuring out reservations per-region, consider your baseline vs spot/on-demand levels, potentially put some other stuff you don't need on the RI market, and audit how many RIs in your inventory are actually in use. This is an annoyance when you have a small fleet, but it quickly becomes an expensive nightmare when you start talking 100+ VMs. You start having to pay for expensive external tools to manage your expenses because this stuff sucks so much. Or write a ton of your own tooling (which is not free at all). Or just have someone who does this manually all the time (also really sucks).
epicureanideal 10y ago
The other 50% is subsidized by the NSA in exchange for direct access to your servers.
malloryerik 10y ago
Does anyone know how much of Google Cloud works inside of China? So, would my webapp be accessible from the PRC? And what about services that come from a Google API such as voice-to-text or translation, managed database and so on?
- codesnik 10y ago
  ah, I almost forgot! My gce instances weren't accessible from Hainan. They aren't accessible from Crymea, also.
codesnik 10y ago
I've used GCE for production servers in the past and was really pleased with almost every aspect. I have really little "serious" experience with AWS, and I'd say it's much more.. um, arcane? I'm genuinly curious, what kind of project/situation would be to actually prefer AWS to GCE (aside from "we're already on AWS" or "I know AWS and don't know GCE")?
skywhopper 10y ago
This article is interesting and the author has some good points about the lack of small non-burstable instances in AWS. There are plenty of things to gripe about. But the headline assertion is ultimately unsupported except in terms of simple comparison graphs of paper numbers about the raw CPU and memory numbers. Are the CPU units comparable? Is the networking what it's cracked up to be? How easy is it to autoscale? Is the capacity you need available when you need it? How long do instances take to start? What are the dynamic storage options? How does disk IO performance compare? I'd be really interested to read an article that attempted to break these down and do a real comparison. But this article doesn't even attempt a real world comparison.
- user5994461 10y ago
  > Are the CPU units comparable? Is the networking what it's cracked up to be? How easy is it to autoscale? Is the capacity you need available when you need it? How long do instances take to start? What are the dynamic storage options? How does disk IO performance compare? In order. Yes. Google networking is superior (cheaper & faster). Variable, depends on your application/workload, not just the cloud. Yes. < 30 seconds on Google, 1-3 minutes on AWS. lcoal SSD, remote SSD, or remote HDD on Google VS a mess of many complex & expensive disks on AWS (it would take more than a blog post to explain their disk offerings). Google disks are 3-10 times IOPS and/or bandwidth, lower latency. This article is just on basic pricing. I plan more articles for the future. Starting with one on disk benchmark and one on network benchmark.
paulddraper 10y ago
"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation" Well that's a huge caveat. Anyone intending to be a serious user of AWS will use reservations. The discount is large, well over 50% off IIRC. And then there's the spot instances/spot fleets with even steeper discounts. For better or worse, AWS's pricing is more complicated then its competitors. A serious comparison would have to include those details.
- hairyhenderson 10y ago
  "Anyone intending to be a serious user of AWS will use reservations." Not in my experience... It's impossible to predict the kind of usage you're going to need over the next 1-3 years, especially when you're first getting started with AWS. If you underestimate, you waste money. If you overestimate, you waste even more money. Google's concept of "sustained use" discounts is _much_ more appealing to me.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    > when you're first getting started with AWS Then I respectfully submit that you are not (yet) a serious user of AWS. > It's impossible to predict the kind of usage you're going to need over the next 1-3 years I call BS. Office 365, JIRA, Slack, Loggly...these all have monthly price plans, and discounted yearly plans. People managed to predict needs, despite a uncertain future of their needs. In the case they underestimate, they just purchase more at anytime. In case they overestimate...I don't know; I just know that a price comparison would very likely use JIRA's yearly prices, not its monthly ones. Unlike those examples, reserved instances can be bought and sold on the AWS marketplace (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...). I understand (and agree) if people criticize the complexity of AWS EC2 pricing. But if you're not going to use reserved instances for your non-trivial stuff...you're flushing money; go with another provider already.
    - merb 10y ago
      well you just buy the lowest possible and start new instances and stop them when needed, when the lowest possible raises you just reserve more.
ranman 10y ago
The author references this post: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX But quite obviously only read the headline.
estefan 10y ago
I want to like Google Cloud, but it just seriously lags AWS. Amazon got everything so right with an ID and secret. GC's oauth is just cumbersome, and the CLI tools are nowhere near as user friendly as aws-cli. Two other recent examples - the lack of granularity and inflexibility of GC's IAM perms (you need to faff around with roles which even as an Owner you can't create - they need to be done at the org level, WTF?), and GC support is miles behind. I opened a support ticket for a critical issue recently, and the initial response I received when someone looked at it fell into the repeating-back-to-me-what-I'd-told-them-in-the-ticket category. Then they suggested I "check the permissions are right", which as I told them "I don't know what's wrong or what needs checking, that's why I opened the ticket". It's just lucky the issue didn't affect our prod account or we'd have been in real trouble since they're still investigating even though we're probably one of their top-tier customers. AWS support has always been second to none for me. GC support has always for me been second to, well, Amazon...
- ranman 10y ago
  I actually like the gcloud CLI -- I wish its output was more tunable (CSV, Table, JSON)... I also think it's weird they use a ~/.boto config.
  - jvolkman 10y ago
    Have you tried '--format'?
    - ranman 10y ago
      that was easier than I expected.
didibus 10y ago
I hate it when the evangelist swarm the hackernews comments. On another note, I'm not surprised Google cloud is cheaper as its trailing behind and offer no other advantage but price to catch up. GCE, Azure and AWS all pretty much match each other technically, so I suspect the one with least customers to always offer the better value. So if GCE were to ever become number 1, I'd suspect it's price to rise and others prices to lower.
rmykhajliw 10y ago
GAE has serious problems: 1. security, everything accessible for everyone 2. billing, it stoped accepting my card an your ago without any notice, hover the same corporate card works for all other services 3. support it's 100% per cent useless. They cannot even fix anything, only claiming they have the same issue for the last 3 years (that's from my real conversation). That's why I highly not recommend to have nay relationships with Google Cloud. It's unpredictable, you just cannot build your business around it. Now it exists, in 5 minutes they may decided to close the service, change the billing to unbillable, whatever. And the most scary, NONE, just NONE helps you. It will be your issue.
ranman 10y ago
I work at AWS and I have questions for the author about this post: TL;DR -- I urge all readers to take this post with a grain/boulder of salt: The author is anonymous, prone to hyperbole and error, and makes multiple unverified claims. I'm sure he's a nice guy/girl and if we met in real life I'd be happy to converse over a beer -- but I find the language and misinformation in the post overly polemic and disingenuous. If this stuff interests you guys tune into the reinvent livestream next week: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/ https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/ All numbers are from EU-WEST-1 (Does anyone know why GCE doesn't have a eu-west-1a? only b,c,d? I'd be curious to know the story there... not trolling -- just curious.) Graph 2: c4.large has 2 CPUs... n1-standard-1 has 1... comparison on price is strange? Your point below about optimizing for manageability doesn't really make sense to me as manageability would stem from config/deploy/etc. -- not from instance type? Perhaps your language isn't clear. You're anonymous but I'm guessing english is a second language for you (judging from sentences in post) so it's possible we're missing your point there. Could you clarify please? >"an ancient virtualization technology" source? details? KVM came out in 2007. Xen came out in 2003. I don't consider either of those dates particularly ancient but whatever it's your post, use the language you want. Graph 3: A c4.4xlarge has 16 CPUs, and 30 gigs of RAM. An n1-highcpu-4 has 4 CPUs and <4 gigs of RAM. Comparing the two on price is disingenuous. Your claims that these are the "production instances" don't make sense to me. >Network Heavy: So this is a test between two t2.micros in different AZs: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ranman-code/2016-11-20+00.58.23.gif https://s3.amazonaws.com/ranman-code/2016-11-20+00.58.23.gif It shows 1gbps... I ran it literally a minute ago... So that's 1gbit... Do you mean inbound from public internet or outbound to public internet? I created an n1-highcpu-4 and had it talk to a c4.xlarge at 1gpbs in (both in eu-west) so your claim that you need a c4.4xlarge for 1gbps seems dubious. Test Complete. Summary Results: [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 7.40 GBytes 1.06 Gbits/sec 1297597 sender [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 7.40 GBytes 1.06 Gbits/sec receiver It actually seems like Google's network was the limiting factor there because when I ran a similar test on a 10gpbs instance I couldn't get faster than 1gpbs. Which is fine because that's what's advertised -- just pointing out that the need for a c4.4xlarge is wrong. On a c4.large I got 900mbps. >C4/m4/r3 have a hard cap at 220 mbits This one is just false. What am I missing here? Where did you get this info? From eu-west-1 to us-east-1 I get faster than that using public routes and t2.micros. Internally across availability zones I get much faster than that. Local SSD #s: Use PIOPS volumes, tunable size, lower cost, can attach to any instance type. Also consider the numerous other instance types that offer ephemeral SSDs. >It is quite flexible. For instance, we could recreate any instance from AWS on Google Cloud. I don't think you mean any instance... but ok sure! >Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right, A message by an employee from Amazon than Google, not directly relevant but still a good read. ^ I don't think you read the above post when listing it as a reference. The title is ironic. Steve Yegge quit Google. Famously... on stage... He also goes on to say that Google can't do platforms. I'm sure that's changed in the past few years though. In the end I'm super excited about both AWS and GCP they both have awesome products. I encourage people to continue researching and writing posts around these topics. It's hard to not take some of the criticisms personally when you're passionate and invested in your work (at least it is for me). I've got a google employee DM-ing on twitter calling me "petulant child" among other things. We don't need that. It's not helpful for our companies and it's not helpful for our customers. I'll encourage everyone to tune in to the reinvent livestream on the 29th, 30th, 1st: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/ https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/
StreamBright 10y ago
The only feature that any company can copy from a competitor without any effort is price. It is well known in product circles that you can't compete with price only, you need to put in other features that make your product attractive compare to the competitors. I am still waiting for something extraordinary from GCP that would make me consider them over AWS or Azure. Price - for me - is simply not enough.
aryehof 10y ago
My problem with Google Cloud is I find their pricing too opaque. Will I find myself with a huge bill overnight is my worry. Is there some way to get started with a cap on my monthly bill?
ojr 10y ago
last time I explored my options, setting environment variables (ENV) were hard to secure in Google Cloud, I had to push a config.json file that sits on the server? Whats the point of a cheaper price if I can't even figure out how to secure the app. There might be cost gains in larger apps but for the small app I am working on, I'm a big believer of using tools that make you productive and iterate over parts that makes sense. You shouldn't choose a technology like Go lang because its cheaper to run than Node.js if you don't know how to Go
tscanausa 10y ago
The author of this article mentioned running a database server on raid 10 local ssds. I would whole heatedly recommend against this. There is no replication on locally ssd ( at all ). If there is a massive hardware failure there are still situations were all the the data on the local ssds can be lost. ( Disclosure: I would for Google Cloud Platform Support and have seen this happen on rare occasions.)
logmeout 10y ago
Bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing for all the big cloud providers that charge by the bit rather than a fixed price; all of them are too expensive.
homosaphien 10y ago
I use both clouds extensively while google cloud is cheaper in most cases. But DynamoDb in AWS is still cheaper than Cloud datastore or big table
disposablezero 10y ago
This PR propaganda is making the rounds. Most of the real use-cases I've seen point to self-hosting on AWS is cheaper than using GCE and friends. Pick whichever service has the cheapest TCO, not what some paid blogger says.
joe563323 10y ago
Both AWS and Google Cloud does not support Ipv6. Suprise Surprise
locusm 10y ago
Is there a roadmap for GCP - wondering if they are coming to Australia?
- dmourati 10y ago
  2017: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-Platform-sets-a-course-for-new-horizons.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-Pl...
nikon 10y ago
How could I apply for startup credits if I am bootstrapping? "To Apply, contact your VC, Accelerator, or Incubator and ask about GCP for Startups application details." [0] [0] https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/
hankmort 10y ago
I test and use all 3 main public cloud providers. I keep Azure out in this conversation for now: A quick comparison of GCP & AWS : The services & flexibility of options offered by GCP is not even in par with AWS. Yes I may be able to spin up a couple of VMs but when it comes to enterprise GCP can't be an option. It is like buying the new macbook pro and can't add more than 16gb memory! A designer for sure needs more ram regardless even if Macbook pro is offered for free. - There are about 50+ 3rd party offerings in Google Cloudlauncher compare to thousands in AWS Marketplace! - Choice of server/OS! maximum 8vCPU-7.2Mem in GCP compare to 192 vCPU and 2TB memory in AWS -NoSQL Big table ( max 30 nodes) - compare to ( virtually unlimited DynamoDB) -SQL (only MySQL in GCP ) compare to ( Almost all with exception of DB2 in AWS). - and so forth - Just having Lambda, F5 support is damn good reason to go for AWS regardless of how much it costs. Those are the basic needs of SMB that google can't even offer. - 60 day trial and 300 dollar limit! compare to 1 year The whole point of moving to the cloud is to have no limits and be able to have access to resources whenever you want. Google offering is very limited for now. This is just a lame marketing move by google and I hope they first fix their offerings and then compare. I can go to godaddy and say I'm cheaper maybe! Just check the list of services offered by both and see which one should be considered for a serious customer. We are all professional and judge products by testing them, open an account in both and judge by yourself. When I started using GCP it sounded refined for basic services but when it comes to Bigdata, monitoring I did not find the console very integrated nor usable.
- thesandlord 10y ago
  I work for Google Cloud. I think a blanket statement claiming the GCP is 50% cheaper that AWS is a bad for all the reasons you stated, there is a lot more than just VM pricing you have to take into account! We are definetly working on a lot of the things you brought up, I hope this time in 2017 your experience will be very different. Want to clarify a few things though: > - Choice of server/OS! maximum 8vCPU-7.2Mem in GCP compare to 192 vCPU and 2TB memory in AWS The biggest instance on GCP currently is 32vCPU-120GB. Also, with custom machine types you can tune your machine and pick exactly how many cores / memory you need; you are not stuck with predefined instance types. Curious what OSs AWS supports that GCP does not? AWS definitely has a better vertical scaling story though. > - NoSQL Big table ( max 30 nodes) - compare to ( virtually unlimited DynamoDB) BigTable and DynamoDB are not really comparable. BigTable is much lower level. The apples to apples comparison is DynamoDB and Datastore, and Datastore is also unlimited. > - 60 day trial and 300 dollar limit! compare to 1 year I'd also like to see a longer trial for GCP, but the AWS trial gives you 1 year access to basic usage. With GCP, you can spend the $300 any way you like. Personally I'm not sure which model is better or worse, though I lean towards the AWS model.
Arbinv 10y ago
Personally I just turn things off when they are not being used and that alone saves me 60% off my AWS bill. Obviously, it only works for non-prod instances but that is the bulk of what we use. see www.parkmycloud.com

598 points by yarapavan 10y ago

Lots of discussion here too: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE? [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515505

jakozaur 10y ago

Good article though I would disagree about AWS Reserved Instances. Though they are way more complicated, they can give 40%+ discount and in many use cases you can run quite a lot of them.

0xmohit 10y ago
Isn't it true that those require a 1-yr or 3-yr commitment? You can't move a reserved instance to another region. IIRC, its tied both to a region and AZ. OTOH, spot instances can be cheaper but then you should be prepared for those to vanish anytime.
- needcaffeine 10y ago
  As of September 2016, you can buy a convertible reservation that allows you to move a reserved instance to a different AZ within a region. Your greater point still stands but I just wanted to correct one piece of it. Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-update-convertible-ris-and-regional-benefit/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-updat...
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Thanks for the update. The change appears to be relatively recent, and I'm not surprised being unaware :)

thevivekpandey 10y ago

Does someone know why Google Cloud can afford to be so much cheaper compared to AWS? Are the costs to Amazon for AWS so much higher than the costs to Google for Google Cloud? Why?

notyourwork 10y ago
My guess is economics are trying to steal AWS business. Low pricing will draw a % of AWS customers over to GCE and the prices will balance out. Frankly I am more interested in Google's support quality compared to AWS. I don't have any experience with Google but I know Amazon is founded on the premise of customer experience which carries into their support. How is google's support?
- StreamBright 10y ago
  I am not familiar with GCP support but with their product support. Once I bought a device from Google and it broke on the first day. The device was completely dead, did not even turn on. When I engaged their support and explained the situation to the customer representative she kept asking me which light is on even though I explained to her 10 times that the device is completely dead. I was lucky because I bought the device through Amazon. I visited the website clicked on the dead device needs to be replaced button and in 10 minutes the replacement was on the way to my home. I do not want to draw any conclusion here but when it comes to which company gets my money decision I always prefer Amazon. The following applies to customer trust too: "It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute." ― Will Rogers
jonathanyc 10y ago
It's Google using their typical strategy: spend lots of advertising cash to develop and then provide something for free / less than competitors, with the goal of pulling you into their ecosystem. Under the Obama administration we didn't see any antitrust/antidumping actions because of how much Google managed to embed themselves into the administration. Don't know if it will change. EDIT: fixed a typo
- 10y ago

mikebay 10y ago

But problem is that, google will delete your accounts without any warning, if you are too opinionated against mainstream what google is pushing. Thats why I will use amazon more likely. No thanks google, your business is censoring peoples opinions and I do not support your services.

joaoqalves 10y ago

Comparing only instance prices is not fair, imho. Amazon charges that because all of the services/ecosystem they have. Google Cloud is stepping up their game though, leading to cheaper prices in AWS.

vgt 10y ago
Amazon has a very broad offering of great fully managed services, but Google's no slouch. In fact, many of Google's offerings can be very compelling - BigQuery, Bigtable, CloudML, PubSub, GKE to name a few. Just in the "only instances" space you mention Google has a different strategy. A couple things to mention: - Google doesn't have a broad spectrum of instance types. No storage-optimized or networking optimized. Instead, any instance can just get great storage attached to it, and any instance gets best-in-class networking. - Google's Preemptible VMs are like Spot instances but fixed 75-80% off. Again, with less fragmentation against instance types + fixed cost, much easier to rely on Preemptible VMs imo. - Google's Load Balancer is global, scalable, anycast IP driven, and backed by Google Network. If your packets originate in, say, New Zealand, they'll be talking to a "GCLB instance in our pop in Sydney", which will carry packets on Google's backbone to the VMs. - Custom VM sizes - you can set your own VM/RAM combination for instances. - Live Migration. Google manages instance health and maintenance for you, without forcing restarts. (Work at Google but not on GCE.. and I don't get paid to post here)
- novembermike 10y ago
  I'm not sure I'd agree that Google has a broad spectrum of instance types. You can boost up individual components, but for example if I wanted an EC2 instance with as much local SSD space as I can get I could have 6.4 terabytes, while on GCE I could have 3 TB. If I want memory, Google's willing to give me 200GB, Amazon offers 10x as much. My impression is that Google has a first class general purpose instance but you don't really get the breadth of options that EC2 will give you.
  - vgt 10y ago
    You bring up a good point. Amazon does give you a better "vertical scaling" story. I'll still challenge you on the "breadth" when it comes to EC2 - the philosophy is just very different. Why do you need a "IO optimized instance" if you want just fast disk - that notion just seems very foreign and arbitrarily-constrained on Google Cloud. You bring up Local SSD. Google's Local SSD is just badass by comparison: - 680,000 Read and 360,000 Write IOPS included in the cost [0] - $0.218 per GB per month. Instance cost is separate. - Again, you can attach these to any instance type (hence the point on fragmentation of instances on EC2) - AWS goes up to 365,000 Read and 315,000 "First Write" IOPS. Only if you buy an i2.8xlarge [2] - An i2.8xlarge is $6.82 per hour. You do the math :) And someone else did more comparisons here [1] [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance [1] https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-amazing-price-to-performance-2a58e7d9b433#.r131j8yfe https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-a... [2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instances.html#i2-instances-diskperf http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instan...

nucleardog 10y ago

In any comparison on "cheapest way to run a linux box somewhere" I would expect AWS to lose. AWS is a platform, not a server rental service. You start to see value when you build to the platform.

ed_blackburn 10y ago
This. Some of my clients are on one of the spectrum with lots of PaaS offering in use especially features such as queues. Others prefer to be agnostic and won't use any specific features. I guess it depends on what you want and how comfortable you are administering Rabbit etc.
rms_returns 10y ago
Even when the comparison is with a web-hosting provider such as GoDaddy or Digital Ocean? I want to host a few custom developed web apps on a VPS and I'm confused between AWS and DO/GoDaddy. Which one would you suggest?
- minxomat 10y ago
  Web apps on VPS sounds like something fit for micro or tiny instances, in which case a month pre-commitment might actually be cheaper if you look at OVH's Kimsufi programme: https://www.kimsufi.com/en/vps-ssd.xml https://www.kimsufi.com/en/vps-ssd.xml. These are cheap, but in my experience reliable (after multiple suboptimal experiences with DO) KVMs. While KS is probably more important for EU customers, the KS-VPS line has three regions to choose from: Gravelines (Northern France), Strasbourg (Eastern France) or Beauharnois (North-America). You can also DIY your own cloud with https://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-cloud.xml https://www.ovh.ie/vps/vps-cloud.xml, though I've never tested this. Personal point: I may be very old-fashioned, but after using GCE and AWS for various tasks, I still prefer the transparency of pre-committed billing. E.g., I don't know if this changed by now, but I ran into dozens of inexplicable administration errors with GCE, to the point where I couldn't manage my own projects anymore. Plus, after creating billing details, I couldn't detach my credit card from the platform. The only way around that was to disable all projects, but that still left me with an uneasy feeling. I don't have automatic billing setup for KS/OHV. I get billing reminders 30/15/7 days before each cycle and authorize each payment.

ed_blackburn 10y ago

How much do google use their own cloud internally? I'm curious and would better appreciate Google Cloud if I could see it being dogfooded with something substantial.

ChrisAntaki 10y ago
In July, Anvato joined Google. They're using Google Cloud to power video processing solutions for customers like NBCUniversal and Univision. http://www.anvato.com/anvato-joins-google/ http://www.anvato.com/anvato-joins-google/
gkop 10y ago
My understanding is GKE on GCP is kinda sorta a rewrite of the Borg system Google has used internally for years. Internal services at Google are encouraged to use GKE, but there's little incentive to migrate from the Borg infrastructure that has a long track record for reliability. So currently only a marginal amount of Google services use GKE, but as old services are retired and new ones developed, the share of services on GKE should grow steadily over time.

lordnacho 10y ago

I didn't see any mention of Google's preemptible instances. I've used them, and they're much cheaper than ordinary instances. They happen to fit my use case, which is a simple copybigfile-simulate-writeresults done over hundreds of days of market data. Preemption does happen, but it tends to happen very early on in a simulation. Also you don't get billed if it's in the first 10 minutes. For some reason GCE won't let you auto-restart that instance, but you can just write an API call that accomplishes the same. There's also the added benefit that your instance will die after 24 hours, so you won't get billed for leaving something on by accident.

tener 10y ago
If you create an instance group of preemptible instances it will automatically try to fulfill your demand - no need to write a thing!
- brianwawok 10y ago
  And it's amazing. Over 99% uptime for 1/4 the price.
lordnacho 10y ago
One thing I forgot to mention is I've had a couple of "we will shut you down" emails. Something about the automated abuse detection seems to not quite work, and so I've gotten emails saying the account is suspected of DDOSing other internet users. It's a bit unnerving, but they've been pretty prompt at getting back once an explanation was put forward.
bdcravens 10y ago
To be fair, wouldn't you then need to compare to AWS spot instance pricing?
paulddraper 10y ago
Nor any mention of AWS spot instances.

desireco42 10y ago

While most will still use AWS, it is great that there are alternatives and competition. A lot of good points raised here about Amazon as ecosystem.

jbyers 10y ago

"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation." While I agree that Google's pricing model is superior, the author's position on reserved instances accounts for ~40% of the cost difference. In a drag race between instances AWS tends to lose. If you value the enormous feature and service surface-area that AWS provides it's a different story. Either way we win; both companies will engage in a brutal price and feature war for many years to come.

vgt 10y ago
I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in Google Cloud. Google's ecosystem of fully managed services is very rich broad and compelling, and in many ways far ahead of competition. (work on Google Cloud but don't get paid to post here)
- Fiahil 10y ago
  > I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in Google Cloud. RDS instances with Postgresql.
  - vgt 10y ago
    This is the one that comes up. Hit me up offline. Also, you can always use any number of partners that provide this functionality. Let me know if there are any others.
    - chronic6l 10y ago
      > Also, you can always use any number of partners that provide this functionality. Like AWS?
      - vgt 10y ago
        Yup, both leverage partners where their offerings are not present.

baybal2 10y ago

well, both still loose to budget app hostings if you count only cost

coredog64 10y ago

Is there another source for the 220Mbit/s limit for m4 class instances? I was under the impression that you could get enhanced networking with those, and double the speed when paired with placement groups.

user5994461 10y ago
The 220Mbits/s is for the m4.large instance, not all the m4 family. The bigger instances get more. It is with HVM and enhanced networking. You can "wget http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip" http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip" and see what speed you get.
ranman 10y ago
The 220mbps limit is entirely false. Between two m4.large in two different AZs. Test Complete. Summary Results: [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 3.13 GBytes 449 Mbits/sec 39391 sender [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 3.13 GBytes 449 Mbits/sec receiver CPU Utilization: local/sender 1.4% (0.0%u/1.5%s), remote/receiver 7.2% (0.8%u/6.4%s)

tzaman 10y ago

I can confirm that first hand; We're just moving our whole stack from AWS to GC and right now we're running everything in parallel with roughly the same amount of resources. AWS monthly bill: ~$1000, GC monthly bill: ~$600

toomuchtodo 10y ago
How many months will you need to run in GC to break even on the engineer time spent moving at $400/month savings?
- chronic6l 10y ago
  Assuming a $400/month engineer, 1 month.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    How many servers did you have to move? I'd assume that you can count them on your fingers if the bill is only $1000/month. That's a "reasonably" small scale migration, if not locked in on AWS services.
    - notyourwork 10y ago
      Yep, we spend around $45-$50k/month and are quite happy with our support from AWS.
    - tzaman 10y ago
      Agreed, we have 10 instances on AWS, but it's hard to judge the complexity of the migration just based on that because these servers vary in size, requirements, and purpose. But all in all, yes, it is a fairly small scale migration.
    - jamiesonbecker 10y ago
      Generally speaking, the number of servers has very little to do with complexity of migration or existential threat from downtime, relative to company size.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ggregoire 10y ago

A bit off-topic, but - AWS has a 12 months free tier [1] - Google Cloud has a 2 months free trial [2] That will make a huge difference when I'll have to choose. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/free https://aws.amazon.com/free [2] https://cloud.google.com/free-trial https://cloud.google.com/free-trial

vgt 10y ago
Great point. I think it's a matter of different philosophies, and both are great for customers! - AWS gives you specific usage allotments per-month for specific services. - Google gives you $300 cash for 2 months to use however you please. just don't mine bitcoins or generate email spam :) - Some folks did the math on AWS free tier to total $247.20 [0]. That is, if you 100% utilize all the allotments. - Google BigQuery, Firebase, and AppEngine also have perpetual free tiers. [0] http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/How-much-are-free-cloud-computing-services-worth http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/How-much-are-... (work on Google Cloud)
- ggregoire 10y ago
  Thank you for the clarification. :)
0xmohit 10y ago
Talking of EC2, AWS free tier only allows t2.micro instances (1 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM). Might not serve any use to many.
alberts00 10y ago
It seems like Google Cloud free trial in several countries (at least in LV,LT,EE) is only available to businesses. I wanted to give the free trial a go, but wasn't able to register because it did not let me choose account type as "individual".

avtar 10y ago

Does anyone know if either Google or Amazon provide credits for non-profits like Microsoft does [1] for Azure? I haven't been able to find any details but also not sure if it's something they do offline on a case by case basis. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/philanthropies/product-donations/products/azure https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/philanthropies/product-donat...

13498RtgbDwl 10y ago
It looks like AWS has a credit program for non-profits[0]. GCP has one for education[1], and a program to use GCP to protect journalists[2], but I'm not seeing anything for non-profits. You may be able to get credits by asking them, however. -- [0] https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/ https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/nonprofits/ [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/06/new-Google-Cloud-Platform-Education-Grants-offer-free-credits-to-students.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/06/new-Google-Clou... [2] https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/ https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/
- avtar 10y ago
  Thanks! Not sure how I missed that Amazon page. I'll get in touch with them since having access to Postgres via RDS is very appealing.

jacques_chester 10y ago

I've worked with both AWS and GCP (my day job is working on Cloud Foundry). In every area that I've looked, GCP is so much better than AWS that it's offensive, bordering on obscene. It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually comprehensible. The APIs are consistent. There's a single console, rather than a fruit salad of conceptually different consoles under a single domain. The console is, in fact, navigable without invoking curses. Not even a small one. AWS has the massive advantage of inertia. If you're deeply woven into the higher-level AWS services, I'd probably stay put. But if you aren't, or you're just beginning, then holy moly you owe it to yourself to look.

ranman 10y ago
>It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually comprehensible. The docs have more 404s than trumps twitter account... who payed/paid you to write this?
- vgt 10y ago
  >>It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually comprehensible. >The docs have more 404s than trumps twitter account... who payed/paid you to write this? (ranman works at AWS..and talking to an AWS premier partner... the delicious irony)
  - ranman 10y ago
    Great job addressing those 404s.
    - vgt 10y ago
      Again, a weird thing for an AWS employee to say about an opinion from an AWS customer and an AWS platinum partner, and then accuse them of expressing those opinions due to monetary compensation.
      - 10y ago

sirn 10y ago

Slightly unrelated, but since there seems to be some Google Cloud people in this thread: I see that Google Cloud account is linked to my Google Account. What happen to my Google Cloud instances if my Google Account got suspended by Google due to other reasons (e.g. Pixel stuff from the other day, or because of YouTube, or etc.) and I did not bought support tier?

halite 10y ago
I don't think that should be a concern as both providers in theory can block or suspend your account. Maybe use a separate account for Google cloud for running world-changing-billion-user app.
gist 10y ago
This is a great question. Common sense wise to me it's an issue. And given how large a company google is I don't think it even matters what the google cloud people who might respond say. It makes sense to simply isolate things like this.
- robalfonso 10y ago
  Slightly related - had a AWS account, the account tied to it was for business use only - at some point I had credits/balance on the business account and someone gained access to the regular amazon account and bought some digital goods, so I notified amazon. They locked the account AND locked me out of AWS. This particular account was not important, but it took weeks to get access back. I finally had to call my rep at AWS and said - you are putting your business with us in jeopardy (On other accounts that we spend significant money on) because its taken me so long to resolve this. Got it unlocked in 24 hours, but the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. I suspect Google WILL have this issue as well, it has the potential to be a huge issue for your business. Alternatively never had this issue when I've COLO'd - food for thought.
  - gist 10y ago
    > Alternatively never had this issue when I've COLO'd Taking it one step further in precaution (and from experience): We have some servers colo'd at a small datacenter. We use it strictly for our operating website and don't put anything for customers in that data center at all even though it would be convenient and save money. The reason is we don't want any bad actors that we might have as customers potentially impacting our main operations. This is in addition to vetting customers as well actually.

BonoboIO 10y ago

I would use Google Cloud Storage or S3 Storage but their Traffic charges are HUGE. 500 GB Storage (Google Cloud Storage Nearline) Storage Fee= $0.01 x 500 = 5 Dollar Retrieval $0.01 x 500 = 5 Dollar Bandwith Charges $0.12 x 500 = 60 DOLLAR I mean SIXTY DOLLAR just for downloading my backups, they are crazy. Both companys. Would use rClone for my backups but OVH OpenStack is kind of buggy and could not get it to work.

user5994461 10y ago
The traffic is free if it's coming from an instance in the same region. This is really intended for business. Definitely not a good fit for a personal backup solution.
- BonoboIO 10y ago
  Well i would use it as server backup but in this moment i got rclone woth OVH running :D https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/storage/object-storage.xml https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/storage/object-storage.xml 10 times cheaper than GC oder AWS
alainv 10y ago
I'd suggest Arq + Amazon Drive.
- BonoboIO 10y ago
  Its Server Backup

novaleaf 10y ago

sorry, but parts of this article are a bit.... dumb. for example, "minimum production instance", it's comparing a 2cpu aws instance vs a 1cpu gce. no wonder its "50% cheaper". I use GCE over AWS, and run aprox 50 vm's. GCE is cheaper, but not nearly as much as the article claims. the savings is for hardware. data egress cost is basically the same.

daemonk 10y ago

Is there a spot instance-like mechanism with google cloud? I regularly request high memory spot instances (r3.8xlarge) on AWS for 1-2 days processes (genomic analysis). With spot-pricing it can be pretty cheap.

alainv 10y ago
https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/
dgacmu 10y ago
Yes. Google calls them "preemptible instances". Unlike the AWS spot instances, they're fixed price at a discount.
- phonon 10y ago
  Preemptible Instances only can be used for a max of 24 hours, so would not fit the above usage pattern...though I don't know if AWS spot instances are really meant to be used for that long either. Of course both allow you to use the regular non-preemptible on-demand pricing. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible
jpatokal 10y ago
Cloud Genomics is intended for use cases like yours: https://cloud.google.com/genomics/ https://cloud.google.com/genomics/
arrogantrobot 10y ago
A very clever way to run genomic analysis on GCP is via WDL ( https://software.broadinstitute.org/wdl/ https://software.broadinstitute.org/wdl/ ) workflows executed on the Cromwell ( https://github.com/broadinstitute/cromwell https://github.com/broadinstitute/cromwell ) service. Using WDL you define tasks, and compose those into workflows, then Cromwell executes those tasks on GCP using the pipelines api ( https://cloud.google.com/genomics/reference/rest/v1alpha2/pipelines https://cloud.google.com/genomics/reference/rest/v1alpha2/pi... ). So you don't need to set up any instances at all, each stage of your pipeline, a task, is executed in its own docker instance, with files from google cloud storage being materialized on that instance for you. When that task is done, outputs are sent to cloud storage buckets, and everything is torn down. Picard can pull reads directly out of the google genomics API, and more of the Broad tools are adopting the GA4GH api, so this means an increasing amount of core tools anyone doing genomics will want to use, will work directly with google genomics.

benjojo12 10y ago

Now, If only I could use it in the UK. Seriously. Every time I sign up, I have no option to sign up as a individual, only company. Friends in other regions of the world can sign up as individual, but it appears google ( in the UK/EU ? ) as decided for whatever reason ( I assume VAT calculation ) they won't offer it. I can sign up to and use AWS ( as much as I really don't really want to ) as myself. Yet there are all of these really nice things coming out of GCP that I can't use because I simply can't enable billing. (that being said, I do use google app engine for my blog, and it's fantastic)

nhumrich 10y ago

Once GC has a RDS like service for postgres, I will switch right away.

xiaoma 10y ago

Here's a thought: Things often go wrong. Would you rather have your mission critical apps relying on Google's customer service or on Amazon's customer service?

Yabood 10y ago
This.
imperialdrive 10y ago
We pay 10+k/mo for our AWS support, and it has never paid off, even with multiple phantom errors and failures... the top level support supposedly being paged out of bed for me doesn't have answers. Always had to simply restore from backup without a good report to share with mgmt.
- ignoramous 10y ago
  That's deeply concerning. Can you pls share your aws account ID with me? If you're not comfortavle doing that, pls share email ID where I can contact you. Thanks.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- nodesocket 10y ago
  I've actually had good experiences with AWS support. Use the phone call option. Online replies tend to take over 24 hours.
- pwelch 10y ago
  We've actually had good luck with AWS Support and have a dedicated representative that is always there to push urgent issues through support.
- dmourati 10y ago
  Agree. It takes an act of congress to get through to an actual AWS engineer. AWS status site is a joke with how degraded a service needs to be to register a change: https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/.

mrwnmonm 10y ago

what makes me choose AWS, is i can survive a year using it without paying too much money, while in GC you got 300$ to spend in 3 months, which would get you more powerful machine for this period but you should start paying after it so if you really don't have money to start with, you have to choose AWS

Buge 10y ago
I don't understand. Why not just use a normal amount for the first 60 days.
- mrwnmonm 10y ago
  doesn't matter, it still just 60 days
  - Buge 10y ago
    Just 60 days for what? You get full functionality before and after. And you pay less than AWS before and after.
    - mrwnmonm 10y ago
      60 days without paying, for free. while on AWS https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/ you could not paying for a year if your usage is low
      - frag 10y ago
        what AWS is giving for 1 year is really really minimal for a PoC or testing stuff. A small website would already get into trouble

usaphp 10y ago

I wonder how do they compare to digitalocean?

jlgaddis 10y ago
That's not a good comparison to make.

jread 10y ago

GCE is a great platform with many competitive advantages including networking, flexible configurations and sustained use discounting. However, I'd argue that using different data points and comparison criteria the opposite hypothesis could be made in favor of EC2 - e.g. burst instance/storage, spot and reserve pricing, local SSD and magnetic storage, and others.

vgt 10y ago
I agree, you can go into higher granularity a-la-carte on both fronts.. but I don't think "spot pricing" is that, and neither are local SSD + magnetic storage (take a look at my local SSD post in this thread).

mixmastamyk 10y ago

I find AWS annoying in that the east coast is always cheaper and the price reductions linked mention more reductions on that side. Who of the cloud companies is treating California as a first class citizen?

hrez 10y ago
Oregon region is on par with east coast.

plandis 10y ago

This guy has some other really great articles. My favorite is: "GCE vs AWS in 2016: Why you should never use AWS" [1]. [1] https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-you-should-never-use-amazon/ https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-201...

StreamBright 10y ago

If any cloud project was a single dimension problem. For me it does not matter how much cheaper I could run an instance in GCP simply because we rely on services from AWS that do not exist in GCP yet. Another issue for me with Google is how they handle account problems. I do not want to find out the hard way that I should have done some extra safety measures just to keep our entire production environment safe. With AWS I do not need to worry, their customer first approach proved to be extremely useful over the years, and they were very patient with us even when we did something that was against their policy. My customer trust is not something that is up for sale and I have been disappointed with Google's customer support several times, this is simple cannot happen in a cloud infrastructure situation. I like GCP and Azure because they make sure that I get a good deal on AWS.

kristopolous 10y ago

Azure is even cheaper

kristopolous 10y ago
Correcting my comment, Google has apparently undercut Microsoft recently.
Ducki 10y ago
Concerning the Virtual Machine pricings on the discussed platforms, I'd like to mention that – on very small machines – running Windows Server is significantly more expensive on Google Loud than on AWS or Azure, because Google charges you the license fee directly whereas Azure or AWS seem to have a mixed calculation. Having the smallest Windows VM on AWS is like 6-7$/month, whereas on GCE you're at at least 14.60$ higher due to the license.

iagooar 10y ago

Does anyone know if there are any plans to support Postgres by the Cloud SQL? Because currently it's the major deal breaker to me. I have a SaaS business that works on Postgres and we don't plan to replace it with any major SQL alternative.

htn 10y ago
There's some indications that Google would support Postgres as part of the CLoudSQL in the future. But there are already multiple DB-as-a-Service offerings that provide PostgreSQL in Google Cloud. My company, Aiven (https://aiven.io https://aiven.io) is one of the providers and I believe Compose, DatabaseLabs and ElephantSQL also provide managed PG in Google Cloud.
- iagooar 10y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, we will give it a look for sure.

pascalxus 10y ago

I recently visited the google cloud pricing page and had a hard time making any sense of it all. The pricing isn't at all clear. DigitalOcean on the other hand, you take one glance at their pricing page and know exactly what your getting. Google can learning something from that.

spangry 10y ago
Thank god I'm not the only one. I keep hearing about how opaque AWS pricing is compared to GCP, yet I personally cannot make any sense of google's pricing. It's difficult to explain, but I struggle ti figure out how much I'll be paying over, say, a month for a GCE instance. It seems like there are too many variables to keep in my head. But I'm just a tinkerer/hobbyist. So maybe the reason is because I don't have a clear idea of what my monthly utilisation is going to look like, or whether it's going to be consistent. I imagine this would be much clearer for those running businesses. I dunno...
- manigandham 10y ago
  GCP pricing is far simpler than AWS - just visit any of the product pages to see the unit costs. And they have a calculator: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ If you're talking about Compute Engine utilization for billing discounts, they just mean how long you have it running continuously over the course of a month.

snissn 10y ago

i recently moved a database off of RDS onto a "bare metal" VPS and my queries are > 10x faster

sebringj 10y ago

This is why Werner Vogels sweats so much.

meow_mix 10y ago

This is good news for GCS but they will need to compete on more than price if they want to gain market share. Saving 500$ / month is minuscule compared to the time it will cost engineers to migrate from AWS to GCS and get used to the new service.

movedx 10y ago
Look at Terraform. With the right infrastructure tooling, it's not hard to move at all. Look at Ansible (or Puppet, Chef, Salt, etc.) With the right configuration management tooling, it's much, much easier to migrate services.
rotten 10y ago
The web interfaces for Google Compute Engine/Disks/Networking are much more intuitive. The pricing calculator is built right in. And - they offer free consulting services to help you migrate out of AWS. We are moving out of AWS to Google Compute Engine and it has really gone fairly smoothly and within a couple of weeks was already saving us money.

cdevs 10y ago

In response to Reserve pricing is bs.. We are moving to aws before the end of the year and it will be a 50% price cut from the dedicated providers we have been using. Our dedicated servers are just about out of space and their bs cloud environment is about 350$ for what you get for 70-80$ on linode. When we need 10-50 processing servers quickly cloned up we go to linode do our work and try to sling the data back ...it's all too annoying now. We're moving to aws, reserving some instances for our client front ends and and booting up what we have to when we need it for mapreduce jobs. For us reserve pricing isn't so bs.

gtaylor 10y ago
It gets a lot more challenging once you outgrow your initial reservations. Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes. As you add more reservations, it will become something that you are dealing with constantly. It's terrible.
- cthalupa 10y ago
  >Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes You can resize RIs within the same family (ie 1 m4.xlarge to 2 m4.large) http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify...
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    Yes, you can. But doing this is not "free", in that you are spending time doing this (potentially often) instead of an infinite number of other more productive things. This alone isn't going to kill your productivity, but it's one of many of the annoyances of managing a large fleet using RIs. It's a cumulative burden, between figuring out reservations per-region, consider your baseline vs spot/on-demand levels, potentially put some other stuff you don't need on the RI market, and audit how many RIs in your inventory are actually in use. This is an annoyance when you have a small fleet, but it quickly becomes an expensive nightmare when you start talking 100+ VMs. You start having to pay for expensive external tools to manage your expenses because this stuff sucks so much. Or write a ton of your own tooling (which is not free at all). Or just have someone who does this manually all the time (also really sucks).

epicureanideal 10y ago

The other 50% is subsidized by the NSA in exchange for direct access to your servers.

malloryerik 10y ago

Does anyone know how much of Google Cloud works inside of China? So, would my webapp be accessible from the PRC? And what about services that come from a Google API such as voice-to-text or translation, managed database and so on?

codesnik 10y ago
ah, I almost forgot! My gce instances weren't accessible from Hainan. They aren't accessible from Crymea, also.

codesnik 10y ago

I've used GCE for production servers in the past and was really pleased with almost every aspect. I have really little "serious" experience with AWS, and I'd say it's much more.. um, arcane? I'm genuinly curious, what kind of project/situation would be to actually prefer AWS to GCE (aside from "we're already on AWS" or "I know AWS and don't know GCE")?

skywhopper 10y ago

This article is interesting and the author has some good points about the lack of small non-burstable instances in AWS. There are plenty of things to gripe about. But the headline assertion is ultimately unsupported except in terms of simple comparison graphs of paper numbers about the raw CPU and memory numbers. Are the CPU units comparable? Is the networking what it's cracked up to be? How easy is it to autoscale? Is the capacity you need available when you need it? How long do instances take to start? What are the dynamic storage options? How does disk IO performance compare? I'd be really interested to read an article that attempted to break these down and do a real comparison. But this article doesn't even attempt a real world comparison.

user5994461 10y ago
> Are the CPU units comparable? Is the networking what it's cracked up to be? How easy is it to autoscale? Is the capacity you need available when you need it? How long do instances take to start? What are the dynamic storage options? How does disk IO performance compare? In order. Yes. Google networking is superior (cheaper & faster). Variable, depends on your application/workload, not just the cloud. Yes. < 30 seconds on Google, 1-3 minutes on AWS. lcoal SSD, remote SSD, or remote HDD on Google VS a mess of many complex & expensive disks on AWS (it would take more than a blog post to explain their disk offerings). Google disks are 3-10 times IOPS and/or bandwidth, lower latency. This article is just on basic pricing. I plan more articles for the future. Starting with one on disk benchmark and one on network benchmark.

paulddraper 10y ago

"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation" Well that's a huge caveat. Anyone intending to be a serious user of AWS will use reservations. The discount is large, well over 50% off IIRC. And then there's the spot instances/spot fleets with even steeper discounts. For better or worse, AWS's pricing is more complicated then its competitors. A serious comparison would have to include those details.

hairyhenderson 10y ago
"Anyone intending to be a serious user of AWS will use reservations." Not in my experience... It's impossible to predict the kind of usage you're going to need over the next 1-3 years, especially when you're first getting started with AWS. If you underestimate, you waste money. If you overestimate, you waste even more money. Google's concept of "sustained use" discounts is _much_ more appealing to me.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > when you're first getting started with AWS Then I respectfully submit that you are not (yet) a serious user of AWS. > It's impossible to predict the kind of usage you're going to need over the next 1-3 years I call BS. Office 365, JIRA, Slack, Loggly...these all have monthly price plans, and discounted yearly plans. People managed to predict needs, despite a uncertain future of their needs. In the case they underestimate, they just purchase more at anytime. In case they overestimate...I don't know; I just know that a price comparison would very likely use JIRA's yearly prices, not its monthly ones. Unlike those examples, reserved instances can be bought and sold on the AWS marketplace (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/marketplace/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-insta...). I understand (and agree) if people criticize the complexity of AWS EC2 pricing. But if you're not going to use reserved instances for your non-trivial stuff...you're flushing money; go with another provider already.
  - merb 10y ago
    well you just buy the lowest possible and start new instances and stop them when needed, when the lowest possible raises you just reserve more.

ranman 10y ago

The author references this post: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX But quite obviously only read the headline.

estefan 10y ago

I want to like Google Cloud, but it just seriously lags AWS. Amazon got everything so right with an ID and secret. GC's oauth is just cumbersome, and the CLI tools are nowhere near as user friendly as aws-cli. Two other recent examples - the lack of granularity and inflexibility of GC's IAM perms (you need to faff around with roles which even as an Owner you can't create - they need to be done at the org level, WTF?), and GC support is miles behind. I opened a support ticket for a critical issue recently, and the initial response I received when someone looked at it fell into the repeating-back-to-me-what-I'd-told-them-in-the-ticket category. Then they suggested I "check the permissions are right", which as I told them "I don't know what's wrong or what needs checking, that's why I opened the ticket". It's just lucky the issue didn't affect our prod account or we'd have been in real trouble since they're still investigating even though we're probably one of their top-tier customers. AWS support has always been second to none for me. GC support has always for me been second to, well, Amazon...

ranman 10y ago
I actually like the gcloud CLI -- I wish its output was more tunable (CSV, Table, JSON)... I also think it's weird they use a ~/.boto config.
- jvolkman 10y ago
  Have you tried '--format'?
  - ranman 10y ago
    that was easier than I expected.

didibus 10y ago

I hate it when the evangelist swarm the hackernews comments. On another note, I'm not surprised Google cloud is cheaper as its trailing behind and offer no other advantage but price to catch up. GCE, Azure and AWS all pretty much match each other technically, so I suspect the one with least customers to always offer the better value. So if GCE were to ever become number 1, I'd suspect it's price to rise and others prices to lower.

rmykhajliw 10y ago

GAE has serious problems: 1. security, everything accessible for everyone 2. billing, it stoped accepting my card an your ago without any notice, hover the same corporate card works for all other services 3. support it's 100% per cent useless. They cannot even fix anything, only claiming they have the same issue for the last 3 years (that's from my real conversation). That's why I highly not recommend to have nay relationships with Google Cloud. It's unpredictable, you just cannot build your business around it. Now it exists, in 5 minutes they may decided to close the service, change the billing to unbillable, whatever. And the most scary, NONE, just NONE helps you. It will be your issue.

ranman 10y ago

I work at AWS and I have questions for the author about this post: TL;DR -- I urge all readers to take this post with a grain/boulder of salt: The author is anonymous, prone to hyperbole and error, and makes multiple unverified claims. I'm sure he's a nice guy/girl and if we met in real life I'd be happy to converse over a beer -- but I find the language and misinformation in the post overly polemic and disingenuous. If this stuff interests you guys tune into the reinvent livestream next week: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/ https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/ All numbers are from EU-WEST-1 (Does anyone know why GCE doesn't have a eu-west-1a? only b,c,d? I'd be curious to know the story there... not trolling -- just curious.) Graph 2: c4.large has 2 CPUs... n1-standard-1 has 1... comparison on price is strange? Your point below about optimizing for manageability doesn't really make sense to me as manageability would stem from config/deploy/etc. -- not from instance type? Perhaps your language isn't clear. You're anonymous but I'm guessing english is a second language for you (judging from sentences in post) so it's possible we're missing your point there. Could you clarify please? >"an ancient virtualization technology" source? details? KVM came out in 2007. Xen came out in 2003. I don't consider either of those dates particularly ancient but whatever it's your post, use the language you want. Graph 3: A c4.4xlarge has 16 CPUs, and 30 gigs of RAM. An n1-highcpu-4 has 4 CPUs and <4 gigs of RAM. Comparing the two on price is disingenuous. Your claims that these are the "production instances" don't make sense to me. >Network Heavy: So this is a test between two t2.micros in different AZs: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ranman-code/2016-11-20+00.58.23.gif https://s3.amazonaws.com/ranman-code/2016-11-20+00.58.23.gif It shows 1gbps... I ran it literally a minute ago... So that's 1gbit... Do you mean inbound from public internet or outbound to public internet? I created an n1-highcpu-4 and had it talk to a c4.xlarge at 1gpbs in (both in eu-west) so your claim that you need a c4.4xlarge for 1gbps seems dubious. Test Complete. Summary Results: [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 7.40 GBytes 1.06 Gbits/sec 1297597 sender [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec 7.40 GBytes 1.06 Gbits/sec receiver It actually seems like Google's network was the limiting factor there because when I ran a similar test on a 10gpbs instance I couldn't get faster than 1gpbs. Which is fine because that's what's advertised -- just pointing out that the need for a c4.4xlarge is wrong. On a c4.large I got 900mbps. >C4/m4/r3 have a hard cap at 220 mbits This one is just false. What am I missing here? Where did you get this info? From eu-west-1 to us-east-1 I get faster than that using public routes and t2.micros. Internally across availability zones I get much faster than that. Local SSD #s: Use PIOPS volumes, tunable size, lower cost, can attach to any instance type. Also consider the numerous other instance types that offer ephemeral SSDs. >It is quite flexible. For instance, we could recreate any instance from AWS on Google Cloud. I don't think you mean any instance... but ok sure! >Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right, A message by an employee from Amazon than Google, not directly relevant but still a good read. ^ I don't think you read the above post when listing it as a reference. The title is ironic. Steve Yegge quit Google. Famously... on stage... He also goes on to say that Google can't do platforms. I'm sure that's changed in the past few years though. In the end I'm super excited about both AWS and GCP they both have awesome products. I encourage people to continue researching and writing posts around these topics. It's hard to not take some of the criticisms personally when you're passionate and invested in your work (at least it is for me). I've got a google employee DM-ing on twitter calling me "petulant child" among other things. We don't need that. It's not helpful for our companies and it's not helpful for our customers. I'll encourage everyone to tune in to the reinvent livestream on the 29th, 30th, 1st: https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/ https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/

StreamBright 10y ago

The only feature that any company can copy from a competitor without any effort is price. It is well known in product circles that you can't compete with price only, you need to put in other features that make your product attractive compare to the competitors. I am still waiting for something extraordinary from GCP that would make me consider them over AWS or Azure. Price - for me - is simply not enough.

aryehof 10y ago

My problem with Google Cloud is I find their pricing too opaque. Will I find myself with a huge bill overnight is my worry. Is there some way to get started with a cap on my monthly bill?

ojr 10y ago

last time I explored my options, setting environment variables (ENV) were hard to secure in Google Cloud, I had to push a config.json file that sits on the server? Whats the point of a cheaper price if I can't even figure out how to secure the app. There might be cost gains in larger apps but for the small app I am working on, I'm a big believer of using tools that make you productive and iterate over parts that makes sense. You shouldn't choose a technology like Go lang because its cheaper to run than Node.js if you don't know how to Go

tscanausa 10y ago

The author of this article mentioned running a database server on raid 10 local ssds. I would whole heatedly recommend against this. There is no replication on locally ssd ( at all ). If there is a massive hardware failure there are still situations were all the the data on the local ssds can be lost. ( Disclosure: I would for Google Cloud Platform Support and have seen this happen on rare occasions.)

logmeout 10y ago

Bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing for all the big cloud providers that charge by the bit rather than a fixed price; all of them are too expensive.

homosaphien 10y ago

I use both clouds extensively while google cloud is cheaper in most cases. But DynamoDb in AWS is still cheaper than Cloud datastore or big table

disposablezero 10y ago

This PR propaganda is making the rounds. Most of the real use-cases I've seen point to self-hosting on AWS is cheaper than using GCE and friends. Pick whichever service has the cheapest TCO, not what some paid blogger says.

joe563323 10y ago

Both AWS and Google Cloud does not support Ipv6. Suprise Surprise

locusm 10y ago

Is there a roadmap for GCP - wondering if they are coming to Australia?

dmourati 10y ago
2017: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-Platform-sets-a-course-for-new-horizons.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-Pl...

nikon 10y ago

How could I apply for startup credits if I am bootstrapping? "To Apply, contact your VC, Accelerator, or Incubator and ask about GCP for Startups application details." [0] [0] https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

hankmort 10y ago

I test and use all 3 main public cloud providers. I keep Azure out in this conversation for now: A quick comparison of GCP & AWS : The services & flexibility of options offered by GCP is not even in par with AWS. Yes I may be able to spin up a couple of VMs but when it comes to enterprise GCP can't be an option. It is like buying the new macbook pro and can't add more than 16gb memory! A designer for sure needs more ram regardless even if Macbook pro is offered for free. - There are about 50+ 3rd party offerings in Google Cloudlauncher compare to thousands in AWS Marketplace! - Choice of server/OS! maximum 8vCPU-7.2Mem in GCP compare to 192 vCPU and 2TB memory in AWS -NoSQL Big table ( max 30 nodes) - compare to ( virtually unlimited DynamoDB) -SQL (only MySQL in GCP ) compare to ( Almost all with exception of DB2 in AWS). - and so forth - Just having Lambda, F5 support is damn good reason to go for AWS regardless of how much it costs. Those are the basic needs of SMB that google can't even offer. - 60 day trial and 300 dollar limit! compare to 1 year The whole point of moving to the cloud is to have no limits and be able to have access to resources whenever you want. Google offering is very limited for now. This is just a lame marketing move by google and I hope they first fix their offerings and then compare. I can go to godaddy and say I'm cheaper maybe! Just check the list of services offered by both and see which one should be considered for a serious customer. We are all professional and judge products by testing them, open an account in both and judge by yourself. When I started using GCP it sounded refined for basic services but when it comes to Bigdata, monitoring I did not find the console very integrated nor usable.

thesandlord 10y ago
I work for Google Cloud. I think a blanket statement claiming the GCP is 50% cheaper that AWS is a bad for all the reasons you stated, there is a lot more than just VM pricing you have to take into account! We are definetly working on a lot of the things you brought up, I hope this time in 2017 your experience will be very different. Want to clarify a few things though: > - Choice of server/OS! maximum 8vCPU-7.2Mem in GCP compare to 192 vCPU and 2TB memory in AWS The biggest instance on GCP currently is 32vCPU-120GB. Also, with custom machine types you can tune your machine and pick exactly how many cores / memory you need; you are not stuck with predefined instance types. Curious what OSs AWS supports that GCP does not? AWS definitely has a better vertical scaling story though. > - NoSQL Big table ( max 30 nodes) - compare to ( virtually unlimited DynamoDB) BigTable and DynamoDB are not really comparable. BigTable is much lower level. The apples to apples comparison is DynamoDB and Datastore, and Datastore is also unlimited. > - 60 day trial and 300 dollar limit! compare to 1 year I'd also like to see a longer trial for GCP, but the AWS trial gives you 1 year access to basic usage. With GCP, you can spend the $300 any way you like. Personally I'm not sure which model is better or worse, though I lean towards the AWS model.

Arbinv 10y ago

Personally I just turn things off when they are not being used and that alone saves me 60% off my AWS bill. Obviously, it only works for non-prod instances but that is the bulk of what we use. see www.parkmycloud.com