9 ms·

Going Multi-Cloud with Google Cloud Endpoints and AWS Lambda

173 points by blopeur 10y ago

iced0wn 10y ago
This is very wise advise to those on a certain "forest" cloud
pdog 10y ago
Why?
- hobofan 10y ago
  The first paragraph tells you why.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Sort of. "Spread Critical Workloads" is somewhat silly to me. The uptime will be lower than the worse of the two clouds, complexity higher, and cost higher due to egress for cloud to cloud. I do get the use case for actual multi-cloud, where there aren't cross cloud dependencies. This setup seems unwise though. Maybe as a short term migration pathway, or similar.
  - pdog 10y ago
    No it doesn't.
rynop 10y ago
clickbait. I don't consider this multi-cloud
djhworld 10y ago
TL;DR - call services on GCP from your AWS lambda functions using Cloud Endpoints.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
doppenhe 10y ago
this doesn't solve the biggest problem with multi-cloud which is data egress though. Even if latency is acceptable you would get killed on data transfer for any significant amount of data. am I missing something?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Nope, spot on. You either cache extremely aggressively with a CDN if you can, or otherwise you eat the data out charges for dynamic data.
- al_james 10y ago
  No exactly right. As Google seem to be getting more serious about attracting aws converts and dual cloud deployments (eg in built aws vpc peering) I wonder if they will offer some kind of cut price data transfer to aws networks. That would be an interesting move.
  - thesandlord 10y ago
    https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/ Ingress is free on all major clouds, but you still have to pay to get the data out. (I work on GCP)
- tlarkworthy 10y ago
  In my experience egress is not the biggest cost though, it's compute and storage. Are my workloads the outliers?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    For most people not running a CDN or Netflix I would also expect to see CPU or Ram the bottleneck.
    - _jal 10y ago
      Really depends on the business model. I modeled different deployment scenarios for a product for a small company, and egress pricing broke the economics for the ones involving cloud providers. (It was principally concerned with hires images.) That was some time back and I know pricing has come down, so that may be different now.
luhn 10y ago
This is not multi-cloud as it is commonly defined: Simultaneously handle workloads with multiple cloud vendors, to prevent lock-in to a single vendor. Rather, this is passing workloads between AWS and Google to leverage the advantages of each. A useful strategy, but the title is a bit misleading as it goes against the colloquial definition of multi-cloud.
- zeroxfe 10y ago
  > the colloquial definition of multi-cloud. I know you can use multi-cloud to prevent lock in, but I've never heard the term used to strictly mean that. Almost everyone I work with uses the term multi-cloud as "workloads on multiple cloud vendors."
  - ben_jones 10y ago
    My take is that "multi-cloud" means if one cloud goes down you don't have a service disruption. Or at least not a major one.
    - dmourati 10y ago
      RAID 1 vs RAID 0
- datums 10y ago
  +1 Multi Cloud , has meant aws || azure || gce || vmware
  - doubleplusgood 10y ago
    Thank you for sorting the operands, my OCD is satisfied
- pasbesoin 10y ago
  Trans-cloud, as opposed to multi-cloud?
  - 10y ago
MichaelBurge 10y ago
Seeing all those services hooked together gives me the willies. It sounds like a right PITA to debug, and chaining them together in serial for a single request multiplies the chance of an error even if each individual node is pretty stable. I guess it's okay for a demo though. They're probably not setting an example so much as trying to throw as many services together to show off the technique.
- zackmorris 10y ago
  Ya the only way I could ever see this being maintainable is if it's declarative. It takes a tremendous amount of boilerplate and configuration to perform what comes down to a one liner in any functional language or a formula in any spreadsheet. I think I would be more interested in a transform that converts a series of goroutines to lambda functions or something.
- jankedeen 10y ago
  You know, architecturally, at application level no one wants to deal with this but devs orchestrate nightmarish dependencies for deploys and hit 'endpoints' with aplomb in service architectures with only a playbook or data blueprint to follow. What's the point of fighting this? Let the kids play.
peterjlee 10y ago
Wouldn't this make your service less reliable since downtime in either cloud service can cause your service to be down?
- tyingq 10y ago
  Yep. Your new uptime is u1 x u2. Like .99 x .99 == .9801 It's raid 0, like striped disks.
thawab 10y ago
why would Google write a blog post about AWS lambda while they have cloud functions in beta?[1] why would i use google endpoint with AWS lambda instead of AWS API gateway? Going "multi cloud" using AWS lambda with AWS API gateway and Google cloud functions with endpoints is a blog post I'm interested to read. [1]https://cloud.google.com/functions/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/
- plandis 10y ago
  Seems like marketing to get people comfortable w/ Lambda and who are not going to switch to at least partially use Google Cloud?
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  I don't know about google cloud endpoints, but AWS gateway is an absolute nightmare. Configuration is awful and communicating errors from backend to client is a travesty. The lowest of the low hanging fruit to compete with AWS on. If GEP is remotely coherent it will be a clear win.
  - sheeshkebab 10y ago
    Yeah, API gateway was written as some hack it seems (or maybe they used some third party ESB or a soa framework and slapped cloudfront on it). All the swagger extensions to configure it, these 200 status codes for 500 errors - its all barely usable. Just take your own rest backend and put cloudfront on it and it you'll have more functionality and as much or more scalability and security, for an "api".
  - masuo 10y ago
    Were you using a Lambda integration? I found the following blog to be useful: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/error-handling-patterns-in-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/error-handling-patterns...
  - shivakrish 10y ago
    API Gateway PM here - Sorry to hear that. Would love to understand more details around the trouble you are having with API configurations. Please do reach out to us on our forums (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=199 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=199) so we can assist further.
techcofounder 10y ago
A (potentially) better approach to going multi-cloud is to use a CD tool like Spinnaker (spinnaker.io), which Google and Microsoft both support - and Netflix supports the integrations to AWS. (full disclosure: my startup, Armory.io, builds enterprise features on top of Spinnaker)
- alpb 10y ago
  You’re right, however this article is not talking about deployment tools. It's about setting up a serverless/lambda runtime pipeline between AWS and Google Cloud. As far as I know, Spinnaker does not do anything for your application runtime.
dimitar9 10y ago
this is just ridiculous
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jknz 10y ago
I am wondering if the future of multi-cloud lies in a third party entity managing real-time auctions for cloud services. 1. The developer sets up some requirements: number of instances, X amount of CPU power, Y amount of memory, Z amount of storage, B amount of bandwidth, or other characteristics. These requirements are sent to the third party. 2. Cloud vendors (the "bidders") receive the characteristics needed by the developer. Each of them bid by providing a price per hour for the given characteristics. 3. The bidder with the lowest price wins the auction, sends back credentials to start deployment 4. The developer can start the deploy with the infrastructure provided by the lowest bidder! All this may happen in less than one second, similarly to the auctions that happen when advertisers bid for displaying an ad when someone visits a webpage. This would need a massive standardization across cloud vendors, a system of penalties when the infrastructure provided by the bidder does not satisfy the characteristics, etc. This does not too far fetched to me. It also make it easier for new cloud providers to start selling, and lower prices for developers.
- sdflkd 10y ago
  I just saw this today: https://zeit.co/now#frequently-asked-questions https://zeit.co/now#frequently-asked-questions I haven't had enough time to read into it (nor do I have enough experience to evaluate), but it seems like what you're talking about?
- sunbreak 10y ago
  This is happening; Cloudsmash - Decentralized VPS Cloud Open To The Public https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1869603 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1869603
- nine_k 10y ago
  How about moving gigabytes of data that underlie the application? The egress cost is not that low. The access latency is utterly important. Raw computing power on small amounts of data has a limited applicability.
  - optimuspaul 10y ago
    This is one of the main reasons I think being cloud agnostic is a fools errand.
tyingq 10y ago
Why would you want the resulting uptime (u1 * u2) plus the added egress costs for cross cloud chatter? Cross cloud just seems like a bad idea all around. Edit: Maybe for a migration?
- discodave 10y ago
  Imagine somebody that wants to get the features of EC2 and the features of BigQuery or some of Googles ML stuff.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    I suppose. The downsides seem large enough that I would try and find alternative implementations such that I could do it in one cloud. Or ar least something that highly minimized cross provider dependencies and expensive data xfer. You're fighting the purpose built intention of the cloud to make it costly and clunky to move data out.
cdnsteve 10y ago
Flask app :)

173 points by blopeur 10y ago

iced0wn 10y ago

This is very wise advise to those on a certain "forest" cloud

pdog 10y ago

Why?

hobofan 10y ago
The first paragraph tells you why.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Sort of. "Spread Critical Workloads" is somewhat silly to me. The uptime will be lower than the worse of the two clouds, complexity higher, and cost higher due to egress for cloud to cloud. I do get the use case for actual multi-cloud, where there aren't cross cloud dependencies. This setup seems unwise though. Maybe as a short term migration pathway, or similar.
- pdog 10y ago
  No it doesn't.

rynop 10y ago

clickbait. I don't consider this multi-cloud

djhworld 10y ago

TL;DR - call services on GCP from your AWS lambda functions using Cloud Endpoints.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

doppenhe 10y ago

this doesn't solve the biggest problem with multi-cloud which is data egress though. Even if latency is acceptable you would get killed on data transfer for any significant amount of data. am I missing something?

toomuchtodo 10y ago
Nope, spot on. You either cache extremely aggressively with a CDN if you can, or otherwise you eat the data out charges for dynamic data.
al_james 10y ago
No exactly right. As Google seem to be getting more serious about attracting aws converts and dual cloud deployments (eg in built aws vpc peering) I wonder if they will offer some kind of cut price data transfer to aws networks. That would be an interesting move.
- thesandlord 10y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/ https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/ Ingress is free on all major clouds, but you still have to pay to get the data out. (I work on GCP)
tlarkworthy 10y ago
In my experience egress is not the biggest cost though, it's compute and storage. Are my workloads the outliers?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  For most people not running a CDN or Netflix I would also expect to see CPU or Ram the bottleneck.
  - _jal 10y ago
    Really depends on the business model. I modeled different deployment scenarios for a product for a small company, and egress pricing broke the economics for the ones involving cloud providers. (It was principally concerned with hires images.) That was some time back and I know pricing has come down, so that may be different now.

luhn 10y ago

This is not multi-cloud as it is commonly defined: Simultaneously handle workloads with multiple cloud vendors, to prevent lock-in to a single vendor. Rather, this is passing workloads between AWS and Google to leverage the advantages of each. A useful strategy, but the title is a bit misleading as it goes against the colloquial definition of multi-cloud.

zeroxfe 10y ago
> the colloquial definition of multi-cloud. I know you can use multi-cloud to prevent lock in, but I've never heard the term used to strictly mean that. Almost everyone I work with uses the term multi-cloud as "workloads on multiple cloud vendors."
- ben_jones 10y ago
  My take is that "multi-cloud" means if one cloud goes down you don't have a service disruption. Or at least not a major one.
  - dmourati 10y ago
    RAID 1 vs RAID 0
datums 10y ago
+1 Multi Cloud , has meant aws || azure || gce || vmware
- doubleplusgood 10y ago
  Thank you for sorting the operands, my OCD is satisfied
pasbesoin 10y ago
Trans-cloud, as opposed to multi-cloud?
- 10y ago

MichaelBurge 10y ago

Seeing all those services hooked together gives me the willies. It sounds like a right PITA to debug, and chaining them together in serial for a single request multiplies the chance of an error even if each individual node is pretty stable. I guess it's okay for a demo though. They're probably not setting an example so much as trying to throw as many services together to show off the technique.

zackmorris 10y ago
Ya the only way I could ever see this being maintainable is if it's declarative. It takes a tremendous amount of boilerplate and configuration to perform what comes down to a one liner in any functional language or a formula in any spreadsheet. I think I would be more interested in a transform that converts a series of goroutines to lambda functions or something.
jankedeen 10y ago
You know, architecturally, at application level no one wants to deal with this but devs orchestrate nightmarish dependencies for deploys and hit 'endpoints' with aplomb in service architectures with only a playbook or data blueprint to follow. What's the point of fighting this? Let the kids play.

peterjlee 10y ago

Wouldn't this make your service less reliable since downtime in either cloud service can cause your service to be down?

tyingq 10y ago
Yep. Your new uptime is u1 x u2. Like .99 x .99 == .9801 It's raid 0, like striped disks.

thawab 10y ago

why would Google write a blog post about AWS lambda while they have cloud functions in beta?[1] why would i use google endpoint with AWS lambda instead of AWS API gateway? Going "multi cloud" using AWS lambda with AWS API gateway and Google cloud functions with endpoints is a blog post I'm interested to read. [1]https://cloud.google.com/functions/ https://cloud.google.com/functions/

plandis 10y ago
Seems like marketing to get people comfortable w/ Lambda and who are not going to switch to at least partially use Google Cloud?
nothrabannosir 10y ago
I don't know about google cloud endpoints, but AWS gateway is an absolute nightmare. Configuration is awful and communicating errors from backend to client is a travesty. The lowest of the low hanging fruit to compete with AWS on. If GEP is remotely coherent it will be a clear win.
- sheeshkebab 10y ago
  Yeah, API gateway was written as some hack it seems (or maybe they used some third party ESB or a soa framework and slapped cloudfront on it). All the swagger extensions to configure it, these 200 status codes for 500 errors - its all barely usable. Just take your own rest backend and put cloudfront on it and it you'll have more functionality and as much or more scalability and security, for an "api".
- masuo 10y ago
  Were you using a Lambda integration? I found the following blog to be useful: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/error-handling-patterns-in-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/error-handling-patterns...
- shivakrish 10y ago
  API Gateway PM here - Sorry to hear that. Would love to understand more details around the trouble you are having with API configurations. Please do reach out to us on our forums (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=199 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/forum.jspa?forumID=199) so we can assist further.

techcofounder 10y ago

A (potentially) better approach to going multi-cloud is to use a CD tool like Spinnaker (spinnaker.io), which Google and Microsoft both support - and Netflix supports the integrations to AWS. (full disclosure: my startup, Armory.io, builds enterprise features on top of Spinnaker)

alpb 10y ago
You’re right, however this article is not talking about deployment tools. It's about setting up a serverless/lambda runtime pipeline between AWS and Google Cloud. As far as I know, Spinnaker does not do anything for your application runtime.

dimitar9 10y ago

this is just ridiculous

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jknz 10y ago

I am wondering if the future of multi-cloud lies in a third party entity managing real-time auctions for cloud services. 1. The developer sets up some requirements: number of instances, X amount of CPU power, Y amount of memory, Z amount of storage, B amount of bandwidth, or other characteristics. These requirements are sent to the third party. 2. Cloud vendors (the "bidders") receive the characteristics needed by the developer. Each of them bid by providing a price per hour for the given characteristics. 3. The bidder with the lowest price wins the auction, sends back credentials to start deployment 4. The developer can start the deploy with the infrastructure provided by the lowest bidder! All this may happen in less than one second, similarly to the auctions that happen when advertisers bid for displaying an ad when someone visits a webpage. This would need a massive standardization across cloud vendors, a system of penalties when the infrastructure provided by the bidder does not satisfy the characteristics, etc. This does not too far fetched to me. It also make it easier for new cloud providers to start selling, and lower prices for developers.

sdflkd 10y ago
I just saw this today: https://zeit.co/now#frequently-asked-questions https://zeit.co/now#frequently-asked-questions I haven't had enough time to read into it (nor do I have enough experience to evaluate), but it seems like what you're talking about?
sunbreak 10y ago
This is happening; Cloudsmash - Decentralized VPS Cloud Open To The Public https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1869603 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1869603
nine_k 10y ago
How about moving gigabytes of data that underlie the application? The egress cost is not that low. The access latency is utterly important. Raw computing power on small amounts of data has a limited applicability.
- optimuspaul 10y ago
  This is one of the main reasons I think being cloud agnostic is a fools errand.

tyingq 10y ago

Why would you want the resulting uptime (u1 * u2) plus the added egress costs for cross cloud chatter? Cross cloud just seems like a bad idea all around. Edit: Maybe for a migration?

discodave 10y ago
Imagine somebody that wants to get the features of EC2 and the features of BigQuery or some of Googles ML stuff.
- tyingq 10y ago
  I suppose. The downsides seem large enough that I would try and find alternative implementations such that I could do it in one cloud. Or ar least something that highly minimized cross provider dependencies and expensive data xfer. You're fighting the purpose built intention of the cloud to make it costly and clunky to move data out.

cdnsteve 10y ago

Flask app :)