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In what way(s) do you find GCP better than AWS? My company was using both for a while but has migrated more towards AWS lately. But I'm just learning my way aro

In what way(s) do you find GCP better than AWS? My company was using both for a while but has migrated more towards AWS lately. But I'm just learning my way around cloud development now so I don't have insight into the major differences between providers.

dklsafhjskljfl 8y ago
Aside from pricing (different workloads yield different results), I'd say that: GCP has much more modern APIs (they got to do "right" the first time around, while AWS had to learn from their "mistakes") GCP is less mature with documentation, but still excellent (AWS is first class). I've found bugs, and others I know have run into straight up wrong docs - a quick message to support yielded the correct information and docs update within the week. GCP is far more "opinionated" about how you should run a service. AWS is opinionated as well, but less so. What this means is that while GCP will sell you resources in traditional way, to go GCP native or from scratch really requires buying into the GCP "way" of doing things more than AWS does. Basically, K8S or go home. We use GCP and I enjoy it quite a bit. I have extensive AWS experience as well, but no strong preference.
- lrem 8y ago
  GCP is not done "right the first time". Most of the interesting things you see in GCP are 3rd-5th generations of internal products.
  - falcor84 8y ago
    How is that a contradiction? You are saying that by the time the products made it to become external SPIs, they were already battle tested, right?
    - lrem 8y ago
      That's true, but I wasn't trying to contradict, only explain why some Google's products feel so polished since early access. Also explains why some designs may feel awkward: they were assuming the user to be Google products, with all the ballast of building for a billion users.
dijit 8y ago
Hey! I'm actually glad you asked. :) So, obviously my experience is based on my use-case so things that are important to me are predictability of resources and consistency of data. From a resource perspective (GCP:Compute) there seems to be a tendency of setting CPU affinity for certain cores, often in the same NUMA zone on the host. This means my tickrate doesn't get hijacked on certain cores randomly. That's quite nice honestly and it's something that on-prem hyperconverged VM solutions don't manage. The NUMA zone affinity / samezone affects our performance quite drastically as certain applications (such as in-memory databases or gameworlds) allocate large chunks of memory and then do little updates millions of times a second. This means memory bandwidth is very important. GCP also has live migration of instances which is 100% transparent to the application (even the CPU clock seems to be moved over), unlike my colleagues on AWS who get 24h notifications of host machine maintenances I've never had to "deal" with even a single instance outage since starting up on GCP 1y ago. But I would assume if AWS hasn't moved on solving this problem they will soon. Things like VPC networking being inter-zone by default is something that just makes sense and solves some headaches that I hear other teams having. From a storage performance perspective, on AWS we were hard-capped to 5GBps per instance to S3, such a hard limit does not exist for GCP instances to cloud storage so we're able to make use of it. (in fact, I can often saturate my 10GBit interface limit even to non-google instances). A n AWS sales rep that this hard-limit can't be removed no matter how much we pay. I can't attest to the difference in APIs, since I use terraform and that abstracts away anything I would be using. Regarding storage again; we had reps from AWS talking to us at length and they would not guarantee that fsync() would be honoured on elastic storage. They stated that "it should never be needed" but honestly I'm not comfortable with that answer. I mean, my bare-metal database instances haven't gone down in 3 years but it doesn't mean I'm going to start decreasing the consistency for raw throughput. There's a lot more but these are the most important things that I can think of right now.
- afpx 8y ago
  Regarding the 5 gbps cap, they said at re:invent 2017 that they increased the cap to 25 gpbs. Did that never happen? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9x8hz1oRWbE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9x8hz1oRWbE
manigandham 8y ago
GCP has the fastest, simplest, and cheapest primitives for building. Organization and project hierarchy combined with IAM permissions (integrated with G Suite if you use it) make security and access easy. Every project has its own namespace and can be transferred to different owners or billed separately. VMs don't have a mess of instance types, just standard but customizable cpu/ram with any disks and local SSDs attached. Live-migrated, billed to the second, and automatically grouped per cpu/ram increments for billing discounts. Networking is 2gbps/core upto 16gpbs/instance with low latency and high throughput regardless of zone and doesn't need placement groups. VPCs are globally connected and can be peered and shared easily across projects so that it's maintained in one place across multiple teams. Fast global load balancing with a single IP across many protocols and immediate scaling. Storage is fast with uncapped bandwidth and has strongly consistent listings. BigQuery, BigTable and lots of other services have "no-ops" so there's no overhead other than getting your work done. Support is also flat rate and not a ripoff percentage. The major downsides to GCP are the lack of managed services, limited and outdated versions for what they do offer, poor documentation and broken SDKs, and dealing with the opinionated approach of their core in-house products. This usually means as a startup that you are more productive on AWS or Azure because you can get going in a few clicks with a vast ecosystem, while GCP is a better home for larger companies that have everything built and just need strong core offerings with operational simplicity.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Our blocker in using GCP is that they do not offer a managed Oracle Database. AWS does with RDS. We hate Oracle like the next person, but we're locked in. And there's no way we're going to the "Oracle Cloud"
  - dijit 8y ago
    What about running oracle on a google instance with a regional disk? Sure, it's not as sexy as a managed service but functionally it would be very similar.
    - ticmasta 8y ago

dklsafhjskljfl 8y ago

Aside from pricing (different workloads yield different results), I'd say that: GCP has much more modern APIs (they got to do "right" the first time around, while AWS had to learn from their "mistakes") GCP is less mature with documentation, but still excellent (AWS is first class). I've found bugs, and others I know have run into straight up wrong docs - a quick message to support yielded the correct information and docs update within the week. GCP is far more "opinionated" about how you should run a service. AWS is opinionated as well, but less so. What this means is that while GCP will sell you resources in traditional way, to go GCP native or from scratch really requires buying into the GCP "way" of doing things more than AWS does. Basically, K8S or go home. We use GCP and I enjoy it quite a bit. I have extensive AWS experience as well, but no strong preference.

lrem 8y ago
GCP is not done "right the first time". Most of the interesting things you see in GCP are 3rd-5th generations of internal products.
- falcor84 8y ago
  How is that a contradiction? You are saying that by the time the products made it to become external SPIs, they were already battle tested, right?
  - lrem 8y ago
    That's true, but I wasn't trying to contradict, only explain why some Google's products feel so polished since early access. Also explains why some designs may feel awkward: they were assuming the user to be Google products, with all the ballast of building for a billion users.

dijit 8y ago

Hey! I'm actually glad you asked. :) So, obviously my experience is based on my use-case so things that are important to me are predictability of resources and consistency of data. From a resource perspective (GCP:Compute) there seems to be a tendency of setting CPU affinity for certain cores, often in the same NUMA zone on the host. This means my tickrate doesn't get hijacked on certain cores randomly. That's quite nice honestly and it's something that on-prem hyperconverged VM solutions don't manage. The NUMA zone affinity / samezone affects our performance quite drastically as certain applications (such as in-memory databases or gameworlds) allocate large chunks of memory and then do little updates millions of times a second. This means memory bandwidth is very important. GCP also has live migration of instances which is 100% transparent to the application (even the CPU clock seems to be moved over), unlike my colleagues on AWS who get 24h notifications of host machine maintenances I've never had to "deal" with even a single instance outage since starting up on GCP 1y ago. But I would assume if AWS hasn't moved on solving this problem they will soon. Things like VPC networking being inter-zone by default is something that just makes sense and solves some headaches that I hear other teams having. From a storage performance perspective, on AWS we were hard-capped to 5GBps per instance to S3, such a hard limit does not exist for GCP instances to cloud storage so we're able to make use of it. (in fact, I can often saturate my 10GBit interface limit even to non-google instances). A n AWS sales rep that this hard-limit can't be removed no matter how much we pay. I can't attest to the difference in APIs, since I use terraform and that abstracts away anything I would be using. Regarding storage again; we had reps from AWS talking to us at length and they would not guarantee that fsync() would be honoured on elastic storage. They stated that "it should never be needed" but honestly I'm not comfortable with that answer. I mean, my bare-metal database instances haven't gone down in 3 years but it doesn't mean I'm going to start decreasing the consistency for raw throughput. There's a lot more but these are the most important things that I can think of right now.

afpx 8y ago
Regarding the 5 gbps cap, they said at re:invent 2017 that they increased the cap to 25 gpbs. Did that never happen? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9x8hz1oRWbE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9x8hz1oRWbE

manigandham 8y ago

GCP has the fastest, simplest, and cheapest primitives for building. Organization and project hierarchy combined with IAM permissions (integrated with G Suite if you use it) make security and access easy. Every project has its own namespace and can be transferred to different owners or billed separately. VMs don't have a mess of instance types, just standard but customizable cpu/ram with any disks and local SSDs attached. Live-migrated, billed to the second, and automatically grouped per cpu/ram increments for billing discounts. Networking is 2gbps/core upto 16gpbs/instance with low latency and high throughput regardless of zone and doesn't need placement groups. VPCs are globally connected and can be peered and shared easily across projects so that it's maintained in one place across multiple teams. Fast global load balancing with a single IP across many protocols and immediate scaling. Storage is fast with uncapped bandwidth and has strongly consistent listings. BigQuery, BigTable and lots of other services have "no-ops" so there's no overhead other than getting your work done. Support is also flat rate and not a ripoff percentage. The major downsides to GCP are the lack of managed services, limited and outdated versions for what they do offer, poor documentation and broken SDKs, and dealing with the opinionated approach of their core in-house products. This usually means as a startup that you are more productive on AWS or Azure because you can get going in a few clicks with a vast ecosystem, while GCP is a better home for larger companies that have everything built and just need strong core offerings with operational simplicity.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Our blocker in using GCP is that they do not offer a managed Oracle Database. AWS does with RDS. We hate Oracle like the next person, but we're locked in. And there's no way we're going to the "Oracle Cloud"
- dijit 8y ago
  What about running oracle on a google instance with a regional disk? Sure, it's not as sexy as a managed service but functionally it would be very similar.
  - ticmasta 8y ago