5 ms·

Goodbye Google Cloud, Hello Digital Ocean

87 points by mluggy 9y ago

bauerd 9y ago
>What has gone wrong with GCP? It was trying to be AWS. Too complex and feature-rich instead of simple and feature-complete. Yeah no. GCP is a direct competitor to AWS, so of course Google needs (at least partly) to match Amazon's product lineup. The argument of this post boils down to "GCP should be like DO", i.e. less services and a slicker UI, but Google won't win over AWS customers with that.
- mluggy 9y ago
  I wasn't focusing on product lineup. GCP is clearly superior to DO and AWS even more. I was just offering an alternative to someone primarily using compute. It seems AWS LightSail understood this too: https://amazonlightsail.com/ https://amazonlightsail.com/
- laumars 9y ago
  Indeed. Further to that, there are already a lot of DO-like hosting platforms out there but fewer AWS-like solutions targeting enterprise. So why would Google target a crowded market when they have the resources to target enterprise. Also to offer my own anecdotal experiences using DO. I find it highly inflexible when I need to do anything more granular. Sure it's easy for deploying a standard build, but anything that falls slightly outside of DO's remit quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth. Where as AWS (and similar) might intimidate new comers with it's scale and complexity but that flexibility can also be a godsend.
FBISurveillance 9y ago
More of a rant. There's time you need more flexibility. I'm serving 1.2MM requests per second from 3 GCP regions, managing instances and GKE clusters with terraform, and I cannot see how could I possibly set that up in a resilient fashion with DigitalOcean. I think DO is perfect for certain scale apps. You usually care about UI things mostly when you spin up couple servers; but when you operate hundreds of machines you need automation. GCP has it's quirks, e.g. * 130k connections/core limit due to conntrack, * lower networking throughput compared to AWS (16Gbps on GCP vs 25Gbps on AWS), * no support for enhanced networking (haven't tested recent Andromeda 2.1 yet, though) * no way to attach more than 8 local SSDs (arguably a good thing) * etc So does AWS, so does DO and you have to pick what's best for your project. One thing I like in general here is competition that makes all of those services better. EDIT: Fix conntrack typo
- mluggy 9y ago
  You do get additional 2-3TB per instance which alone is a couple hundred $$ in bandwidth savings. Will it cover the price of these extra instances? Obviously if you need 8 SSDs DO isn't for you. But the real question is - could GCP be more lean back and still provide the same level of service? I think so.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Anyone who count in a unit less than kilo dollar is a waste of time for AWS/Google. A big business doesn't care about "hundreds of dollars" of savings, it's like cents.
- throwawayReply 9y ago
  What do you do that serves 1.2mm requests / second? I don't disbelieve you, I'm just wondering what type of site that is since English Wikipedia is several orders of magnitude lower than that.
  - FBISurveillance 9y ago
    Ads, one of the most shitshow industries in the world.
    - FBISurveillance 9y ago
      Forgot to add a joke: you can judge from my nickname! :-)
    - piva00 9y ago
      Can add to that, I worked for a few months in a small mobile ad network and the throughput of that was insane for the size of the company. Also a shitshow of a company on many levels.
    - ericnyamu 9y ago
      1.2m request per sec of ads looks like adblock isnt working .
sitepodmatt 9y ago
AWS, Azure and GCP instances are completely different to Linode, DO, Vultr, etc... With the first three you get dependable performance characteristics with minimal variation (excluding t* EC2), this is the exact thing you need to do reliable horizontal scaling. Linode and Vultr and DigitalOcean etc.. are great for the price point but if I'm CPU bound and about to scale the identical service to N boxes then it's a poor choice. As someone pointed out you have Lightsail if you want Linode/DO from AWS. 3.2.1... lets have cliche AWS/GCP/Azure is ridiculously expensive based on some undefined VPS memory/cpu details, hey virtual core!, and let's not forget the usual HE.net / Cogent / Level3 quote of 10Gig for $2000 and work out real bandwidth from there.. :rolleyes:
- mluggy 9y ago
  didn't get your last remark re bandwidth. If 1TB alone costs $90 at both GCP/AWS, how is 3TB + 2 CPU instance for $20 is a poor choice?
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of tenants is exponentially more than physical cores), so I maintain if your CPU bound and horizontal scaling these are poor choices. The cost of provisioning high performance networking is very real, Linode/DO/Vultr don't expect 98% of their customers to use anything close to 1TB and this nicely fit with the idea that they are poor choice for horizontal scaling - hence why AWS Lightsail isn't a threat to main cloud offerings. If you're just getting start and no where near the limit of single node then fine, I even use Linode for a few clients myself "Bandwidth: 39GB Used, 13961GB Remaining, 14000GB Quota ".
    - Elect2 9y ago
      Did you know that DigitalOcean provides "High CPU" droplets?
dna_polymerase 9y ago
Good luck with DO, the last time I checked they still shut down your instances as you hit sustained 300Mbps incoming traffic [0]. Could never work with a service that weak on the policy side. Also remember the disaster with surge [1]. [0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw... [1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj35w/nra-complaint-takes-down-38000-websites https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj35w/nra-compla...
grabcocque 9y ago
This is just an ad. FFS Hacker News, why is this front page?
halayli 9y ago
So he basically uses ec2 equivalent service and is complaining about the existence of other services.
- mluggy 9y ago
  yes. except DO bandwidth is $0.006 instead of $0.09/GB. am I paying extra for the sole existence of other services?
  - laumars 9y ago
    The high bandwidth is because with cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud you'd be serving most traffic from either object storage (like S3) or their CDN. Both of which are in the same region as the DO bandwidth figure you quoted. This not only reduces your compute bandwidth costs but also drastically improves your application performance when under load (and as an added bonus you also reduce your compute CPU costs since they're not serving up static content). I've found even some relatively simple infrastructures (2x web servers, 1x database server + some extra caching services), AWS actually worked out cheaper than Digital Ocean. The problem is you'd have to approach hosting on platforms like AWS slightly differently than you'd approach hosting on the likes of Digital Ocean. But once you start scaling your application, you'll soon find that you'll want to adopt the aforementioned topology anyway regardless of arguments about AWS/Google/etc vs Digital Ocean.
    - mluggy 9y ago
      S3 is $0.023/GB (still x4 higher), plus $0.004 per 10K requests CloudFront is $0.085/GB, plus $0.0075-$0.01 per 10K requests) GCP is $0.08-0.12/GB (same for all services), plus $5 per 1M requests) And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets? 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends)
      - laumars 9y ago
        > And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets? It obviously depends on the application but generally you'd expect that to be the case for web sites (ie not services that act only as an API backend). > 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends) I don't know your business so you might be transferring more dynamic data rather than static but your argument here doesn't help explain your business as you're mixing metaphors. eg most of our requests are dynamic as well but JSON APIs will generally return smaller chunks of data compared to an image. So in real bandwidth terms on our application, more data is transferred for static content rather than dynamic. None of the static content touches our web servers though. In fact a fair amount of the dynamic content doesn't either since a lot of that isn't user specific so is served from caching services. If you don't mind me asking, how much bandwidth you transfer each month? Even taking the above into account, our bandwidth costs (which is nothing compared to when we self-hosted) gets dwarfed by our computing costs (VMs and DB). By the way, how are you finding node.js for your workload? I find it a weird choice if 99% of your requests are dynamic based on bottlenecks I've experienced when deploying test systems on it. But I ask about your experiences because I've not used node.js for anything at scale (ie just a few thousand requests a second).
doh 9y ago
I think this is called maturity. GCP finally knows who the target customer is, and they're building features for them. DO has really nice and simple UI, but try to spin 5,000 servers and you will see what a hot mess it is. GCP shines at a very large scale. For us, what makes the difference, is the spending predictability and massive discounts coming from running preemptible servers or simply committing to certain usage. GCP is not as service rich as AWS, but most of the offered services are capable of withstanding incredible loads. In our case, while running on tens of thousands of mostly preemptible servers[0], we couldn't pull this off anywhere else (trust me, we've tried). It's great to know which service works for your loads and make the best of it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  +1 you said what I was going to say. GCP probably doesn’t want the business of small web sites and portals. I think that under Diane Green they have a clear vision of who their target (large/huge) customer base should be and what they need to do to attract those customers. For small projects, especially when I am paying the bills, it is difficult to beat OVH and DigitalOcean on costs. That said, GCP is still my favorite provider, largely because using GCP makes me a little nostalgic for the time I worked as a contractor at Google - really enjoyed their infrastructure.
  - doh 9y ago
    I hear you. Miss most of the tools and infrastructure every day since I left. I was ecstatic when they made PubSub available to everyone. Wish they would expose more of the internal services, especially Colossus, Dremel, Borg, ...
    - dekhn 9y ago
      dremel = bigquery, borg = GKE.
      - doh 9y ago
tzury 9y ago
“Goodbye cloud, hello nice UI for VPS hosting”. If Google’s own premium speedy network, anycast IP, global load balancing and security features bring no benefit to your web operations, then your math might be right. If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google? F/W default “Everything within a project should allowed”? Sorry, but no way. Not familiar with other DO capabilities, but cloud platform is not just about a VPS available throu REST API, it is way far beyond.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google? The same options every business that needed them has done for decades? Renting dedicated servers én masse, colocating, or running own datacenters? And doing this in multiple countries? What I'd suggest for a start is renting dedicated servers or colocating in a few places (EU-Central, US east, US west), and running on that. Dedicated servers, even with having to maintain them, are always cheaper than GCP. Even more so is the network traffic. I've started with dedicated servers with a few European hosters myself where I'd be able to get servers and traffic for 40€ a month that would have cost me upwards of 14'000€ a month with GCP, AWS or Azure (180TB+ traffic per month, I don't have the exact numbers again, but I used each service's cost calculator for this). Sure, if I want high quality networking, I'd have to pay another 360€ per month extra with these hosters, but that's still cheap enough that it means I can basically run a 180TB/month serving service on a hobbyists budget.
  - tzury 9y ago
    Dedicated servers == constanct cost. Many cases, you reach peak times for several hours per week/day. With GCP scale up and super fast, and when done, tearing down and saving money. Also, from my experience, when you reach a certain level of operations, you discuss with Google sales team and you get a significant discount for bandwidth.
    - sokoloff 9y ago
ridruejo 9y ago
If you want a (free) digital-ocean like interface on top of GCP checkout our Bitnami launchpad https://google.bitnami.com https://google.bitnami.com
euph0ria 9y ago
We were also impressed with DO's GUI and easy of use. We setup a few monitor servers on their network to measure uptime, latency, packet loss and similar metrics since we deal with audio streaming over UDP. Suffice it to say, it was a mess. So many micro-timeouts and tons of packet loss in small bursts. For prototypes and small projects dealing mainly in TCP and if uptime is not really important then DO is great. For us, we stick to AWS / GCP for the bulk of our load including dev/testing etc as we want to have the environment as similar to prod as possible.
radarsat1 9y ago
Huh. I have zero experience with using cloud services, but I'm a bit surprised by the complexity of both of those UIs. I always assumed it was way simpler than that. Like, I thought it was as simple as using a command-line tool, like "docker run <myprogram>" but "cloud run.." As there any cloud services like that? Where you just specify your environment and CPU features you need etc from a single console command?
- gabemart 9y ago
  You could script something like this pretty simply with the DO api, and there might well be programs out there already that operate in a similar way. My own needs are modest, but I have provisioning scripts that create and destroy DO droplets on-the-fly from the command line.
  - mluggy 9y ago
    guys use ansible. it care less about who's the cloud provider and uses ssh (agent-less configuration).
- Permagate 9y ago
  You could spin up a server with just one AWS CLI command (and most likely google console, but I have no experience with it). As you said, just specify the server spec in the command option. Though, AWS CLI is very verbose with their commands, imo. Anything more complex, such as weaving several server under one VPC with a load balancer and routing configuration, I'd recommend checking out terraform. It also supports multiple cloud providers.
  - kthejoker2 9y ago
    There's also an Azure CLI. You can spin up a Docker Container in one line: az container create --name mycontainer --image microsoft/aci-helloworld --resource-group myResourceGroup --ip-address public --ports 80
- thesandlord 9y ago
  What you are probably looking for is a PaaS (App Engine, Heroku, Zeit Now, etc) not IaaS On GCP you can run: gcloud app deploy And it will deploy your app on App Engine, with auto-scaling built in. The thing is, that is just the start. Pretty soon you will need databases, caching, versions, etc, etc. (I work for Google Cloud)
gabemart 9y ago
I'm a bit surprised by the replies talking about serving millions of requests a second, or needing ultra-consistent packet latency. Perhaps most of the HN demo is working for companies that operate at that scale. But the OP is talking about running dozens of servers, not hundreds or thousands. My own modest apps have held up to the traffic from being #1 on reddit and not fallen over, never been null routed or nerfed by DO, and served hundreds of millions of requests and hundreds of TBs of data. I have nothing but good things to say about DO. I have no experience running apps at the "millions of requests a second" scale, and I'm willing to accept DO might be a bad choice at that level. But what percentage of apps will ever reach that scale?
- user5994461 9y ago
  >>> I'm a bit surprised by the replies talking about serving millions of requests a second, or needing ultra-consistent packet latency. Perhaps most of the HN demo is working for companies that operate at that scale. There is a high concentration of serious professionals on HN running world class operations. There is also a large amount of startup and single man operations who would hate to write a $100 check. The thing is, one can only be on one side. Then the other side has nothing valuable to say to you, all their advice is misplaced. So, to answer your question. It's stupid to ask what apps will reach a large scale. You're either at large scale already or you are not. Obviously, the article is only intended for small scale operations (actually, the entire article is just a generic ad, digitalocean has a nice affiliate program).
dividuum 9y ago
> Private network is available, unmetered. It's not private. It's internal and shared with all other customers at the same data center location. I wouldn't be surprise if this misleading marketing resulted in lots of accidentally exposes services.
nickjj 9y ago
Let's not forget how great DO's support is too. Even if you're only operating at 1x $5/month droplet (their lowest instance type), you'll still get top grade email support included with your plan. Getting a response in a few hours is almost guaranteed and often times they'll even help you debug problems that go beyond the scope of their infrastructure. Compare that to something like AWS which charge you an extra $29/month minimum (or 3% of your AWS bill) to speak to an entry level support person through email.
Elect2 9y ago
The only thing that vps attracted me is the pricing of bandwidth.

87 points by mluggy 9y ago

>What has gone wrong with GCP? It was trying to be AWS. Too complex and feature-rich instead of simple and feature-complete. Yeah no. GCP is a direct competitor to AWS, so of course Google needs (at least partly) to match Amazon's product lineup. The argument of this post boils down to "GCP should be like DO", i.e. less services and a slicker UI, but Google won't win over AWS customers with that.

mluggy 9y ago
I wasn't focusing on product lineup. GCP is clearly superior to DO and AWS even more. I was just offering an alternative to someone primarily using compute. It seems AWS LightSail understood this too: https://amazonlightsail.com/ https://amazonlightsail.com/
laumars 9y ago
Indeed. Further to that, there are already a lot of DO-like hosting platforms out there but fewer AWS-like solutions targeting enterprise. So why would Google target a crowded market when they have the resources to target enterprise. Also to offer my own anecdotal experiences using DO. I find it highly inflexible when I need to do anything more granular. Sure it's easy for deploying a standard build, but anything that falls slightly outside of DO's remit quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth. Where as AWS (and similar) might intimidate new comers with it's scale and complexity but that flexibility can also be a godsend.

FBISurveillance 9y ago

More of a rant. There's time you need more flexibility. I'm serving 1.2MM requests per second from 3 GCP regions, managing instances and GKE clusters with terraform, and I cannot see how could I possibly set that up in a resilient fashion with DigitalOcean. I think DO is perfect for certain scale apps. You usually care about UI things mostly when you spin up couple servers; but when you operate hundreds of machines you need automation. GCP has it's quirks, e.g. * 130k connections/core limit due to conntrack, * lower networking throughput compared to AWS (16Gbps on GCP vs 25Gbps on AWS), * no support for enhanced networking (haven't tested recent Andromeda 2.1 yet, though) * no way to attach more than 8 local SSDs (arguably a good thing) * etc So does AWS, so does DO and you have to pick what's best for your project. One thing I like in general here is competition that makes all of those services better. EDIT: Fix conntrack typo

mluggy 9y ago
You do get additional 2-3TB per instance which alone is a couple hundred $$ in bandwidth savings. Will it cover the price of these extra instances? Obviously if you need 8 SSDs DO isn't for you. But the real question is - could GCP be more lean back and still provide the same level of service? I think so.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Anyone who count in a unit less than kilo dollar is a waste of time for AWS/Google. A big business doesn't care about "hundreds of dollars" of savings, it's like cents.
throwawayReply 9y ago
What do you do that serves 1.2mm requests / second? I don't disbelieve you, I'm just wondering what type of site that is since English Wikipedia is several orders of magnitude lower than that.
- FBISurveillance 9y ago
  Ads, one of the most shitshow industries in the world.
  - FBISurveillance 9y ago
    Forgot to add a joke: you can judge from my nickname! :-)
  - piva00 9y ago
    Can add to that, I worked for a few months in a small mobile ad network and the throughput of that was insane for the size of the company. Also a shitshow of a company on many levels.
  - ericnyamu 9y ago
    1.2m request per sec of ads looks like adblock isnt working .

sitepodmatt 9y ago

AWS, Azure and GCP instances are completely different to Linode, DO, Vultr, etc... With the first three you get dependable performance characteristics with minimal variation (excluding t* EC2), this is the exact thing you need to do reliable horizontal scaling. Linode and Vultr and DigitalOcean etc.. are great for the price point but if I'm CPU bound and about to scale the identical service to N boxes then it's a poor choice. As someone pointed out you have Lightsail if you want Linode/DO from AWS. 3.2.1... lets have cliche AWS/GCP/Azure is ridiculously expensive based on some undefined VPS memory/cpu details, hey virtual core!, and let's not forget the usual HE.net / Cogent / Level3 quote of 10Gig for $2000 and work out real bandwidth from there.. :rolleyes:

mluggy 9y ago
didn't get your last remark re bandwidth. If 1TB alone costs $90 at both GCP/AWS, how is 3TB + 2 CPU instance for $20 is a poor choice?
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  You're getting 2 (or X) virtual cores - which means absolutely nothing and can vary from minute to mintue / hour to hour - Linode was even giving 8 virtual cores with the cheapest plan 2/3 years ago. Virtual cores on Linode/DO/Vultr are shared/contended, basically undefined in terms of lower bound performance - you are at the mercy of other tenants - and there's a lot more tenants in the building too (where number of tenants is exponentially more than physical cores), so I maintain if your CPU bound and horizontal scaling these are poor choices. The cost of provisioning high performance networking is very real, Linode/DO/Vultr don't expect 98% of their customers to use anything close to 1TB and this nicely fit with the idea that they are poor choice for horizontal scaling - hence why AWS Lightsail isn't a threat to main cloud offerings. If you're just getting start and no where near the limit of single node then fine, I even use Linode for a few clients myself "Bandwidth: 39GB Used, 13961GB Remaining, 14000GB Quota ".
  - Elect2 9y ago
    Did you know that DigitalOcean provides "High CPU" droplets?

dna_polymerase 9y ago

Good luck with DO, the last time I checked they still shut down your instances as you hit sustained 300Mbps incoming traffic [0]. Could never work with a service that weak on the policy side. Also remember the disaster with surge [1]. [0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandwidth-what-will-happen https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/extra-bandw... [1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj35w/nra-complaint-takes-down-38000-websites https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj35w/nra-compla...

grabcocque 9y ago

This is just an ad. FFS Hacker News, why is this front page?

halayli 9y ago

So he basically uses ec2 equivalent service and is complaining about the existence of other services.

mluggy 9y ago
yes. except DO bandwidth is $0.006 instead of $0.09/GB. am I paying extra for the sole existence of other services?
- laumars 9y ago
  The high bandwidth is because with cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud you'd be serving most traffic from either object storage (like S3) or their CDN. Both of which are in the same region as the DO bandwidth figure you quoted. This not only reduces your compute bandwidth costs but also drastically improves your application performance when under load (and as an added bonus you also reduce your compute CPU costs since they're not serving up static content). I've found even some relatively simple infrastructures (2x web servers, 1x database server + some extra caching services), AWS actually worked out cheaper than Digital Ocean. The problem is you'd have to approach hosting on platforms like AWS slightly differently than you'd approach hosting on the likes of Digital Ocean. But once you start scaling your application, you'll soon find that you'll want to adopt the aforementioned topology anyway regardless of arguments about AWS/Google/etc vs Digital Ocean.
  - mluggy 9y ago
    S3 is $0.023/GB (still x4 higher), plus $0.004 per 10K requests CloudFront is $0.085/GB, plus $0.0075-$0.01 per 10K requests) GCP is $0.08-0.12/GB (same for all services), plus $5 per 1M requests) And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets? 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends)
    - laumars 9y ago
      > And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets? It obviously depends on the application but generally you'd expect that to be the case for web sites (ie not services that act only as an API backend). > 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends) I don't know your business so you might be transferring more dynamic data rather than static but your argument here doesn't help explain your business as you're mixing metaphors. eg most of our requests are dynamic as well but JSON APIs will generally return smaller chunks of data compared to an image. So in real bandwidth terms on our application, more data is transferred for static content rather than dynamic. None of the static content touches our web servers though. In fact a fair amount of the dynamic content doesn't either since a lot of that isn't user specific so is served from caching services. If you don't mind me asking, how much bandwidth you transfer each month? Even taking the above into account, our bandwidth costs (which is nothing compared to when we self-hosted) gets dwarfed by our computing costs (VMs and DB). By the way, how are you finding node.js for your workload? I find it a weird choice if 99% of your requests are dynamic based on bottlenecks I've experienced when deploying test systems on it. But I ask about your experiences because I've not used node.js for anything at scale (ie just a few thousand requests a second).

doh 9y ago

I think this is called maturity. GCP finally knows who the target customer is, and they're building features for them. DO has really nice and simple UI, but try to spin 5,000 servers and you will see what a hot mess it is. GCP shines at a very large scale. For us, what makes the difference, is the spending predictability and massive discounts coming from running preemptible servers or simply committing to certain usage. GCP is not as service rich as AWS, but most of the offered services are capable of withstanding incredible loads. In our case, while running on tens of thousands of mostly preemptible servers[0], we couldn't pull this off anywhere else (trust me, we've tried). It's great to know which service works for your loads and make the best of it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726224

mark_l_watson 9y ago
+1 you said what I was going to say. GCP probably doesn’t want the business of small web sites and portals. I think that under Diane Green they have a clear vision of who their target (large/huge) customer base should be and what they need to do to attract those customers. For small projects, especially when I am paying the bills, it is difficult to beat OVH and DigitalOcean on costs. That said, GCP is still my favorite provider, largely because using GCP makes me a little nostalgic for the time I worked as a contractor at Google - really enjoyed their infrastructure.
- doh 9y ago
  I hear you. Miss most of the tools and infrastructure every day since I left. I was ecstatic when they made PubSub available to everyone. Wish they would expose more of the internal services, especially Colossus, Dremel, Borg, ...
  - dekhn 9y ago
    dremel = bigquery, borg = GKE.
    - doh 9y ago

tzury 9y ago

“Goodbye cloud, hello nice UI for VPS hosting”. If Google’s own premium speedy network, anycast IP, global load balancing and security features bring no benefit to your web operations, then your math might be right. If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google? F/W default “Everything within a project should allowed”? Sorry, but no way. Not familiar with other DO capabilities, but cloud platform is not just about a VPS available throu REST API, it is way far beyond.

kuschku 9y ago
> If you need your LB to handle 10s of millions of HTTP/S requests per minute, then what other choices do you have other than Google? The same options every business that needed them has done for decades? Renting dedicated servers én masse, colocating, or running own datacenters? And doing this in multiple countries? What I'd suggest for a start is renting dedicated servers or colocating in a few places (EU-Central, US east, US west), and running on that. Dedicated servers, even with having to maintain them, are always cheaper than GCP. Even more so is the network traffic. I've started with dedicated servers with a few European hosters myself where I'd be able to get servers and traffic for 40€ a month that would have cost me upwards of 14'000€ a month with GCP, AWS or Azure (180TB+ traffic per month, I don't have the exact numbers again, but I used each service's cost calculator for this). Sure, if I want high quality networking, I'd have to pay another 360€ per month extra with these hosters, but that's still cheap enough that it means I can basically run a 180TB/month serving service on a hobbyists budget.
- tzury 9y ago
  Dedicated servers == constanct cost. Many cases, you reach peak times for several hours per week/day. With GCP scale up and super fast, and when done, tearing down and saving money. Also, from my experience, when you reach a certain level of operations, you discuss with Google sales team and you get a significant discount for bandwidth.
  - sokoloff 9y ago

ridruejo 9y ago

If you want a (free) digital-ocean like interface on top of GCP checkout our Bitnami launchpad https://google.bitnami.com https://google.bitnami.com

euph0ria 9y ago

We were also impressed with DO's GUI and easy of use. We setup a few monitor servers on their network to measure uptime, latency, packet loss and similar metrics since we deal with audio streaming over UDP. Suffice it to say, it was a mess. So many micro-timeouts and tons of packet loss in small bursts. For prototypes and small projects dealing mainly in TCP and if uptime is not really important then DO is great. For us, we stick to AWS / GCP for the bulk of our load including dev/testing etc as we want to have the environment as similar to prod as possible.

radarsat1 9y ago

Huh. I have zero experience with using cloud services, but I'm a bit surprised by the complexity of both of those UIs. I always assumed it was way simpler than that. Like, I thought it was as simple as using a command-line tool, like "docker run <myprogram>" but "cloud run.." As there any cloud services like that? Where you just specify your environment and CPU features you need etc from a single console command?

gabemart 9y ago
You could script something like this pretty simply with the DO api, and there might well be programs out there already that operate in a similar way. My own needs are modest, but I have provisioning scripts that create and destroy DO droplets on-the-fly from the command line.
- mluggy 9y ago
  guys use ansible. it care less about who's the cloud provider and uses ssh (agent-less configuration).
Permagate 9y ago
You could spin up a server with just one AWS CLI command (and most likely google console, but I have no experience with it). As you said, just specify the server spec in the command option. Though, AWS CLI is very verbose with their commands, imo. Anything more complex, such as weaving several server under one VPC with a load balancer and routing configuration, I'd recommend checking out terraform. It also supports multiple cloud providers.
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  There's also an Azure CLI. You can spin up a Docker Container in one line: az container create --name mycontainer --image microsoft/aci-helloworld --resource-group myResourceGroup --ip-address public --ports 80
thesandlord 9y ago
What you are probably looking for is a PaaS (App Engine, Heroku, Zeit Now, etc) not IaaS On GCP you can run: gcloud app deploy And it will deploy your app on App Engine, with auto-scaling built in. The thing is, that is just the start. Pretty soon you will need databases, caching, versions, etc, etc. (I work for Google Cloud)

gabemart 9y ago

I'm a bit surprised by the replies talking about serving millions of requests a second, or needing ultra-consistent packet latency. Perhaps most of the HN demo is working for companies that operate at that scale. But the OP is talking about running dozens of servers, not hundreds or thousands. My own modest apps have held up to the traffic from being #1 on reddit and not fallen over, never been null routed or nerfed by DO, and served hundreds of millions of requests and hundreds of TBs of data. I have nothing but good things to say about DO. I have no experience running apps at the "millions of requests a second" scale, and I'm willing to accept DO might be a bad choice at that level. But what percentage of apps will ever reach that scale?

user5994461 9y ago
>>> I'm a bit surprised by the replies talking about serving millions of requests a second, or needing ultra-consistent packet latency. Perhaps most of the HN demo is working for companies that operate at that scale. There is a high concentration of serious professionals on HN running world class operations. There is also a large amount of startup and single man operations who would hate to write a $100 check. The thing is, one can only be on one side. Then the other side has nothing valuable to say to you, all their advice is misplaced. So, to answer your question. It's stupid to ask what apps will reach a large scale. You're either at large scale already or you are not. Obviously, the article is only intended for small scale operations (actually, the entire article is just a generic ad, digitalocean has a nice affiliate program).

dividuum 9y ago

> Private network is available, unmetered. It's not private. It's internal and shared with all other customers at the same data center location. I wouldn't be surprise if this misleading marketing resulted in lots of accidentally exposes services.

nickjj 9y ago

Let's not forget how great DO's support is too. Even if you're only operating at 1x $5/month droplet (their lowest instance type), you'll still get top grade email support included with your plan. Getting a response in a few hours is almost guaranteed and often times they'll even help you debug problems that go beyond the scope of their infrastructure. Compare that to something like AWS which charge you an extra $29/month minimum (or 3% of your AWS bill) to speak to an entry level support person through email.

Elect2 9y ago

The only thing that vps attracted me is the pricing of bandwidth.