4 ms·

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 th

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...
    - inframouse 10y ago
      The real problem I have is the low network performance. Yes, yes, before everyone jumps all over me and points to Jupiter etc.. I understand the problems in Pb/s bisection bandwidth for the large datacenters. That doesn't change the fact that I don't need an entire datacenter worth of stuff.. but I do need an Amdahl-balanced cluster. So big machines with wimpy (20Gb non-RDMA) networks prevent me doing my HPCish workloads on GCE. Followed by waiting on GPUs and other user accessible accelerators of course.
      - vgt 10y ago
        hit me up, i'll connect you with some folks
  - user5994461 10y ago
    There are only two notable differences: 1) The highest memory instance on Google is about 200GB, on AWS it's 2TB. 2) Google doesn't have GPU instances yet. They're been announced for 2017. Other than that, google instances have more options and more flexibility.
- CoolGuySteve 10y ago
  AWS spot instances are a fraction of the price, like 20-30%. In my experience, building the same processing cluster from AWS costs half as much as Google Cloud. Which is why I find it so annoying when I see these price comparison articles that don't really use the SpotFleet API correctly.
Bedon292 10y ago
Agreed. The value of AWS is not in the cost of the instances it is the services and customer service which go along with it. Its all of the easy manages services that add up. Its the combination of RDS, SQS, and all of the other features that add up. Sure each EC2 instance may be more expensive, but there are huge savings in time (which is more valuable) elsewhere.
dward 10y ago
What services are missing from GCP?
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  Lots. AWS is very featuresome. In terms of publicly consumable features, they have a 10-year head start.
  - dward 10y ago
    I'm asking for specific examples.

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...
  - inframouse 10y ago
    The real problem I have is the low network performance. Yes, yes, before everyone jumps all over me and points to Jupiter etc.. I understand the problems in Pb/s bisection bandwidth for the large datacenters. That doesn't change the fact that I don't need an entire datacenter worth of stuff.. but I do need an Amdahl-balanced cluster. So big machines with wimpy (20Gb non-RDMA) networks prevent me doing my HPCish workloads on GCE. Followed by waiting on GPUs and other user accessible accelerators of course.
    - vgt 10y ago
      hit me up, i'll connect you with some folks
- user5994461 10y ago
  There are only two notable differences: 1) The highest memory instance on Google is about 200GB, on AWS it's 2TB. 2) Google doesn't have GPU instances yet. They're been announced for 2017. Other than that, google instances have more options and more flexibility.
CoolGuySteve 10y ago
AWS spot instances are a fraction of the price, like 20-30%. In my experience, building the same processing cluster from AWS costs half as much as Google Cloud. Which is why I find it so annoying when I see these price comparison articles that don't really use the SpotFleet API correctly.

Bedon292 10y ago

Agreed. The value of AWS is not in the cost of the instances it is the services and customer service which go along with it. Its all of the easy manages services that add up. Its the combination of RDS, SQS, and all of the other features that add up. Sure each EC2 instance may be more expensive, but there are huge savings in time (which is more valuable) elsewhere.

dward 10y ago

What services are missing from GCP?

jacques_chester 10y ago
Lots. AWS is very featuresome. In terms of publicly consumable features, they have a 10-year head start.
- dward 10y ago
  I'm asking for specific examples.