9 ms·
Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?
by rattray 10y ago
Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?
- forgot-my-pw 10y agoGCP is generally cheaper than AWS.
- beisner 10y agoIt's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.
- rattray 10y agoWow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)
- phonon 10y agoAWS has a better compliance story. Compare https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/ to https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance
- zbjornson 10y agoAs far as HIPAA compliance goes, though, AWS EC2 requires dedicated tenancy, whereas GCE allows HIPAA workloads on any VM, including preemptible VMs.
- gkop 10y agoThis is true, however Amazon's standard BAA is a bit more robust than Google's. This didn't stop my HIPAA-compliant company from choosing Google, but it does make it more difficult to compare the two clouds on HIPAA-friendliness.
- mikecb 10y agoThere's been a lot of talk in the compliance gcp slack on this, seems like a lot of products are being audited and announcements will be made at Next.
- gkop 10y agoLet's hope they are building the managed Postgres product from the ground up with an eye toward compliance!
- mikecb 10y agoWell, since mysql compatible Cloud SQL is, I would imagine pg would be too.
- gkop 10y agoAWS launched Postgres RDS in November 2013. They covered MySQL and Oracle RDS under BAA in August 2015. But AWS didn't add Postgres RDS to the BAA until November 2016. We're hoping GCP doesn't delay covering Postgres Cloud SQL under BAA like AWS did with their managed Postgres.
- boulos 10y agoCan you say more about what you found less robust? And (hopefully) were you unable to get the legal agreement up to snuff by the end? Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not compliance).
- vgt 10y agoI know security is not compliance, and I'm not here to compare the two, but Google goes to great lengths to protect security. [0] TL;DR: - Google's global SDN is ultra-secure, and Google carries your packets on its network rather than dumping them onto public web. Google's undersea cables are shark bite-proof! [1] - Google Data Centers are mostly homogeneous and rely on Google-build hardware rather than vendors. This greatly helps with securing infra - only one vendor (Google) to trust, only one set of best practices to follow, lower risk of misconfiguration, and exposure risk is minimal. - > 600 security engineers. - Encryption-at-rest and in-transit is ubiquitous. [0] https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMxkRh7sx84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMxkRh7sx84 (work on Google Cloud, not in marketing :) )
- Johnny555 10y agoI can't find "ultra-secure" in any of our security certification docs. Is that better or worse than "super-duper secure"? For security, I don't care whether my traffic as routed over a private network or public web as long as the data is encrypted, because a "private network" is only as private as thousands of miles of fiber and every single network facility it traverses can be. Which means 'not very'. Does Google build it's own hard drives/SSD's and CPU's? If not, then that's at least 2 other vendors to trust since both CPU's and hard drives are related to hardware security.
- vgt 10y agoHa.ha. Did I mention I'm not in marketing? I do appreciate your passion! On your first point. There is a very strong risk of inadvertent misconfiguration or your employees not following best practices.. Or even poor documentation. Google cloud by default gives you a global secure vpc that never traverses public internet, so there's less risk because the baseline of security is high. Sure, you can run VPN tunnels between data centers. Point is, with Google cloud you don't need to. On the latter point, of course you cannot eradicate every vendor, especially within the obvious context of this specific Intel announcement... But, again, not having three dozen flavors of configs and four network router vendors does make a difference. I would encourage you to read the paper I linked to above (discussed this topic in great detail), and also perhaps [0]. Also security folks at Google, who are much more qualified to discuss this topic than I am, frequently post on hn. [1] [0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-new-disks-for-data-centers.html?m=1 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-ne... [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13388941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13388941
- jcims 10y agoAWS did a lot of work to improve how they share compliance information over the past year. It wasn't much better than Google's reference before that. Azure beats both of them in my opinion, as you can access many of the raw compliance reports without an NDA. It's also important to pay attention to which services you consume, as not all of them are certified to the same degree.
- lotyrin 10y agoIn organizations I've worked for, we use AWS because it's politically correct to do so; non-technical leadership has heard how "Cloud" is an alternative to "IT" and have golf buddies that buy "Cloud" from Amazon. Technical management can sometimes be persuaded, given overwhelming evidence, that competing products/services are superior or more cost-effective but ultimately conclude "we'll never sell this solution to leadership".
- heh 10y agoFWIW, that's not the only good stuff on GCE: * Instances have sustained use discounts - you don't need to pay in advance and reserve them and the discounts are applied very, very fairly. * Pre-emptable instances are cheap as all hell, and they are perfect for batchwork, celery workers, etc (anything disposable). You don't have to bid for them so automation is easier. * Up to 2 Gbits/second/core, depending on your workload type * CUSTOMIZABLE instances. * live migrations. The only thing I really miss from AWS is RDS's postgres. I don't even want to talk about Azure. Why do people use AWS? 1. Free tier. 2. Plethora of PaaS as you mentioned. 3. AWS was there first, has brand recognition and is a safe choice for management.
- rattray 10y agoHeh, I know you don't want to talk about Azure, but perhaps others can share -- what's so bad about it? It's superior for running Windows at least, right?
- boulos 10y agoI don't want to fork the thread to discuss other providers (take a look at GitLab's experience on Azure if you'd like), but I will say that we support Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, and Powershell throughout GCP [1]. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (so I want to sell you our services). [1] https://cloud.google.com/windows/ https://cloud.google.com/windows/
- heh 10y ago> "Heh, I know you don't want to talk about Azure, but perhaps others can share -- what's so bad about it?" This is what I will say: I'm working on a migration to it, so I'm not very experienced with it, but so far, it's been very painful compared to GCE or AWS, in which I've run production stacks. I'd rather not comment further, simply due to my relative new-ness to the service and the chance that it's just lack of experience. The customer service is, at best, run at a glacial pace. > "It's superior for running Windows at least, right?" I'm a Linux guy running a platform agnostic Linux stack, but I'd assume so. I get the feeling so far that it's really good if you want to run MS-SQL and .net, and garbage otherwise. The only reason we're migrating from GCE to Azure is because our GCE credits are expiring, and Microsoft gave us the YC Credits offer for Azure. We'd rather stay on GCE if we could. Also, postgres RDS/CloudSQL is the one thing we miss from AWS
- briankereszturi 10y agoManaged Kubernetes.
- mr_luc 10y agoAgreed. I'm on GCP whenever I get to pick. For anyone else who is on AWS (maybe because of rds postgres, or because it's client work that needs to be on AWS), you can go outside of vanilla AWS to get a similarly great dev UX. I've used Convox + the Weave ECS AMI on a project, and it was pleasant.
- rattray 10y agoHow much of a boon is that, though? Isn't Kubernetes built to be self-managing on any platform?
- mikecb 10y agoKubernetes manages containers, but what manages Kubernetes? GKE just makes the experience very painless, updates, etc.
- mjn 10y agoIt's better than fully self-managing it, but GKE is still less managed than I'd personally like. I just want to submit containers as jobs to be executed in "the cloud", with the cloud provider figuring out the details of where they get executed. On GKE, have to create a cluster in the cloud, then submit your jobs to your cluster, and set up logic to manage provisioning/resizing/etc., rather than just being able to submit your jobs to a giant abstracted cluster managed by Google. Joyent's Triton container service basically does that, so it's possible.
- mikecb 10y agoHave you tried Appengine flexible environment?
- eblanshey 10y ago
- mikecb 10y agoKiller network.
- doh 10y agoSpending on GCP is more predictable than on AWS. Also the general behavior is more predictable. For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources. I believe that whatever GCP does, does better. Faster network, faster spinning and turning off servers, simpler quotas, etc. GCP doesn't offer that many services as AWS and most of those are not very compatible with Apache tools (although they're doing their best, e.g. BigTable looks like Hbase from outside). In our case, we're running ~28,000 servers on GCE and utilizing many services, especially PubSub, BigQuery, etc. The price we're paying for our setup is roughly 1/4 of a similar setup on AWS.
- nugator 10y agoHoly cow, 28 000 servers, can you give us a clue to what you need so many servers for?
- doh 10y agoWe're processing videos, a lot of them. Roughly 34PB worth of data every month. Additionally we're running our search engine at top of it with couple of other services. You can check what we're up to here https://pex.com https://pex.com
- nugator 10y agoCool, thanks for the info!
- EnigmaticLion 10y agoThat landing page is a whopping 9MB [1]. Please optimize it for users with slow internet like me. [1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170225_RN_1K80/ https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170225_RN_1K80/
- doh 10y agoI apologize. We need to pay more attention to the actual website