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Google launches Compute Engine
- clhodapp 14y agoI wonder if the reason that they don't offer less powerful, cheaper machines is that Google itself does not use such machines; You aren't "scaling like Google" if you are not using the same types of machines as they use in their actual architecture. Edit: You guys are right, obviously, they will almost certainly offer slower, cheaper machines at some point (even if this wasn't part of their original plan, there is a visible demand, which should motivate action). However, my real point is that I'm guessing that this initial roll-out does map more closely to what they use themselves than whatever their eventual full catalog of offerings looks like.
- wmf 14y agoYou can make VMs as small as you want.
- aliguori 14y agoBut at odd sizes, density becomes harder to achieve. Local disk I/O tends to be harder to deal with with small machines. It's a lot easier to satisfy 4 8-VCPU guests than 32 1-VCPU guests if you've only got a handful of spinning disks...
- clhodapp 14y agoNetwork bandwidth is also in this category. If they are trying to make a fixed amount of bandwidth available to each virtual instance, there is a maximum number of machines that can run behind a physical network adapter.
- wmf 14y agoI suspect cheapskates will take however little you give them in terms of I/O. I'm opposed to local disk, but that's a different discussion...
- SpikeGronim 14y agoI'm curious what you would replace local disk with. EBS? Now all the root devices in your system are dependent on a functioning network, greatly magnifying the impact of network failures. I am all for I/O optimized instances with relatively little CPU or RAM. I like having my disks local to my instances though.
- j_baker 14y agoVirtualization works wonders. You can take a big machine an divide it up into a lot of smaller machines.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoIt's all virtualized, anyway. You don't really get put on a one proc box at Amazon. More likely, the want to limit the onslaught until after they've worked out the kinks.
- NonEUCitizen 14y agoAmazon has free microinstance for 1st year. Looks like there's no free 1st year here?
- ridruejo 14y agoFrom the spokesperson comments they are targeting first the people with really large downloads, not worrying too much about entry-level developer adoption.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI assume you mean workloads rather than downloads? Their Cloud Storage and [insert some CDN] should be sufficient for just downloads.
- jstalin 14y agoAm I reading this right? $.14 per hour for the cheapest tier of instance? That's over $100 a month. The cheapest tier on Amazon is less than $15 a month.
- velodrome 14y agoMaybe they will work their way down to lower tier options like Amazon.
- bratsche 14y agoThe cheapest thing Google is offering seems to be roughly equivalent to an EC2 medium instance though, which is $0.16/hour.
- vladd 14y agoYeah, the current price is ridiculous for: - jobs that can fit in 1.7 GB of RAM or less (Amazon's Small Instance has 1.7 GB of RAM and is about half the price than the cheapest Google plan). - reserved heavy utilization jobs (compared to Amazon Medium 3.75 GB RAM Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances, Google is 100+ USD/month versus 35.65 USD/month for Amazon). For jobs requiring 3+ GB of RAM and non-reserved utilization, prices seem to be about the same (and CPU performance seems to be slightly better for Google). The Product Management question is: if not the price, then what? Without a killer Amazon feature, they're just going to play catch-up. Maybe with the Google brand? AppEngine existing customers? Access to special data-sets or APIs? Future price drops? The later might be the most likely, once they reach scale, since their data-centers are famous for being energy-efficient.
- tlogan 14y agoGoogle will promote their excellent customer service and how they provide excellent support to developers when things go wrong (i.e., their API is down). /sarcasm
- nilsbunger 14y agoThe use cases they're suggesting tend not to benefit from reserved pricing. I think they decided to launch focusing on a small segment of jobs (high-scale, intermittent) so they can get things working well, then slowly expand the use cases and pricing to make it work for other scenarios... Even Google can't instantly replicate everything Amazon has done in 5-6 years with AWS!
- dm8 14y agoCost-wise how effective it is? Of all the services out there EC2 seems to be the cheapest with so many services. Its like mini swiss knife for cloud computing.
- druiid 14y agoWell, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Google doesn't have the greatest track record with 'cloud'... I wouldn't put anything mission critical up there for a while. That said, the pricing is a mixed bag. It's technically more expensive than ec2, but the storage at the 15gig mem level is fairly good. I can see this being useful for quick and dirty data processing tasks. I'm not so sure at this pricing that I'd ever want to run 24/7 type applications on it.
- druiid 14y agoI should note, when I say cloud track record, I don't necessarily mean stability. I'm talking as far as actually running true 'cloud' services like App Engine, pricing, etc.
- druiid 14y agoAnd here's my least favorite kind of thing: Egress to a different Region within the US $0.01 promotional pricing; eventually will be charged at internet download rates So what exactly is that going to mean? Some of the per hour costs are pretty decent, but are these going to change? I remember one of the big problems people had with App Engine was that it was cheap-as-free and then Google went 'oh, here's pricing updates!'
- j_baker 14y agoIsn't saying that Google doesn't have a good track record with 'cloud' a bit like saying that Toyota doesn't have a good track record with 'automobiles'? I mean, Google's business is built upon the cloud. Like Google's services or not, they're clearly providing some 'cloud' value to someone.
- druiid 14y agoI tried to clarify in a followup comment realizing that I wasn't being clear enough. Google as a whole certainly is all 'cloud' and I can't think of any times I've seen their homepage down for instance. I was comparing their service platforms such as apps + pricing.
- brainless 14y agoIs anyone getting 500 errors for the documentation? I am constantly getting these while all other sites open fine. Quite surprised to get 500 errors from Google.
- velodrome 14y ago"The economy of scale and efficiency of our data centers allows Google Compute Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading cloud providers." http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-compute-engine-computing-without.html http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-compute-... I wonder how cost efficient the instances are vs. EC2.
- shimon_e 14y agoI think people confuse cloud computing with giving money to cloud provider. You can give all your money to a cloud provider without having any benefits of cloud computing. I find developing my app for cloud providers and learning their APIs, submitting bug reports when stuff doesn't work as expected, etc to be more work than opening an account with a data centre and renting hardware as needed. Each to their own.
- ajross 14y agoCan you be more specific? I don't see it that way at all. I've "rented hardware" and provisioned AWS machines, and the broad experience is basically identical. There are "APIs" on both sides that do pretty much the same thing (though with the smaller hosting providers that API is often "call them on the phone" -- not an advantage, IMHO). The differences are in scale (how many can you get and how fast -- cloud wins huge here), price (cloud hosting is more expensive over the long term) and granularity (bill by the hour vs. by the month).
- shimon_e 14y agoOVH has proper API for provisioning hardware. They have many machines ready to go only waiting for automatic OS install.
- jshen 14y agoYou can provision a server on EC2 exactly the way you do a rented server. However, on EC2 you can image it after you have it provisioned so if you need to setup a new one, it's as simple as "make a new server with this image". I see no way to say that it's more work on EC2. It may have worse performance, or cost more, but that is an entirely different argument.
- adgar 14y agoHe seems to be arguing that if you don't know how to use cloud technology, you won't use it well. I have to say I agree, though I don't know how much that observation contributes.
- peq 14y agoIt is 2012, we have Html5, and still people designing pricing pages use * instead of links or hover texts.
- wickedchicken 14y agoyou're right! hover texts work super well on touch devices, and if there's one thing I love it's clicking on links to get a sentence of information.
- Eduard 14y agoand you're right, too! A piece of information and a anchor link pointing to it are two totally mutually exclusive things. No way this could ever be supported even in HTML6.
- Strom 14y agoIt's possible to serve different content to touch devices. Also while I don't have the statistics, I'm willing to bet that touch devices are a very small minority when it comes to viewing this pricing page.
- blo 14y agoPricing comparison: The smallest GCE instance (2.75 compute units, 3.75 GB) should be compared to the medium sized EC2 instance (2 units, 3.75GB memory). That's $0.145/hr GCE vs. $0.16/hr EC2 vs. $0.077/hr EC2 (heavy reserved 1 yr full time), so the pricing is competitive with Amazon - especially given the extra 0.75 compute units. The only unknown is whether the compute units are equivalent - the docs only say they are Sandy Bridge-based Intel CPUs.
- ntkachov 14y agoMy guess is that an GCEU is about the same a single core 1.5ghz proc. Slightly more than amazon.
- mtgx 14y agoIt's more like extra 0.9-1.0 compute, since the prices aren't exactly equal. So that's indeed 50% more compute compared to Amazon, just like they said at the keynote.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- okrasz 14y agoYou should try comparing cloud computing services with http://www.cloudorado.com/ http://www.cloudorado.com/ . It calculates price for specified resources from multiple providers. And for CPU comparison based on the same benchmark across all providers, so it is using the same unit.
- brainless 14y agoRegarding pricing is my assumption right: The Google CPU equivalent is Sandy Bridge, which was released in 2011 onward. While Amazon's is 2007 Xeon equivalent. Also their base memory is 3.75 GB, Amazon's small is 1.7GB. So would it be ok to assume the Google n1-standard-1 equivalent would perform better than medium on AWS?
- justinsb 14y agoGoogle said 50% better price/performance, and I believe Google's culture is less tolerant of marketing "exaggerations" than is Amazon's. As a simple, concrete, example: Amazon's GBs are 10^9 bytes; Google and the rest of the world defines them as 2^30. That's why EC2 instances have such weird memory sizes. So EC2's "17.1 GB" is what the rest of the world calls 16GB.
- saurik 14y agoNo: hard drive manufactures and in fact most storage uses define gigabytes the way Amazon does. If you want to talk about gibibytes, please use tr appropriate terminology.
- justinsb 14y agoWell, I think that's still controversial, but it sells hard drives. For RAM, I still buy a 16GB DIMM; if I buy it from Amazon I expect it to show up as 16GB, not 14.9GB. With EC2, that's not the case. But the point is that I trust Google, when I see something from Amazon I know to check the fine print.
- wmf 14y agoI'm pretty sure that is not the case. I couldn't find data for xlarge, but here's a dmesg snippet from a small instance: Memory: 1711020k/1748992k available (2071k kernel code, 28636k reserved, 1080k data, 188k init, 1003528k highmem) That's pretty close to 1.7 GiB. Here's a large instance: Memory: 7635512k/7864320k available (3204k kernel code, 388k absent, 228420k reserved, 3714k data, 500k init) That looks like 7.5 GiB to me, just as Amazon claims. 17.1 GiB is actually quite normal when you consider than Nehalems have 3 memory channels with 3 DIMMs/channel so you get numbers like 18, 36, 72, or 144 and then subtract some Xen overhead.
- jmvoodoo 14y agoI see a lot of comparison on CPU speed and RAM, which is fine, but it seems to me that EC2's biggest weakness is the miserable IO performance of EBS. If Google has solved the EBS problem, then this could be amazing.
- rscale 14y agoThis is exactly what interests me. I keep 20 servers in colocation facility because I have I/O requirements that can't be reliably met with EBS. Solve that problem and I'll move as soon as my colo contract term expires.
- csarva 14y agoYou can only do so much with gigabit ethernet. Add to that the fact that whatever apps you're running are competing for that same bandwidth and it's super hard to get good I/O out of it.
- irq 14y agoWhat about 10Gb ethernet? 10Gb NICs can be bought for under $200 a piece these days, and 10Gb switches can be bought for under $100 per port. Yes, it's more expensive than 1Gb, but that doesn't mean you can exclude it as an option.
- wmf 14y agoGigabit is not the reason an EBS volume is limited to 100 IOPS. Forcing all customers to use 1 TB SATA drives regardless of their needs or budget seems like the more likely reason.
- rscale 14y agoFor around $1000/server (including switch port costs), a cloud provider could install 2 10Gb ethernet cards into each machine, and run them in an LACP trunk to create an effective 20Gb link. I keep hoping that somebody will do that, hook the other end to an SSD target, and sell me a 'high I/O' node. I want to stop dealing with hardware and colo facility contracts and I doubt I'm alone.
- georgemcbay 14y agoOn one hand, I'm a bit underwhelmed by this. On the other hand, having two very strong nearly-direct competitors in this area is bound to have a very positive (for customers) longer term pricing impact. For that reason, I hope they succeed with this.
- cs702 14y agoHopefully this will result in serious price competition with AWS over time. I also hope the various APIs of all these cloud-computing services (along with build-it-yourself alternatives like OpenStack) somehow coalesce or get meta-abstracted into a single API that works across all services -- akin to what Canonical is trying to accomplish with Project AWSOME[1] but across all major cloud environments. One can dream. [1] http://www.canonical.com/content/canonical%E2%80%99s-awsome-bridges-amazon-and-openstack-clouds http://www.canonical.com/content/canonical%E2%80%99s-awsome-... -- UPDATE: Thank you commenters for all the suggestions!
- tmzt 14y agoCan I launch an instance of Ubuntu from ubuntu.com without creating an account anywhere? Assume I just wanted to test out Desktop, or a Juju for something. (something like workspot.net was, but with stickiness through the cloud.)
- umjames 14y agoDo you mean like the Fog ruby library is an abstraction over several services' APIs?
- cs702 14y agoYes :-) but I mean at a lower level of abstraction than a ruby library.
- tomazmuraus 14y agoProject Awesome is an HTTP proxy which means it's even a higher abstraction than a Ruby library :) In any case, you should have a look at Libcloud (http://libcloud.apache.org/ http://libcloud.apache.org/), jclouds (http://jclouds.org http://jclouds.org), deltacloud (http://deltacloud.apache.org/ http://deltacloud.apache.org/) and other libraries. Deltacloud exposes a similar functionality through an HTTP interface. We have recently also started working on "Libcloud REST" which will expose all the Libcloud functionality through an HTTP interface which means you will be able to talk to it through an arbitrary language which can speak HTTP.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- aristus 14y agoI think the big story here is that Egress is 1/10th the cost of AWS.
- harshreality 14y agoInternet egress is on the order of $.10/GB, so that can't be what you're talking about. The $.01/GB rate for inter-zone egress is promotional. In the fine print, Google says they will eventually charge internet egress rates.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- aristus 14y agoOuch. That's your new kind of lock-in right there. It's not going to be about software compatibility, it's going to be about the extreme high cost of running on more than one cloud and sharing data between them.
- xxiao 14y agoso, amazon, openstack, cloudfoundry, cloudstack, openshift...too many to chose. and, what framework is Google's cloud running on top of? i assume it's something google-proprietary, or is it open-sourced somewhere like everybody else (other than Amazon)?
- dnlbyl 14y agoLooks like GCE has instances in the US only right now https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resources#zones https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resourc... EC2 is available in Ireland, Tokyo, Singapore and Sao Paulo as well as the 3 instances in the US.
- devmach 14y agoA Question : Since Google has a bad track record with customer service, how much they have a chance to people trust them ? They can be "google" and they can be good at infrastructure but i see "image transfer" is problematic here: i want to know that i can "speak" with someone when something went wrong , past experiences shows it's nearly impossible. (When my account is locked ,i don't want to loose my servers, email, docs, im, storage and thereafter my job...)
- notatoad 14y agosigh i'm so sick of seeing this come up every time google introduces anything new. they have, at the very least, adequate customer service, as long as you're their customer. as a gmail user you aren't paying them any money and are therefore not a customer. If you pay for google apps, you get customer service. I'm sure that this product will include customer service at least on par with AWS (which, as far as i'm aware, is basically zilch). you're not going to 'loose' any servers that you are paying for.
- JoshTriplett 14y ago> If you pay for google apps, you get customer service. This has come up many times in past discussions, and many paying Google Apps customers have explicitly said that they receive little more service than free gmail users.
- vannevar 14y agoGoogle is looking more and more like Microsoft, launching wave after wave of me-too products and services in what looks like an increasingly desperate effort to diversify its revenue stream. Where is the focus?
- bennysaurus 14y agoIt looks like a scatter-gun approach: shoot out a bunch of products and see what sticks.
- Bjartr 14y ago>Where is the focus? Every Google product exists to one end: Get more people looking at Google Ads. Google ads are so pervasive that almost anything that gets people to be on the internet more is straight up beneficial to Google. Search? Ads right there. Gmail? Ads right there. Youtube? Ads right there. Google 411? Collect massive quantities of voice samples to train the systems that became Youtube's automatic subtitle system. More features on Youtube = more eyes on ads. Android? Web browser in your pocket = ad delivery in your pocket. Then there's in app ads too. And then there's the invaluable data mining that makes the ads worth more to sellers by making them more effective. Google+? Never leaving Facebook means never seeing a Google ad, action had to be taken. Google+/Chrome/Currents for iOS? Get people on that other device looking at more ads too! Self driving car? Can you imagine how many ads you could be looking at during the time you normally spend driving?! Glass? Ads ALL THE TIME.
- rblackwater 14y agoCorrect. Microsoft's OEMs were the real customers and Google's corporate partners are the real customers. Users are the products.
- vannevar 14y agoGreat point, but if people stop using those Google services because they start perceiving the diluted brand as inferior, that doesn't help the cause.
- mrb 14y agoWow, persistent storage is really cheap! Google sells 1GB at a fixed cost of $0.10. No monthly cost. Whereas an Amazon EC2 EBS volume costs $0.10 per GB every month you keep it around. Google sounds ideal for storing large amount of data that is not used very often.
- fizx 14y agoAnyone know where the datacenters are going to be?
- robomartin 14y agoThe most important products Google needs to launch are: Real Customer Service and Sensible Account Dispute Management. Without these two I would not touch any of these services. They are, almost without a doubt, radioactive. Why? It's an old story, really: Get tangled with Google algo's for any reason and your account is suspended with no recourse. There goes everything: adsense, adwords, plus, gmail, drive, docs and whatever else was linked to that account. No thanks. Make a real commitment to behave like a real business partner with me and my clients and you have a deal. Until then, thanks, but no, thanks. Don't get me wrong, I would definitely like to use these services. I most definitely do. However, the risk of the totalitarian account suspension mechanism chopping your head off is just not worth my time. Charge me $99 a year (think Apple). Put me through the vetting process that Apple puts you through when you register as a developer (company data, etc.). Get comfortable with the fact that I am a real business. Then, from that point forward, let's have a real business-to-business relationship as opposed to a totalitarian-government-to-insignificant-ant relationship. That's a winning formula.
- iwejfweoifjweif 14y agoHave you had that happen with an account that you were paying for (like google apps?)
- earl 14y agoIt's happened to a friend. And not a "friend who heard it" bs, a real live person who told me the story over beers in sf. And the gp raises a good point: what happens when the google magic fairies decide you did something wrong with your adsense account and lock you out of your compute infrastructure? What a nightmare.
- robomartin 14y agoRight, that's the point. Google keep putting more shiny things on the table but neglect to fix what we are all clamoring for: having a proper business relationship.
- deleted 14y ago
- akh 14y agoIt's interesting to see how a lot of the discussions here are around costs. We've just added support for the Google Compute Engine and Cloud Storage to our cloud cost simulation software at http://www.ShopForCloud.com http://www.ShopForCloud.com (http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/06/we-now-support-google-compute-engine.html http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/06/we-now-support-google-c...). Anyone can use our tool to estimate and forecast their costs across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and now, Google. We'd be happy to hear your feedback.
- osipov 14y agoThe tool has a lot of potential but right now it is too hard to use. I don't want to have to pick a specific configuration from a specific cloud computing provider upfront. I want to be able to specify CPU/RAM/HDD like with cloudorado.com and then get the price comparison reports.
- akh 14y agoThanks for the feedback, that's been one of the most requested features and it's on our list...
- jbarham 14y agoHere's what I said when the rumour about Compute Engine came out: "If Google can deliver a semi-decent IaaS offering that works well with App Engine they will have a uniquely powerful platform." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150261) Looks like Google have done just that and IMO this now puts AWS on defence since they don't have anything comparable to App Engine. Google solved the hard problem first: creating a general purpose automatically scalable web platform. With Compute Engine instances you can now fill in the holes in App Engine--SQL databases, native binaries etc. This definitely changes the hosting game.
- Bjartr 14y ago>since they don't have anything comparable to App Engine. True, but other services that are comparable to App Engine (as I understand it) use AWS. So Amazon is still getting a nice slice of that.
- flyt 14y agoAmazon has Elastic Beanstalk, which is the same idea as App Engine: total abstraction of underlying resources. http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
- tszming 14y agoGoogle first need to convince their engineers as well as managements to deploy critical systems (hopefully not just support.google.com or some internal properties) to compute engine just like what Amazone does for EC2 (they powered amazon.com)
- visa 14y agoGuys checkout how much google pays to its employees http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/google-inc-31830.html http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/google-inc-3...
- bashzor 14y agoSo, in practical terms, how much does it cost to crack a 9 character password? A-Za-z0-9, just using raw CPU power (no memory or disk space or bandwidth needed). If that's anywhere under $100, nobody's hash is safe anymore.
- digeridoo 14y agoor you just use a better hashing algorithm... Anyway, you're better off going for EC2 GPUs. http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/amazon-ec2-enables-brute-force-attacks-the-cheap-447 http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/amazon-ec2-enables-...
- VigUi7vv8G2 14y agoNice, some competition with Amazon should be good. Their previous cloud projects were too esoteric. In order to use them you had to program to their API, and how usage translated to billing was a little obscure.
- suprgeek 14y agoDoes anyone know if there is an equivalent of the Cloudwatch API on GCE? The very first step in fault detection would be to provide an API that provides some Metrics