5 ms·

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

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 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
In my experience egress is not the biggest cost though, it's compute and storage. Are my workloads the outliers?
- brianwawok 9y ago
  For most people not running a CDN or Netflix I would also expect to see CPU or Ram the bottleneck.
  - _jal 9y 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.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      > It was principally concerned with hires images That sounds kinda like the CDN example in my case :) I guess you could amend it to say "any kind of large media files" But even if your business does do a lot with huge media files... no reason you can't do 95% of your business on AWS or GCE, and then just offload the giant file download piece to some unlimited bandwidth server you rent.
c0achmcguirk 9y ago
Exactly. Even moving data between services in AWS or Azure can become costly if you aren't managing it properly. Moving that data to another cloud provider (images and video) would be a tough sell considering that both AWS and Azure have similar services already.
numbsafari 9y ago
I think you're right: the headline on the article is bad/awkward in terms of how most people use multi-cloud. I get the impression that Google uses this term internally very differently. I also think you're right that they are leaving out the not insignificant detail about egress pricing. In the context of this article, I think what they are pitching is the idea that, if you are already running services on AWS, you can still leverage some of the value-added service provided by GCP (e.g., their Vision API) by fronting them with Google Cloud Functions. So, for example, let's say you built, and are running, an ecommerce platform on AWS. Now you'd like to leverage some of Google's Vision services to make "visual recommendations of related products". You already let customers upload product images via S3. Now you can have a Lambda function forward that image to a GCP CloudFunction, have it get processed by your visual recommender system, and spit back out a list of SKUs that have a visually similar image. I think the goal is to convince companies that you don't have to put all your eggs in one basket in terms of capabilities, rather than convince them to have availability/capacity between multiple clouds (which how I think most people would interpret the headline).

toomuchtodo 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago

In my experience egress is not the biggest cost though, it's compute and storage. Are my workloads the outliers?

brianwawok 9y ago
For most people not running a CDN or Netflix I would also expect to see CPU or Ram the bottleneck.
- _jal 9y 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.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    > It was principally concerned with hires images That sounds kinda like the CDN example in my case :) I guess you could amend it to say "any kind of large media files" But even if your business does do a lot with huge media files... no reason you can't do 95% of your business on AWS or GCE, and then just offload the giant file download piece to some unlimited bandwidth server you rent.

c0achmcguirk 9y ago

Exactly. Even moving data between services in AWS or Azure can become costly if you aren't managing it properly. Moving that data to another cloud provider (images and video) would be a tough sell considering that both AWS and Azure have similar services already.

numbsafari 9y ago

I think you're right: the headline on the article is bad/awkward in terms of how most people use multi-cloud. I get the impression that Google uses this term internally very differently. I also think you're right that they are leaving out the not insignificant detail about egress pricing. In the context of this article, I think what they are pitching is the idea that, if you are already running services on AWS, you can still leverage some of the value-added service provided by GCP (e.g., their Vision API) by fronting them with Google Cloud Functions. So, for example, let's say you built, and are running, an ecommerce platform on AWS. Now you'd like to leverage some of Google's Vision services to make "visual recommendations of related products". You already let customers upload product images via S3. Now you can have a Lambda function forward that image to a GCP CloudFunction, have it get processed by your visual recommender system, and spit back out a list of SKUs that have a visually similar image. I think the goal is to convince companies that you don't have to put all your eggs in one basket in terms of capabilities, rather than convince them to have availability/capacity between multiple clouds (which how I think most people would interpret the headline).