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Having built out big infra on AWS and now on GCP, GCP's live migrations really change the way I think about the cloud. GCP has hardware failures, and if there'
by ihumanable 5y ago
Having built out big infra on AWS and now on GCP, GCP's live migrations really change the way I think about the cloud.
GCP has hardware failures, and if there's a bad enough one it impacts your instance, but you can have instances that live forever and they just move it from physical machine to physical machine and it mostly works.
I was very skeptical about this, having spent 5-6 years on AWS and got used to the idea that AWS might just blow your instance away (normally with notice, sometimes not though if the hardware hosting it had some catastrophic failure). GCP just says, "Don't worry about it, things will get moved" and the servers in question have long lived connections, they aren't just simple stateless HTTP API servers, and it works 99.9% of the time (that last 0.1% of the time is a real pain to debug).
We still treat our machines as cattle instead of pets, but not having to constantly deal with cattle roaming off the reservation is nice.
- brianwawok 5y agoThis is neat and something I really like about GCP. Surprised AWS hasn’t been able to replicate this yet. Yes your code should handle an instance dying. But if 98% of the time you can live migrate and not... hey why not.
- bradknowles 5y agoVMware can handle live migration. I know, I worked there for a while and that was one of the key things we sold as our stuff being better than “the cloud”. AWS has had a partnership with VMware for a while now, so I would imagine/hope that they could still do live migration, even when running in the AWS cloud. That does make me wonder why AWS doesn’t implement the same functionality native, though.....