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GCE vs. AWS in 2016: Why You Shouldn't Use Amazon

149 points by mikecarlton 10y ago

ungzd 10y ago
> AWS Premium Support is mandatory Is Google Cloud support even acceptable? Google is known for poor or no support for most services.
- doh 10y ago
  Actually it's surprisingly good. We use them a lot and even when we were on the silver package (the cheapest) they were pretty quick (under 1 hour for P1 situations [production is impacted]).
  - aluminussoma 10y ago
    Can you help me understand how much you define "a lot"? Is it about 2 tickets a month, or more? With AWS we do have a direct line to a Technical Account Manager which we utilize for the rare P1 (Prod down) situations. That gets things moving quickly if it wasn't already moving quickly with Support.
    - chrisabrams 10y ago
      You have the same thing for gold and up on GCE. On the rare occasions I have to use it, I get every pennies worth. Also with P1 issues on GCE most of the time an enginner assigned to the case calls me. I've even spoken directly to the head of google cloud platform via hangouts.
      - shshhdhs 10y ago
        What company do you work for?
    - doh 10y ago
      Just checked, we're on two tickets a week. Sounds a lot but we push GCE to its limits. On gold support and P1 there is usually an engineer assigned to the ticket. In many occasions you're talking to the person fixing your problem. GCE is not perfect and neither is their support. But they do try and even when things go sidewise they take responsibility for it, which didn't happen much with AWS, at least in our case.
- hrrsn 10y ago
  Whenever I've needed to contact Google support for Gsuite, they've been excellent.
  - tomcam 10y ago
    Same here
- Veratyr 10y ago
  Google's known for poor or no support on their free services but their paid services often have decent support. Personally, I've found GCP, GSuite, Project Fi, Google Store and Pixel support to all be pretty great but haven't found any support at all for Gmail, YouTube etc.
  - aarongolliver 10y ago
    YouTube red support seems excellent (the one time I used it). And my father asked support for help with his Google Home routers with a very specific question and support was absolutely phenomenal. No going through lame troubleshooting steps; it was clear we got connected with a well qualified network engineer immediately.
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      The actual people doing the tier 1 support at Google also got through the Google hiring process. 6 years and 250k on a CS masters from Stanford and they'll set you up helping people with home routers :) it's really not just a meme that Google massively underutilizes their talent.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    Google nearly wreaked a business that was making them bank and is now doing 20MM/year without them. Support wouldn't even talk to the founder: https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-penny-hoarder-with-kyle-taylor/ https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-penny-hoarder-with-kyle-t...
  - GordonS 10y ago
    Hah, Adwords must be an exception then - support is total crap. You're lucky if you get a canned response that doesn't begin to answer your question..
    - rahrahrah 10y ago
      Hmm sounds like you might have to increase your bids.
- tertius 10y ago
  Support for things like the Nexus devices and anything you can buy on their store is very good. Also, Google My Business support is also pretty good.
- tomassre 10y ago
  Thought I would chime in here since I didn't see anyone comment here about gold. We have GCP gold support. They answer all the questions / issues quickly and there aren't any limits to ticket counts I am aware of. During both the outages we have been affected by (~1.5 hour google load balancer outage, >3 hour bigquery outage) in the past few months, the support feels pretty bad even though there is nothing they can do I guess. However during the bigquery one, it was "outage will have an update by some time". There proceeds to not be some update for well past that time. Also 3 hours later its still we will have an update by some time but no more info when both of these were past SLA. Overall feels good and they answer any weird / general questions too which is nice (although sometimes on every reply they say I am going to close the ticket).
  - vgt 10y ago
    I hear ya. Check out the postmortem for the BigQuery Streaming API outage [0]. Relevant paragraph: "Finally, we have received feedback that our communications during the outage left a lot to be desired. We agree with this feedback. While our engineering teams launched an all-hands-on-deck to resolve this issue within minutes of its detection, we did not adequately communicate both the level-of-effort and the steady progress of diagnosis, triage and restoration happening during the incident. We clearly erred in not communicating promptly, crisply and transparently to affected customers during this incident. We will be addressing our communications — for all Google Cloud systems, not just BigQuery — as part of a separate effort, which has already been launched." (Work on Google Cloud and was on BigQuery team in the past) [0] https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/bigquery/18022 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/bigquery/18022
themihai 10y ago
GCE has its own issues. The raw price is different than the real/total cost. In a better world you shouldn't have to choose between just a few cloud peoviders.
- aluminussoma 10y ago
  How have you observed the total cost being different from the raw price? In what ways were you surprised?
  - themihai 10y ago
    If you are after the raw price you should sign up for bare metal and install/manage your own tools. When you sign up for a service such AWS you pay mostly for the tools/ecosystem and management. I think AWS is still the undisputed leader in that regard, closely followed by Azure. GCP is something I would not recommend due some personal experiences namely the appengine platform and early cloud sdk releases.
tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038298
patwolf 10y ago
What reason is AWS premium support mandatory? I ask because I'm currently building out SaaS offering on AWS and haven't yet hit any issues requiring support. Can I expect to start seeing issues as traffic scales up to a certain level?
- aluminussoma 10y ago
  I consider it mandatory because of the various random issues you will face, even without high levels of traffic. Also, when leveraging new features many times the documentation isn't as refined (e.g. the ALB when it first came out). Support is valuable in explaining how to really do something without wasting much time.
- bkanber 10y ago
  Contrary to what the article says, my company does a lot of business and traffic via AWS and have never once needed support in the last two years.
- bdcravens 10y ago
  We've been on AWS since 2009, and never needed support.
- Dunedan 10y ago
  Having 24/7 access to one dedicated AWS employee (the technical account manager (TAM) you get as part of premium support) can be _really_ helpful. Such TAMs can get you direct access to the product teams inside of AWS in case you need it and can escalate problems quickly. Still, it really depends on what you're doing at which scale with AWS. I also found business support quite good, if you don't need such dedicated resources. Regarding seeing issues, it's simply a matter of probabilities: The more you run in AWS the more likely it is to get problems sooner or later with one or the other service. My advice is to start with business support and see based on the experiences with it if you have additional requirements business support doesn't meet. If yes, you might then better know if premium support might offer enough value for its money.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Author of the article here. It's not. It's utterly useless. After an entire year, where the support has never been of any help, my last action for the year 2016 was to call a meeting with everyone, subject line "we should cancel our support subscription with AWS". It's clear that we (especially me) are way more qualified in all AWS offerings, from basics to special quirks, than they are. And they can't do anything that we can't do ourselves. I think the support is useful when you first start out, they can answer a lot of general questions. You should subscribe for support the first year and see how it goes. Note that some AWS managed services (e.g. RDS) can only be debugged by the support so you might be forced into support if you use these services. We don't.
doh 10y ago
We moved back and forth between AWS and GCE (based on who gave us free credits). Once we ran out, we chose GCE and never regretted it. GCE has many quirks, for instance the inconsistency between API and the UI, it misses the richness of the services offered by AWS but everything GCE does offer is just faster, more stable and much more consistent. One of the biggest problems with AWS is that once you outgrow the assigned limits, it becomes a hell to get more resources from them. We're running on average around 25k servers a day, majority of them preemptible (spot). AWS requires that you request exact type and location for your instances. GCE only asks for a region and then overall resources (e.g. number of CPUs). Also the pricing is much less complicated. 1 core costs y, 32 cores cost 32*y.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > AWS requires that you request exact type and location for your instances Are you running 25k without using Spot Fleets? Spot fleets let you specify value per instance type, and then total value you need. ("Value" could be CPU, memory, network or whatever) AWS will maintain the lowest cost spot instances that fulfill your requirements.
  - doh 10y ago
    We couldn't even get them to approve 5k servers on AWS. We run everything in GCE.
    - paulddraper 10y ago
      That is hard to believe. Their case studies have organizations using thousands or tens of thousands of servers for scientific computing, etc.
      - doh 10y ago
        I didn't blur anything so you can see for yourself http://imgur.com/14upQ5j http://imgur.com/14upQ5j
      - 10y ago
aluminussoma 10y ago
AWS premium support is the best support experience I have encountered so far and should absolutely factor into choosing a cloud provider. Reading frequent stories of Google support nightmares across all their services makes me think twice about using GCE. GCE must find a way to counter this. Also, the AWS premium support fee is negotiable for some customers from what I have heard. They don't like to negotiate down, though!
- user5994461 10y ago
  Strange. I'd qualify them as the most useless support I've ever encountered. In the year 2016, among maybe a hundred tickets, there was only ONCE where they could change something (an ELB issue). And well, I'm not sure whether the fix was related to their changes or if it was just an intermittent error that happened once. Thus their implications in the only time something happened has yet to be proven.
abvdasker 10y ago
God I hate any piece of writing that doesn't define its acronyms at least once. Google Compute Engine isn't popular enough that people should be expected to know immediately what it means.
- imafish 10y ago
  Also, GCE is a service while AWS is a suite of services. The correct comparison should be Google Cloud Platform (GCP) vs AWS. Guess it's nitpicking.. but still.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    I don't think this is nitpicking. This is probably the single biggest issue with Google right now: Don't know how to call their services. GCE - GCP - Google Cloud - Google Compute Engine - Google Cloud Platform ??? I can see on that blog's analytics that people are looking for various terms which result in different articles and ranking. This needs to be unified by Google. Personally, I think I'm gonna call everything "Google Cloud".
    - inopinatus 10y ago
      Amazon also suffers from the bewildering-array-of-confusingly-named-services syndrome.
    - manigandham 10y ago
      It is unified, they have some of the simplest naming. GCP is Google Cloud Platform which is the entire ecosystem. GCE is Google Compute Engine which is the VM/IaaS offering within. You can look at the official products page for all the names and descriptions: https://cloud.google.com/products/ https://cloud.google.com/products/
- noqcks 10y ago
  This entire blog post is rife with other small issues. AWS support is not a 10% minimum at all! Developer Support is 3%.
jasonlotito 10y ago
This was referenced in the previous thread, but here is what amounts to a stl;dr: > "Unfortunately, our infrastructure on AWS is working " > "I learned recently that we are a profitable company, more so than I thought. Looking at the top 10 companies by revenue per employee, we’d be in the top 10."
- dastbe 10y ago
  I'm a bit interested in what their company's response would be to this article.
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    The author(s) have a high proportion of strongly pro-GCP articles; so many, and so emphatically worded, that I began to distrust the source.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    Depends on who you ask in the company and how you word the question. For starters, most of the people here don't need to know anything about AWS. They just fill a [sortof] spreadsheet with a goal-team-instancetype-count-zone and they get servers up and running fully provisioned 5-15 minutes later. There's another lists with load balancers and security groups if they wanna do fancy stuff.
bhouston 10y ago
I really like OVH's SoYouStart in terms of its pricing for CPU/memory intensive computations, their prices just destroy AWS/GCE: https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/
- snvzz 10y ago
  Really bad support. And if you get packetstormed, they just nullroute you and call it "DDoS protection". Over the years, I've had plenty enough of ovh/kimsufi/hetzner/etc. For dedicated, I favor online.net and their alternative brand scaleway. Else AWS. I haven't played with GCE yet.
  - fuayenaha 10y ago
    Being fair, nullrouting you is a DDoS protection... for them.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  In terms of raw machine cost it generally goes owning a DC < owning machines + leasing racks < leasing dedicated < VPS < cloud. But each level down you go is another level of expertise you have to employ someone for and a loss of flexibility. The strength of the cloud has never been cost, it's always been flexibility, the ability to scale up 1000 servers in 5 minutes without any preparation or management.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Yea but those 1000 server are going to do the job of 100 dedicated servers. You still have to provision them, and there aren't too many use cases (there are some) where you have to all the sudden jump 10x of demand. The reason cloud soars is because in developed economies the cost of human resources is astronomically high. The savings are from having fewer people deal with stuff. Even 100k/year bill is okay if that means that 1 person has to deal with it rather than 2 or 3. So if you have money then cloud makes all the sense in the world, if you don't have money and have a bit of free time dedicated servers make a lot of sense until you have money.
bdcravens 10y ago
Evaluated GCP, and 2 main issues made it hard to consider moving: 1) quickly bumped into project limits just doing some tests, and the fact that you have to wait until billing cycle to reset the counter was quite jarring (I presume there's a way to increase) 2) Better tooling for S3 than Google Cloud Storage - non-technical members of our team need to work with files, and there's many nice third-party tools for s3.
- Veratyr 10y ago
  1) AWS has similar limits: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2 https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_ru... and it's pretty simple to fill in the form and request more. 2) GCS has an S3 compatible API so you can use your S3 tooling: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    AWS's limits are in real-time however. I don't mind the limits, I just don't like the fact that I can't run a quick test without it impacting me for the billing cycle. I'll check out the GCS XML compatibility with the current tooling we use; it looks promising.
    - vgt 10y ago
      One more comment on storage. Google Cloud storage has the same API for all its tiers. So to go from Multi-Region to Nearline, you just change the bucket designation. One API, one service, one interface and set of tools. (work on Google Cloud)
- swozey 10y ago
  You can increase the quotas under IAM> Quotas. They're extremely low on new projects, but I've never waited more than a couple of hours to have them increased significantly. Like 75 to 500 cpus, etc. One annoyance that they seriously need to lock down is that every time I request an increase they ask for a deposit or a project name that I own that has $xyz money spent on it already. I don't understand how/why they can't see the other 5 GCE projects attached to my organization. I've begun putting it in the quote notes because if I don't I'll wait a couple of hours for the "Please deposit $250 or send a project-name" then a few more hours after my reply to push it through. It's not a terrible system, AWS does the same thing, you just need to be aware of it when you begin new projects and deal with it before you get rolling. I use gcloud compute copy-files all of the time and it's extremely simple. I haven't used AWS much this year so I'm not sure how far along aws-cli or third parties have have come. I do generally prefer s3, it's far more feature full than GCS right now. The UI right now blows GCS out of the water. Your file revision numbers, etc are directly accessible from the UI, things like that.
nodesocket 10y ago
My biggest complaint about AWS is still EBS and having to guess about for the right provisioned IOPS. Throw in confusing extras like EBS optimized instances, enhanced networking. GCE just abstracts away all these details.
AlexCoventry 10y ago
Looking forward to the day Google Cloud provides on-demand GPU-backed machines. Currently AWS is the only game in town for that, as far as I know.
- zbjornson 10y ago
  Coming early 2017: https://cloud.google.com/gpu/ https://cloud.google.com/gpu/
  - user5994461 10y ago
    You should add that Google will allow to attach up to 8 GPUs to any type of instance. That will put Google Cloud seriously ahead of the competition in terms of GPU computations. Long term: Google has a better trajectory. IMO. Note that AWS announced something similar at reinvent 2016 but it ain't coming any time soon. Not sure about the status, is it even real anymore?
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Apparently, it's coming soon to GCP.
- hruan 10y ago
  What about N-series VMs on Azure? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-n-series-general-availability-on-december-1/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-n-series-genera...
  - AlexCoventry 10y ago
    Last I checked I only found per-month pricing. Are there finer-grained options?
    - hruan 10y ago
      VMs on Azure are billed per minute and I haven't found any indication of N-series being the exception. What's your source on per-month pricing for N-series?
inopinatus 10y ago
I have serious trust issues with Google. Their history of discontinuing services, dismal support (even for a paid service), and neglect of bugs in SDKs/APIs - all three of which I have experienced first-hand - has left a long-term bitter taste. No doubt some individuals are fantastic, but the organisation as a whole gives me an enduring impression of being systematically arrogant and aloof. AWS by contrast have demonstrated fanatically helpful support (even on business level, the cheapest), fixing issues within days of reporting, and a willingness to maintain obsolete/deprecated services (like SimpleDB) long after I'm sure they'd wish everyone had migrated away.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  It seems to me that Google is highly siloed internally. The GCP team is very visible (they engage on HN and elsewhere), and GCP has excellent support. Very different from other parts of Google. I have problems with Google as a whole, but I have as much faith in their cloud as I have in AWS or Digitial Ocean (we currently use all three). The Kubernetes team is also highly engaged on Github (they also occasionally show up on the official Slack channels). The Go community suffers from a depressing abundance of hostility, intransigence and arrogance, and some of Google's projects (e.g. Protobuf, the Go project itself) reflect this, but I was delighted to find that the Kubernetes people are not like this at all. It's a very friendly, quality-focused community. I think they have to be since Kubernetes is still emerging tech that's craving adoption. Same goes for GCP -- Google doesn't hide the fact that they're aggressively courting customers to migrate.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Not to be too cynical but none of this is reassuring. It's making it sound like the moment that GCP stops being the underdog they'll stop being as helpful and courteous :)
- saurik 10y ago
  This thread of comments from a year and a half ago, on the article "How Amazon took control of the cloud", is really epic on these points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825
nhumrich 10y ago
Because of speed of light/latency issues, I won't move to GCP until they have an RDS-postgres equivalent
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  According to comments from googlers elsewhere on HN, they're working on it. It's pretty much the number one thing people are asking for.
tscs37 10y ago
I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest. I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting plus the immense fees if you somehow manage to get decent traffic together. Once my reserved instances run out I'll probably either check out GCE or DO, either seems to be a better option, though GCE seems to be more expensive. Anyways, the console in AWS is a mess and I'm quite sure that I leaked my entire IAM settings to the internet because some switch somewhere isn't set right. Since everything recommends to setup IAM users you'll have to setup the permissions, a procedure which I enjoyed about as much as getting my fingernails slowly removed by a glowing red iron. Calculating any sort of sustained cost is a pain in the backplane if the total doesn't exceed three digits a month. And lastly the login process is probably the biggest pain I've encountered across many many providers. There are atleast 4 login forms I've discovered, 2 of which I have to use and one of those always asks for a captcha with such low quality that a brain-damaged AI running on my calculator could figure it out, not mentioning never knowing if the 2FA setup was correct or maybe probably blew up somewhere because giving some feedback from the UI is plain impossible. TL;DR Don't use AWS, anything else is better.
- swozey 10y ago
  I mean, you're basically setting up a datacenter if you aren't using Beanstalk. I see complaints all the time about how complicated the networking is, IAM, etc is. But it's far more simple dealing with VPCs then having to buy and hop onto a bunch of F5s/Brocades etc that tend to require their own network engineers on staff. The issue always seems to be that someone tries to move a company onto AWS but they lack the experience in actually running infrastructure to that degree. If you know Change Management you can figure out Cloud Formation templates, if you don't you're likely completely lost and rolling out instances by hand. If you don't know any network engineering you're likely going to have issues with load balancers and VPCs. You can really see the experience difference in people when you work on multiple AWS infrastructures. And that's the huge benefit to it. You can practically roll out whatever sort of infrastructure your business requires. If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc). I personally use Cloud Formation and create EVERYTHING by it. Load balancers, VPCs, instances, kubernetes, etc. But yeah, if you haven't touched CF before it can be like walking into a spider web of confusion - but believe me, I'd rather do that over again than take over someones hardware that has no APIs, no dashboards, no centralization. I spent years in datacenters where everything was done manually. I wouldn't ever want to go back now that I've learned to treat infrastructure as code. But hey, if you want to run Vsphere servers, manually configure instances and databases and not do any automation via AWS you can do that as well. That's why it's incredible.
hhandoko 10y ago
One reason why I still can't use GCE in 2016. No PostgreSQL support for CloudSQL. I can find alternatives for other services, but I don't want to compromise on the choice of relational database. Note: I understand there are third-party providers for PostgreSQL, but I'd rather have Google's.
- _asummers 10y ago
  This is on my short wishlist for GCE. It's such obvious feature parity that it's very strange they're not doing it.
  - hhandoko 10y ago
    I believe they are (as mentioned by other commenter), but it's taking too long :)
- matthewrudy 10y ago
  Totally agree, Google Container Engine (hosted kubernetes) plus managed Postgresql would be my dream setup.
- ecnahc515 10y ago
  Have you found any compelling hosted Postgres RDS alternatives?
  - hhandoko 10y ago
    I mean, there is ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2], but I'd rather have something from Google themselves since I consider relational database a core part of the architecture and infrastructure. [1] - https://www.elephantsql.com/ https://www.elephantsql.com/ [2] - https://aiven.io/ https://aiven.io/
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Googlers on HN have commented before that they're working on it. No ETA, though. With AWS now offering both plain-old PostgreSQL and souped-up-PostgreSQL-on-Aurora [1], whatever Google produces needs to be great in order to compete. However, I fear they'll initially come out with something that's on par with the current MySQL support in Cloud SQL, which is just a vanilla MySQL server behind a UI/API. (For example, Cloud SQL's read-replica stuff is reportedly just MySQL binlog replication.) Better than nothing, of course. Cloud SQL also has some annoyances (such as not supporting private IPs and the need for the Cloud SQL Proxy [2]) that I hope they're working on. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgresql-compatibility/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgr... [2] https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-proxy https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-proxy
holografix 10y ago
I'd be interested to know why the OP never considered Heroku
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Heroku is hosted on AWS, and so you inherit the performance, but lose the ability to control it (no way to select local SSDs or enable IOPS, as far as I know, for example), while at the same time paying a large premium for the convenience of using their platform.
  - holografix 10y ago
    Thanks lobster_johnson, yeah I know Heroku is ephemeral so data is stored in a DB or somewhere else, often S3. Just wondering what kind of work he's doing that took him from AWS straight to GCE without stopping to think about Heroku. Maybe you've hit the nail in the head, he's writing to disk a lot for some reason?
    - lobster_johnson 10y ago
      A lot of the article's focus was on network performance, local SSD availability and I/O performance. I think it's safe to say his use case involves a lot of I/O. If "thehftguy" means HFT == high frequency trading, then that's not surprising.
- andrewguenther 10y ago
  At that scale Heroku would probably cost 5x their current bill.
gdgtfiend 10y ago
Two points here really hit home with me about AWS (not in comparison to GCE though since I've never tried it). 1) Reserved Instances: I think the pricing model for this has become very outdated since the beginning of AWS, and it is definitely becoming cumbersome (and therefore scary) to use. 2) ELB + Traffic Spikes: I have tried (unsuccessfully) to pre-scale an ELB to prepare it for the traffic it was about to receive. I tried to pre-scale for this project 3 different times, in coordination with support and without them. I could not do it. Very frustrating. I think these are all signs of extreme growth, and a strange organization of engineering units inside of AWS. However, as OP descried.. we are much to heavily invested in AWS to consider an infrastructure shift at this point
- tejasmanohar 10y ago
  We also manually sync up with AWS support to "warm up" our ELBs... I guess they don't expose an option to avoid abuse, but it really does seem like an implementation caveat.
- tuananh 10y ago
  Can you talk more about ELB + Traffic Spikes? Under high traffic, ELB will fail? How do you pre-scale the ELB? Many thanks.
cpncrunch 10y ago
The cost comparison link is broken.
- user5994461 10y ago
  fixed
ilaksh 10y ago
You should use AWS if you _really_ need something like an infinitely scalable database such as DynamoDB or some other uber-scaling AWS service that you can't replace with some open-source software on a VPS provider. 95-100% of startups don't actually need an infinitely scalable database or whatever. So they shouldn't subject themselves to Amazon's horrible pricing and throttling.
rmykhajliw 10y ago
GCE - piece of shit in case of support and solving customers issues. They didn't manage to FIX billing issue for 8!!! months. Support is useless. Missed access rules boundaries - everything you have to share with everyone. It's nightmare for companies.
blam 10y ago
Having used AWS in production for about 2 years, I can say that scaling in the cloud is hard to get right. Spikes of traffic and load are hard to scale with, especially if you're scaling down to just the right amount of instances to manage the current load. We try to keep 50% capacity free for such spikes. Speaking with AWS support, we can fix issues with limits and scaling elbs, in hours not weeks, so I haven't had the same experience as you in that respect. One thing I would suggest, is that you have 2 AWS accounts. One for dev and one for prod. This way you should be able to see the limits that you're hitting before you get to production, and can raise tickets to get them ammended.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

149 points by mikecarlton 10y ago

ungzd 10y ago

> AWS Premium Support is mandatory Is Google Cloud support even acceptable? Google is known for poor or no support for most services.

doh 10y ago
Actually it's surprisingly good. We use them a lot and even when we were on the silver package (the cheapest) they were pretty quick (under 1 hour for P1 situations [production is impacted]).
- aluminussoma 10y ago
  Can you help me understand how much you define "a lot"? Is it about 2 tickets a month, or more? With AWS we do have a direct line to a Technical Account Manager which we utilize for the rare P1 (Prod down) situations. That gets things moving quickly if it wasn't already moving quickly with Support.
  - chrisabrams 10y ago
    You have the same thing for gold and up on GCE. On the rare occasions I have to use it, I get every pennies worth. Also with P1 issues on GCE most of the time an enginner assigned to the case calls me. I've even spoken directly to the head of google cloud platform via hangouts.
    - shshhdhs 10y ago
      What company do you work for?
  - doh 10y ago
    Just checked, we're on two tickets a week. Sounds a lot but we push GCE to its limits. On gold support and P1 there is usually an engineer assigned to the ticket. In many occasions you're talking to the person fixing your problem. GCE is not perfect and neither is their support. But they do try and even when things go sidewise they take responsibility for it, which didn't happen much with AWS, at least in our case.
hrrsn 10y ago
Whenever I've needed to contact Google support for Gsuite, they've been excellent.
- tomcam 10y ago
  Same here
Veratyr 10y ago
Google's known for poor or no support on their free services but their paid services often have decent support. Personally, I've found GCP, GSuite, Project Fi, Google Store and Pixel support to all be pretty great but haven't found any support at all for Gmail, YouTube etc.
- aarongolliver 10y ago
  YouTube red support seems excellent (the one time I used it). And my father asked support for help with his Google Home routers with a very specific question and support was absolutely phenomenal. No going through lame troubleshooting steps; it was clear we got connected with a well qualified network engineer immediately.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    The actual people doing the tier 1 support at Google also got through the Google hiring process. 6 years and 250k on a CS masters from Stanford and they'll set you up helping people with home routers :) it's really not just a meme that Google massively underutilizes their talent.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  Google nearly wreaked a business that was making them bank and is now doing 20MM/year without them. Support wouldn't even talk to the founder: https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-penny-hoarder-with-kyle-taylor/ https://mixergy.com/interviews/the-penny-hoarder-with-kyle-t...
- GordonS 10y ago
  Hah, Adwords must be an exception then - support is total crap. You're lucky if you get a canned response that doesn't begin to answer your question..
  - rahrahrah 10y ago
    Hmm sounds like you might have to increase your bids.
tertius 10y ago
Support for things like the Nexus devices and anything you can buy on their store is very good. Also, Google My Business support is also pretty good.
tomassre 10y ago
Thought I would chime in here since I didn't see anyone comment here about gold. We have GCP gold support. They answer all the questions / issues quickly and there aren't any limits to ticket counts I am aware of. During both the outages we have been affected by (~1.5 hour google load balancer outage, >3 hour bigquery outage) in the past few months, the support feels pretty bad even though there is nothing they can do I guess. However during the bigquery one, it was "outage will have an update by some time". There proceeds to not be some update for well past that time. Also 3 hours later its still we will have an update by some time but no more info when both of these were past SLA. Overall feels good and they answer any weird / general questions too which is nice (although sometimes on every reply they say I am going to close the ticket).
- vgt 10y ago
  I hear ya. Check out the postmortem for the BigQuery Streaming API outage [0]. Relevant paragraph: "Finally, we have received feedback that our communications during the outage left a lot to be desired. We agree with this feedback. While our engineering teams launched an all-hands-on-deck to resolve this issue within minutes of its detection, we did not adequately communicate both the level-of-effort and the steady progress of diagnosis, triage and restoration happening during the incident. We clearly erred in not communicating promptly, crisply and transparently to affected customers during this incident. We will be addressing our communications — for all Google Cloud systems, not just BigQuery — as part of a separate effort, which has already been launched." (Work on Google Cloud and was on BigQuery team in the past) [0] https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/bigquery/18022 https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/bigquery/18022

themihai 10y ago

GCE has its own issues. The raw price is different than the real/total cost. In a better world you shouldn't have to choose between just a few cloud peoviders.

aluminussoma 10y ago
How have you observed the total cost being different from the raw price? In what ways were you surprised?
- themihai 10y ago
  If you are after the raw price you should sign up for bare metal and install/manage your own tools. When you sign up for a service such AWS you pay mostly for the tools/ecosystem and management. I think AWS is still the undisputed leader in that regard, closely followed by Azure. GCP is something I would not recommend due some personal experiences namely the appengine platform and early cloud sdk releases.

tetraodonpuffer 10y ago

previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038298

patwolf 10y ago

What reason is AWS premium support mandatory? I ask because I'm currently building out SaaS offering on AWS and haven't yet hit any issues requiring support. Can I expect to start seeing issues as traffic scales up to a certain level?

aluminussoma 10y ago
I consider it mandatory because of the various random issues you will face, even without high levels of traffic. Also, when leveraging new features many times the documentation isn't as refined (e.g. the ALB when it first came out). Support is valuable in explaining how to really do something without wasting much time.
bkanber 10y ago
Contrary to what the article says, my company does a lot of business and traffic via AWS and have never once needed support in the last two years.
bdcravens 10y ago
We've been on AWS since 2009, and never needed support.
Dunedan 10y ago
Having 24/7 access to one dedicated AWS employee (the technical account manager (TAM) you get as part of premium support) can be _really_ helpful. Such TAMs can get you direct access to the product teams inside of AWS in case you need it and can escalate problems quickly. Still, it really depends on what you're doing at which scale with AWS. I also found business support quite good, if you don't need such dedicated resources. Regarding seeing issues, it's simply a matter of probabilities: The more you run in AWS the more likely it is to get problems sooner or later with one or the other service. My advice is to start with business support and see based on the experiences with it if you have additional requirements business support doesn't meet. If yes, you might then better know if premium support might offer enough value for its money.
user5994461 10y ago
Author of the article here. It's not. It's utterly useless. After an entire year, where the support has never been of any help, my last action for the year 2016 was to call a meeting with everyone, subject line "we should cancel our support subscription with AWS". It's clear that we (especially me) are way more qualified in all AWS offerings, from basics to special quirks, than they are. And they can't do anything that we can't do ourselves. I think the support is useful when you first start out, they can answer a lot of general questions. You should subscribe for support the first year and see how it goes. Note that some AWS managed services (e.g. RDS) can only be debugged by the support so you might be forced into support if you use these services. We don't.

doh 10y ago

We moved back and forth between AWS and GCE (based on who gave us free credits). Once we ran out, we chose GCE and never regretted it. GCE has many quirks, for instance the inconsistency between API and the UI, it misses the richness of the services offered by AWS but everything GCE does offer is just faster, more stable and much more consistent. One of the biggest problems with AWS is that once you outgrow the assigned limits, it becomes a hell to get more resources from them. We're running on average around 25k servers a day, majority of them preemptible (spot). AWS requires that you request exact type and location for your instances. GCE only asks for a region and then overall resources (e.g. number of CPUs). Also the pricing is much less complicated. 1 core costs y, 32 cores cost 32*y.

paulddraper 10y ago
> AWS requires that you request exact type and location for your instances Are you running 25k without using Spot Fleets? Spot fleets let you specify value per instance type, and then total value you need. ("Value" could be CPU, memory, network or whatever) AWS will maintain the lowest cost spot instances that fulfill your requirements.
- doh 10y ago
  We couldn't even get them to approve 5k servers on AWS. We run everything in GCE.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    That is hard to believe. Their case studies have organizations using thousands or tens of thousands of servers for scientific computing, etc.
    - doh 10y ago
      I didn't blur anything so you can see for yourself http://imgur.com/14upQ5j http://imgur.com/14upQ5j
    - 10y ago

aluminussoma 10y ago

AWS premium support is the best support experience I have encountered so far and should absolutely factor into choosing a cloud provider. Reading frequent stories of Google support nightmares across all their services makes me think twice about using GCE. GCE must find a way to counter this. Also, the AWS premium support fee is negotiable for some customers from what I have heard. They don't like to negotiate down, though!

user5994461 10y ago
Strange. I'd qualify them as the most useless support I've ever encountered. In the year 2016, among maybe a hundred tickets, there was only ONCE where they could change something (an ELB issue). And well, I'm not sure whether the fix was related to their changes or if it was just an intermittent error that happened once. Thus their implications in the only time something happened has yet to be proven.

abvdasker 10y ago

God I hate any piece of writing that doesn't define its acronyms at least once. Google Compute Engine isn't popular enough that people should be expected to know immediately what it means.

imafish 10y ago
Also, GCE is a service while AWS is a suite of services. The correct comparison should be Google Cloud Platform (GCP) vs AWS. Guess it's nitpicking.. but still.
- user5994461 10y ago
  I don't think this is nitpicking. This is probably the single biggest issue with Google right now: Don't know how to call their services. GCE - GCP - Google Cloud - Google Compute Engine - Google Cloud Platform ??? I can see on that blog's analytics that people are looking for various terms which result in different articles and ranking. This needs to be unified by Google. Personally, I think I'm gonna call everything "Google Cloud".
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    Amazon also suffers from the bewildering-array-of-confusingly-named-services syndrome.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    It is unified, they have some of the simplest naming. GCP is Google Cloud Platform which is the entire ecosystem. GCE is Google Compute Engine which is the VM/IaaS offering within. You can look at the official products page for all the names and descriptions: https://cloud.google.com/products/ https://cloud.google.com/products/
noqcks 10y ago
This entire blog post is rife with other small issues. AWS support is not a 10% minimum at all! Developer Support is 3%.

jasonlotito 10y ago

This was referenced in the previous thread, but here is what amounts to a stl;dr: > "Unfortunately, our infrastructure on AWS is working " > "I learned recently that we are a profitable company, more so than I thought. Looking at the top 10 companies by revenue per employee, we’d be in the top 10."

dastbe 10y ago
I'm a bit interested in what their company's response would be to this article.
- inopinatus 10y ago
  The author(s) have a high proportion of strongly pro-GCP articles; so many, and so emphatically worded, that I began to distrust the source.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Depends on who you ask in the company and how you word the question. For starters, most of the people here don't need to know anything about AWS. They just fill a [sortof] spreadsheet with a goal-team-instancetype-count-zone and they get servers up and running fully provisioned 5-15 minutes later. There's another lists with load balancers and security groups if they wanna do fancy stuff.

bhouston 10y ago

I really like OVH's SoYouStart in terms of its pricing for CPU/memory intensive computations, their prices just destroy AWS/GCE: https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/ https://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/essential-servers/

snvzz 10y ago
Really bad support. And if you get packetstormed, they just nullroute you and call it "DDoS protection". Over the years, I've had plenty enough of ovh/kimsufi/hetzner/etc. For dedicated, I favor online.net and their alternative brand scaleway. Else AWS. I haven't played with GCE yet.
- fuayenaha 10y ago
  Being fair, nullrouting you is a DDoS protection... for them.
Veratyr 10y ago
In terms of raw machine cost it generally goes owning a DC < owning machines + leasing racks < leasing dedicated < VPS < cloud. But each level down you go is another level of expertise you have to employ someone for and a loss of flexibility. The strength of the cloud has never been cost, it's always been flexibility, the ability to scale up 1000 servers in 5 minutes without any preparation or management.
- devoply 10y ago
  Yea but those 1000 server are going to do the job of 100 dedicated servers. You still have to provision them, and there aren't too many use cases (there are some) where you have to all the sudden jump 10x of demand. The reason cloud soars is because in developed economies the cost of human resources is astronomically high. The savings are from having fewer people deal with stuff. Even 100k/year bill is okay if that means that 1 person has to deal with it rather than 2 or 3. So if you have money then cloud makes all the sense in the world, if you don't have money and have a bit of free time dedicated servers make a lot of sense until you have money.

bdcravens 10y ago

Evaluated GCP, and 2 main issues made it hard to consider moving: 1) quickly bumped into project limits just doing some tests, and the fact that you have to wait until billing cycle to reset the counter was quite jarring (I presume there's a way to increase) 2) Better tooling for S3 than Google Cloud Storage - non-technical members of our team need to work with files, and there's many nice third-party tools for s3.

Veratyr 10y ago
1) AWS has similar limits: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2 https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_ru... and it's pretty simple to fill in the form and request more. 2) GCS has an S3 compatible API so you can use your S3 tooling: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/interoperability
- bdcravens 10y ago
  AWS's limits are in real-time however. I don't mind the limits, I just don't like the fact that I can't run a quick test without it impacting me for the billing cycle. I'll check out the GCS XML compatibility with the current tooling we use; it looks promising.
  - vgt 10y ago
    One more comment on storage. Google Cloud storage has the same API for all its tiers. So to go from Multi-Region to Nearline, you just change the bucket designation. One API, one service, one interface and set of tools. (work on Google Cloud)
swozey 10y ago
You can increase the quotas under IAM> Quotas. They're extremely low on new projects, but I've never waited more than a couple of hours to have them increased significantly. Like 75 to 500 cpus, etc. One annoyance that they seriously need to lock down is that every time I request an increase they ask for a deposit or a project name that I own that has $xyz money spent on it already. I don't understand how/why they can't see the other 5 GCE projects attached to my organization. I've begun putting it in the quote notes because if I don't I'll wait a couple of hours for the "Please deposit $250 or send a project-name" then a few more hours after my reply to push it through. It's not a terrible system, AWS does the same thing, you just need to be aware of it when you begin new projects and deal with it before you get rolling. I use gcloud compute copy-files all of the time and it's extremely simple. I haven't used AWS much this year so I'm not sure how far along aws-cli or third parties have have come. I do generally prefer s3, it's far more feature full than GCS right now. The UI right now blows GCS out of the water. Your file revision numbers, etc are directly accessible from the UI, things like that.

nodesocket 10y ago

My biggest complaint about AWS is still EBS and having to guess about for the right provisioned IOPS. Throw in confusing extras like EBS optimized instances, enhanced networking. GCE just abstracts away all these details.

AlexCoventry 10y ago

Looking forward to the day Google Cloud provides on-demand GPU-backed machines. Currently AWS is the only game in town for that, as far as I know.

zbjornson 10y ago
Coming early 2017: https://cloud.google.com/gpu/ https://cloud.google.com/gpu/
- user5994461 10y ago
  You should add that Google will allow to attach up to 8 GPUs to any type of instance. That will put Google Cloud seriously ahead of the competition in terms of GPU computations. Long term: Google has a better trajectory. IMO. Note that AWS announced something similar at reinvent 2016 but it ain't coming any time soon. Not sure about the status, is it even real anymore?
bitmapbrother 10y ago
Apparently, it's coming soon to GCP.
hruan 10y ago
What about N-series VMs on Azure? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-n-series-general-availability-on-december-1/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-n-series-genera...
- AlexCoventry 10y ago
  Last I checked I only found per-month pricing. Are there finer-grained options?
  - hruan 10y ago
    VMs on Azure are billed per minute and I haven't found any indication of N-series being the exception. What's your source on per-month pricing for N-series?

inopinatus 10y ago

I have serious trust issues with Google. Their history of discontinuing services, dismal support (even for a paid service), and neglect of bugs in SDKs/APIs - all three of which I have experienced first-hand - has left a long-term bitter taste. No doubt some individuals are fantastic, but the organisation as a whole gives me an enduring impression of being systematically arrogant and aloof. AWS by contrast have demonstrated fanatically helpful support (even on business level, the cheapest), fixing issues within days of reporting, and a willingness to maintain obsolete/deprecated services (like SimpleDB) long after I'm sure they'd wish everyone had migrated away.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
It seems to me that Google is highly siloed internally. The GCP team is very visible (they engage on HN and elsewhere), and GCP has excellent support. Very different from other parts of Google. I have problems with Google as a whole, but I have as much faith in their cloud as I have in AWS or Digitial Ocean (we currently use all three). The Kubernetes team is also highly engaged on Github (they also occasionally show up on the official Slack channels). The Go community suffers from a depressing abundance of hostility, intransigence and arrogance, and some of Google's projects (e.g. Protobuf, the Go project itself) reflect this, but I was delighted to find that the Kubernetes people are not like this at all. It's a very friendly, quality-focused community. I think they have to be since Kubernetes is still emerging tech that's craving adoption. Same goes for GCP -- Google doesn't hide the fact that they're aggressively courting customers to migrate.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Not to be too cynical but none of this is reassuring. It's making it sound like the moment that GCP stops being the underdog they'll stop being as helpful and courteous :)
saurik 10y ago
This thread of comments from a year and a half ago, on the article "How Amazon took control of the cloud", is really epic on these points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486825

nhumrich 10y ago

Because of speed of light/latency issues, I won't move to GCP until they have an RDS-postgres equivalent

lobster_johnson 10y ago
According to comments from googlers elsewhere on HN, they're working on it. It's pretty much the number one thing people are asking for.

tscs37 10y ago

I've used AWS for a bit over 9 months now and it's quite terrible to be honest. I don't need it for anything professional and it's quite terrible for just some amateur hosting plus the immense fees if you somehow manage to get decent traffic together. Once my reserved instances run out I'll probably either check out GCE or DO, either seems to be a better option, though GCE seems to be more expensive. Anyways, the console in AWS is a mess and I'm quite sure that I leaked my entire IAM settings to the internet because some switch somewhere isn't set right. Since everything recommends to setup IAM users you'll have to setup the permissions, a procedure which I enjoyed about as much as getting my fingernails slowly removed by a glowing red iron. Calculating any sort of sustained cost is a pain in the backplane if the total doesn't exceed three digits a month. And lastly the login process is probably the biggest pain I've encountered across many many providers. There are atleast 4 login forms I've discovered, 2 of which I have to use and one of those always asks for a captcha with such low quality that a brain-damaged AI running on my calculator could figure it out, not mentioning never knowing if the 2FA setup was correct or maybe probably blew up somewhere because giving some feedback from the UI is plain impossible. TL;DR Don't use AWS, anything else is better.

swozey 10y ago
I mean, you're basically setting up a datacenter if you aren't using Beanstalk. I see complaints all the time about how complicated the networking is, IAM, etc is. But it's far more simple dealing with VPCs then having to buy and hop onto a bunch of F5s/Brocades etc that tend to require their own network engineers on staff. The issue always seems to be that someone tries to move a company onto AWS but they lack the experience in actually running infrastructure to that degree. If you know Change Management you can figure out Cloud Formation templates, if you don't you're likely completely lost and rolling out instances by hand. If you don't know any network engineering you're likely going to have issues with load balancers and VPCs. You can really see the experience difference in people when you work on multiple AWS infrastructures. And that's the huge benefit to it. You can practically roll out whatever sort of infrastructure your business requires. If you're experienced enough you can basically do every single thing in AWS/GCP without having to hire ancillary staff (network engs, etc). I personally use Cloud Formation and create EVERYTHING by it. Load balancers, VPCs, instances, kubernetes, etc. But yeah, if you haven't touched CF before it can be like walking into a spider web of confusion - but believe me, I'd rather do that over again than take over someones hardware that has no APIs, no dashboards, no centralization. I spent years in datacenters where everything was done manually. I wouldn't ever want to go back now that I've learned to treat infrastructure as code. But hey, if you want to run Vsphere servers, manually configure instances and databases and not do any automation via AWS you can do that as well. That's why it's incredible.

hhandoko 10y ago

One reason why I still can't use GCE in 2016. No PostgreSQL support for CloudSQL. I can find alternatives for other services, but I don't want to compromise on the choice of relational database. Note: I understand there are third-party providers for PostgreSQL, but I'd rather have Google's.

_asummers 10y ago
This is on my short wishlist for GCE. It's such obvious feature parity that it's very strange they're not doing it.
- hhandoko 10y ago
  I believe they are (as mentioned by other commenter), but it's taking too long :)
matthewrudy 10y ago
Totally agree, Google Container Engine (hosted kubernetes) plus managed Postgresql would be my dream setup.
ecnahc515 10y ago
Have you found any compelling hosted Postgres RDS alternatives?
- hhandoko 10y ago
  I mean, there is ElephantSQL [1] and Aiven [2], but I'd rather have something from Google themselves since I consider relational database a core part of the architecture and infrastructure. [1] - https://www.elephantsql.com/ https://www.elephantsql.com/ [2] - https://aiven.io/ https://aiven.io/
lobster_johnson 10y ago
Googlers on HN have commented before that they're working on it. No ETA, though. With AWS now offering both plain-old PostgreSQL and souped-up-PostgreSQL-on-Aurora [1], whatever Google produces needs to be great in order to compete. However, I fear they'll initially come out with something that's on par with the current MySQL support in Cloud SQL, which is just a vanilla MySQL server behind a UI/API. (For example, Cloud SQL's read-replica stuff is reportedly just MySQL binlog replication.) Better than nothing, of course. Cloud SQL also has some annoyances (such as not supporting private IPs and the need for the Cloud SQL Proxy [2]) that I hope they're working on. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgresql-compatibility/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-postgr... [2] https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-proxy https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/sql-proxy

holografix 10y ago

I'd be interested to know why the OP never considered Heroku

lobster_johnson 10y ago
Heroku is hosted on AWS, and so you inherit the performance, but lose the ability to control it (no way to select local SSDs or enable IOPS, as far as I know, for example), while at the same time paying a large premium for the convenience of using their platform.
- holografix 10y ago
  Thanks lobster_johnson, yeah I know Heroku is ephemeral so data is stored in a DB or somewhere else, often S3. Just wondering what kind of work he's doing that took him from AWS straight to GCE without stopping to think about Heroku. Maybe you've hit the nail in the head, he's writing to disk a lot for some reason?
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    A lot of the article's focus was on network performance, local SSD availability and I/O performance. I think it's safe to say his use case involves a lot of I/O. If "thehftguy" means HFT == high frequency trading, then that's not surprising.
andrewguenther 10y ago
At that scale Heroku would probably cost 5x their current bill.

gdgtfiend 10y ago

Two points here really hit home with me about AWS (not in comparison to GCE though since I've never tried it). 1) Reserved Instances: I think the pricing model for this has become very outdated since the beginning of AWS, and it is definitely becoming cumbersome (and therefore scary) to use. 2) ELB + Traffic Spikes: I have tried (unsuccessfully) to pre-scale an ELB to prepare it for the traffic it was about to receive. I tried to pre-scale for this project 3 different times, in coordination with support and without them. I could not do it. Very frustrating. I think these are all signs of extreme growth, and a strange organization of engineering units inside of AWS. However, as OP descried.. we are much to heavily invested in AWS to consider an infrastructure shift at this point

tejasmanohar 10y ago
We also manually sync up with AWS support to "warm up" our ELBs... I guess they don't expose an option to avoid abuse, but it really does seem like an implementation caveat.
tuananh 10y ago
Can you talk more about ELB + Traffic Spikes? Under high traffic, ELB will fail? How do you pre-scale the ELB? Many thanks.

cpncrunch 10y ago

The cost comparison link is broken.

user5994461 10y ago
fixed

ilaksh 10y ago

You should use AWS if you _really_ need something like an infinitely scalable database such as DynamoDB or some other uber-scaling AWS service that you can't replace with some open-source software on a VPS provider. 95-100% of startups don't actually need an infinitely scalable database or whatever. So they shouldn't subject themselves to Amazon's horrible pricing and throttling.

rmykhajliw 10y ago

GCE - piece of shit in case of support and solving customers issues. They didn't manage to FIX billing issue for 8!!! months. Support is useless. Missed access rules boundaries - everything you have to share with everyone. It's nightmare for companies.

blam 10y ago

Having used AWS in production for about 2 years, I can say that scaling in the cloud is hard to get right. Spikes of traffic and load are hard to scale with, especially if you're scaling down to just the right amount of instances to manage the current load. We try to keep 50% capacity free for such spikes. Speaking with AWS support, we can fix issues with limits and scaling elbs, in hours not weeks, so I haven't had the same experience as you in that respect. One thing I would suggest, is that you have 2 AWS accounts. One for dev and one for prod. This way you should be able to see the limits that you're hitting before you get to production, and can raise tickets to get them ammended.

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