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Google Compute Engine makes VPC networking so much easier than AWS. They automatically create solid defaults with a /20 subnet per region (4096 addresses) which

Google Compute Engine makes VPC networking so much easier than AWS. They automatically create solid defaults with a /20 subnet per region (4096 addresses) which can all communicate with each other privately. No need to setup VPN's for cross region private communication or deal with NAT instances or internet gateways. Private traffic is always private. If you want to expose a VM just attach an IP address (static or ephemeral). Also a cool trick is GCE instance names automatically get mapped in your VPC DNS. If you create an instance named web1, all other instances should be able to ping web1 out of the box with no additional configuration. I can't stress enough how much better GCE is than AWS in terms of sane defaults, user experience, performance and cost.

skywhopper 9y ago
GCE does have a huge benefit in having been built several years after AWS organically grew into a set of services that now in retrospect seem to have obvious defaults. From my very limited experience with GCE, it seems to have its own oddities that make managing it from an organizational level weirdly difficult, but I can't argue about the details in a well-informed manner. I will say that while the lack of dead-stupid cross-region VPC peering is annoying in AWS, having talked to some of their engineers about the issue, it seems that their reluctance to make global features dead-simple stems from hard experience of their own in the risks of global interdependencies and the failure conditions that can result. But to your specific details, I'm curious about the "private traffic stays private" and "no NATs required". So does GCE provide implicit NAT, or does it just work how AWS public subnets work (ie, give it an IP and it's on the Internet, don't give it one and it isn't)?
- xref 9y ago
  From my experience NATs and gateways are still required on GCP if you want your private subnet servers to be able to, say, yum update
- user5994461 9y ago
  >>> having talked to some of their engineers about the issue, it seems that their reluctance to make global features dead-simple stems from hard experience of their own in the risks of global interdependencies and the failure conditions that can result. Poor excuses. "It's too hard". It is very hard to make global services. Google was the first to beat the technology long before every one else. Most of their cloud services are worldwide. They proved that it's possible. Having spent much time in AWS. It seems the technology that runs it is exclusively mono region. All regions are segregated and independent, like a full AWS clone. There are no service that span regions. AWS is simply not global. IMO it hints that AWS does not have the technology.
  - oblio 9y ago
    The real question is: is there enough market demand for global services? I know on paper, yeah, there is, but how many can pay for it? And even if they're big enough to pay for it, how many are willing to put their core services (if you're offering global services, they're most likely your core services) in the same basket... controlled by a huge company who might be one of your competitors? I guess many of the companies building a service on the global scale would want to have that expertise in-house.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      >>> The real question is: is there enough market demand for global services? I know on paper, yeah, there is, but how many can pay for it? Yes. The world is full of international companies and services that span across the globe. They have money to pay whatever they want. The issue, so far, has only been the tech. Let's say one makes a random app coupled with a database, say mysql and php => mysql doesn't work across datacenters, It's not going worldwide. End of story. There are very few systems than can span across datacenters. Unless a project was explicitly architectured for it, it probably can't because of it's technical choices. Google is the evolution. All the tech is worldwide. You develop as usual and it comes out of the box.
      - oblio 9y ago
        Ok... but what about lock-in? I use Google's magical pixie dust, great. Then at some point I want to get out. With MySQL I can do that. I can run it on 1 machine, I can cluster it to a reasonably large scale. Can I run Google's magic machine on my own server(s)? Not really...
        user5994461 9y ago
        It's not a "lock in", not more than deciding to use MySQL or any other product. Please call that a design choice or a partnership. You want to get out, you download your database data and move back to AWS pixie dust or self-hosted pixie dust. Most services are pretty standard, it's not magic. There are comparable equivalents. The most advanced capabilities will only come with commercial products that are a million dollars (EMC, VmWare, F5, Akamai). P.S. MySQL got took over by Oracle. Nothing is forever ;)
ciguy 9y ago
It's not as user friendly, but if you actually understand the complexities of VPC networking AWS allows a lot more flexibility with routing and (potentially) network level security than GCE. In general networking/ops guys love AWS because they can set it up exactly how they want, while developers who just want something working out of the box love GCE. AWS really requires a management layer like Terraform in order to be maintainable though. Trying to manage all the routing and connections by hand for more than a single VPC is hellish. Some GCE services are just not up to par yet as well. Their CloudSQL service for instance is a pretty horrible mess right now, while RDS is rock solid (I do cloud architecture and consulting so I have a pretty wide swath of clients on both services to compare with).
- nodesocket 9y ago
  GCE allows custom VPC setup, subnets, routing tables, and VPN's. They also have easy to setup cross project VPC connects and their firewall rules with tagging is superior to security groups. I also find your comment arrogant and misguided as I also run a US based ops and DevOps consulting company: > but if you actually understand the complexities of VPC networking AWS allows a lot more flexibility with routing and (potentially) network level security than GCE

skywhopper 9y ago

GCE does have a huge benefit in having been built several years after AWS organically grew into a set of services that now in retrospect seem to have obvious defaults. From my very limited experience with GCE, it seems to have its own oddities that make managing it from an organizational level weirdly difficult, but I can't argue about the details in a well-informed manner. I will say that while the lack of dead-stupid cross-region VPC peering is annoying in AWS, having talked to some of their engineers about the issue, it seems that their reluctance to make global features dead-simple stems from hard experience of their own in the risks of global interdependencies and the failure conditions that can result. But to your specific details, I'm curious about the "private traffic stays private" and "no NATs required". So does GCE provide implicit NAT, or does it just work how AWS public subnets work (ie, give it an IP and it's on the Internet, don't give it one and it isn't)?

xref 9y ago
From my experience NATs and gateways are still required on GCP if you want your private subnet servers to be able to, say, yum update
user5994461 9y ago
>>> having talked to some of their engineers about the issue, it seems that their reluctance to make global features dead-simple stems from hard experience of their own in the risks of global interdependencies and the failure conditions that can result. Poor excuses. "It's too hard". It is very hard to make global services. Google was the first to beat the technology long before every one else. Most of their cloud services are worldwide. They proved that it's possible. Having spent much time in AWS. It seems the technology that runs it is exclusively mono region. All regions are segregated and independent, like a full AWS clone. There are no service that span regions. AWS is simply not global. IMO it hints that AWS does not have the technology.
- oblio 9y ago
  The real question is: is there enough market demand for global services? I know on paper, yeah, there is, but how many can pay for it? And even if they're big enough to pay for it, how many are willing to put their core services (if you're offering global services, they're most likely your core services) in the same basket... controlled by a huge company who might be one of your competitors? I guess many of the companies building a service on the global scale would want to have that expertise in-house.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    >>> The real question is: is there enough market demand for global services? I know on paper, yeah, there is, but how many can pay for it? Yes. The world is full of international companies and services that span across the globe. They have money to pay whatever they want. The issue, so far, has only been the tech. Let's say one makes a random app coupled with a database, say mysql and php => mysql doesn't work across datacenters, It's not going worldwide. End of story. There are very few systems than can span across datacenters. Unless a project was explicitly architectured for it, it probably can't because of it's technical choices. Google is the evolution. All the tech is worldwide. You develop as usual and it comes out of the box.
    - oblio 9y ago
      Ok... but what about lock-in? I use Google's magical pixie dust, great. Then at some point I want to get out. With MySQL I can do that. I can run it on 1 machine, I can cluster it to a reasonably large scale. Can I run Google's magic machine on my own server(s)? Not really...
      - user5994461 9y ago
        It's not a "lock in", not more than deciding to use MySQL or any other product. Please call that a design choice or a partnership. You want to get out, you download your database data and move back to AWS pixie dust or self-hosted pixie dust. Most services are pretty standard, it's not magic. There are comparable equivalents. The most advanced capabilities will only come with commercial products that are a million dollars (EMC, VmWare, F5, Akamai). P.S. MySQL got took over by Oracle. Nothing is forever ;)

ciguy 9y ago

It's not as user friendly, but if you actually understand the complexities of VPC networking AWS allows a lot more flexibility with routing and (potentially) network level security than GCE. In general networking/ops guys love AWS because they can set it up exactly how they want, while developers who just want something working out of the box love GCE. AWS really requires a management layer like Terraform in order to be maintainable though. Trying to manage all the routing and connections by hand for more than a single VPC is hellish. Some GCE services are just not up to par yet as well. Their CloudSQL service for instance is a pretty horrible mess right now, while RDS is rock solid (I do cloud architecture and consulting so I have a pretty wide swath of clients on both services to compare with).

nodesocket 9y ago
GCE allows custom VPC setup, subnets, routing tables, and VPN's. They also have easy to setup cross project VPC connects and their firewall rules with tagging is superior to security groups. I also find your comment arrogant and misguided as I also run a US based ops and DevOps consulting company: > but if you actually understand the complexities of VPC networking AWS allows a lot more flexibility with routing and (potentially) network level security than GCE