7 ms·

Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

126 points by zafirk 13y ago

chuhnk 13y ago
Having beta tested the Google Compute Engine while working at Google, I have only good things to say about it. They've come along way in an extremely short space of time and knowing what they have internally, this is just the beginning. They'll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost.
- threeseed 13y ago
  > They'll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost. Most likely. But those aren't the only things developers care about when looking for PAAS. There is that whole "Platform" aspect. And AWS destroys Google in this respect. It has far more offerings and more importantly it has a very large ecosystem of companies who will be in the same data centre who you can leverage e.g. Iron.io.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Don't forget support. I know I can get decent AWS support if I pay Amazon. Google? HAH!
    - bgoldy 13y ago
      We actually have come a long way in Support and now offer affordable paid support options and some very high end packages for mission critical operations. Check out https://cloud.google.com/support/packages https://cloud.google.com/support/packages where we have the details. -Brian Head of Marketing, Google Cloud Platform
      - chuhnk 13y ago
        Thanks for mentioning that. Google will probably do something unique with support as the demand increases. To the other comments above; yes aws has a wider range of services available at the moment but they've been at this publicly since 2006. There are services within Google used by devs, managers, etc that blow away anything amazon has. There's a projected timeline for the release of a great deal additions to GCE. 2014-2016 will be game changing in the cloud industry.
      - tracker1 13y ago
        I know these are entirely different departments, and likely have little correlation to reality.. but google has a worse track record than microsoft for supporting some of their most popular products (iGoogle, Reader, free apps account levels)... it's hard for me to trust services to be around in the long run (this is probably more of an emotional bias here). I know that there are api compatible systems out there, and one could roll your own (so to speak), it will get very interesting over time. I'm also curious what happens in the application space for docker.io based cloud offerings in the next year.
dudus 13y ago
Original post http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engine-load-balancing-hits-1-million-requests-per-second.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engin...
wiremine 13y ago
The gist describing how to reproduce the test yourself: https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724
scoot 13y ago
The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn't a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department): 1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe No, r/s != Gb/s.* (Cue the down vote from the google up voters)
- bgentry 13y ago
  Have you worked extensively with ELBs? They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes, they can't handle spikes well because they take many minutes to respond to changes in traffic volume, and they use an ever-changing set of IP addresses for your load balancer nodes. The GCE load balancer has none of these problems, which makes it a huge advantage over AWS and ELBs. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Heroku. We manage dozens of ELBs for ourselves, and thousands of them for our customers.
  - ancarda 13y ago
    >They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes Why?
    - bgentry 13y ago
      Because they consist of a set of EC2 instances, the vertical and horizontal scale of which is determined automatically based on the average traffic profile of each node. Once the traffic has increased enough to warrant a scaling event, it takes minutes for new ELB nodes to come online and go into DNS rotation before they can start serving traffic.
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        It's obnoxious that AWS hasn't developed an API call or web interface option for the ELBs to pre-warm them yourself, vs having to contact AWS support to get the pre-warming done "manually".
drakaal 13y ago
This is the reason that our site. http://plexisearch.com http://plexisearch.com uses Google App Engine. Google has allowed us to run "Code" rather than worry about infrastructure. Because it is an "Engine" we don't have to configure much, and the autoscaling is fantastic. Google Edge Cache means we get Better than CDN performance on static assets. There are limitation to AppEngine, but because we can also leverage virtual servers we can create a hybrid environments that let us do things AppEngine won't like install C Libraries, or run Windows (we aren't doing that, but we could). We have been very happy with Google App Engine and since we are running millions of pages a day through our Natural Language Engine it has worked out really well for us. -Brandon Wirtz CTO Stremor.com
- bgentry 13y ago
  AFAICT this article is talking strictly about Google Compute Engine and its GCLB load balancer product, not about App Engine.
  - drakaal 13y ago
    How do you think App Engine works? AppEngine runs on the same hardware and the same process described as a how to is nearly identical to what is obfuscated and provided to AppEngine users via a GUI.
recuter 13y ago
I keep checking to see whether or not I can run my own images yet but Google Compute Engine so far supports less things than even Digital Ocean. What if I don't want to run your version(s) of CentOS/Debian, guys? Hmm? (I hope somebody from there reads this) :) Still, its a very very interesting offering and something to keep an eye on. I bet nobody here is using it yet because its still early days and the thread devolves into such old classics like "you'll never be able to reach a human at Google" and "they changed up their pricing with Google App Engine that one time and my app was no longer free to run all of a sudden!". Sigh. I personally think it would be great if you could spin up the same instances on either cloud and load-balance/fail-over as needed/cheapest. Docker makes it doubly exciting.
- bgoldy 13y ago
  Stay tuned - Getting custom image support and custom kernels so you can run things like Docker is just around the corner. -Brian (@bgoldy)
- p3rfguy 13y ago
  You can build, create, deploy and use your own images. Check out https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/images https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/images Anthony F. Voellm Google Cloud Performance Engineering Manager @p3rfguy
yeukhon 13y ago
I am pretty excited and yet shocked to see what Compute Engine has evolved into. The original Compute Engine was about scaling (as cluster) in scientific experiment and yet this news makes me think Compute Engine is becoming the new App Engine but with full control of the VM (plus the amazing autoscaling feature). I always like to control my own VM because I can do much more with a VM than a sandbox (to me an App Engine is just a sandbox loaded with X framework and X database). I have always wanted to work on Compute Engine :( This is an interesting marketing stragery. People who wish to launch a VM can choose CE and people who just want a sandbox quickly they can use App Engine? Though I am really skeptical about the future of App Engine if the CE became cheaper. I am sure if that happens, Google will do everything it can to migrate things over to CE. This is probably many years down the road... I still think CE is really good for computations.
- enneff 13y ago
  App Engine is not just a place to run your code. It has a nice deployment system with the ability to flip between versions instantly. It provides a few great pieces of core infrastructure: the datastore, task queues, and memcache (there are many others, but those are the essentials). The SDK gives you a stand-alone development server for testing locally. If you want to build web apps (or a backend for mobile apps), App Engine is a great way to go. Compute Engine is for all the other stuff that you can't run on App Engine. Incidentally, the datastore is now available as a stand-alone service, Google Cloud Datastore: https://developers.google.com/datastore/ https://developers.google.com/datastore/ This should benefit Compute Engine users.
  - hrjet 13y ago
    I like App-Engine and now that there are open-source, API compatible alternatives, there is no lock-in to worry about either. The biggest drawback for App Engine is lack of async support. The only ways to scale are: multiple-threads (slow) or multiple instances (costly).
    - enneff 13y ago
      Or you can use Go and get high performance concurrency in a single-threaded instance. The best of both worlds. ;-)
danhoc01 13y ago
$10 for a 10 minute test, okay. A month of 200 US-hosted n1-standard-1 machines would cost 200 * $.115 * 30 (days) * 24 (hours)... over $16,000. That doesn't include load-balancing, bandwidth, or any additional charges there may be. The price shouldn't be mentioned anywhere in the article. Demand is elastic of course, and if you really want to scale in a cost-effective manner you also need to do auto-scaling. As far as I can tell (I have no direct experience with GAE), it's much easier on AWS. It would also be interesting to see if you can scale your pool of webservers from 1 -> 200 faster on AWS or GCE. The article does quote @cloudpundit, who hits on the true point of the exercise: Relevance of GCE LB load test: With AWS ELB, if you expect a big spike load, must contact AWS support to have ELB pre-warmed to handle load. I would also guess that Amazon is working to improve ELB to behave similarly, especially now that Google's product has less restrictions than theirs.
- espeed 13y ago
  GCE instances are charged in 1 min increments (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), not 1 hour increments like AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/). 1 min increment billing enables you to spin up massive Web clusters to handle spikes or Hadoop clusters so big that you can process the entire dataset it a few minutes, while paying less than you would for a smaller AWS cluster that's billed by the hour.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    It's definitely finer-grained, but there's still a 10-minute minimum per instance: billing is only per-minute above 10 minutes. So if you run a massively parallel 2-minute Hadoop job, you pay num_instances x 10min. Admittedly that's still a win, since AWS would bill you for 6x as much instance time. But it's not a 30x differential as you might guess from the headline "hourly" vs. "per-minute" pricing.
    - simplemath 13y ago
      A fair point, but the scaling granularity advantage is a powerful cost win nonetheless
bhauer 13y ago
I only skimmed the gist with the instructions for reproducing the test [1], but in that skimming I could not figure out what the request and response were in this simulation. Were these responses 100 bytes, 1k, 10k, 100k? I guess small responses, but I'm not certain. I know the goal of the test is to demonstrate how capacity can be scaled upward in very little time and with comparatively little effort. And for that this demonstration is impressive! That said, the requests per second number is not especially impressive given that a modest single server can easily saturate gigabit Ethernet with 100-byte responses (and it's even easier to do so with larger responses) [2]. I am left wondering, does the $10 cost cover the cost of server instances and bandwidth? If so, that is a very good deal. The bandwidth charges for exceeding the capacity of a gigabit Ethernet connection (1M RPS with even the most trivial requests requires more than 1 gigabit) would be substantial with many hosting providers. [1] https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 [2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7&test=plaintext http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...
- scoot 13y ago
  Couldn't agree more. As I (poorly) tried to point out in my earlier off-the-cuff comment, requests-per-second is a meaningless measure without the context of the size of those requests. The Forbes repost and the original google marketing article are both vague on details, and appear to conflate requests-per-second with throughput.
  - p3rfguy 13y ago
    Marketing Post.. Ouch :) One of the things I love about working at Google is we in engineering are empowered to share our knowledge. For those wanting the details check out the step-by-step instructions in the Gist (https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724). The goal was to measure the speed of scaling and load balancing vs egress. Bigger egress would not change the load balancing decisions. Anthony F. Voellm Google Cloud Performance Engineering Manager @p3rfguy
    - 13y ago
jheriko 13y ago
you do need context... a million things a second is not a great metric. these are small numbers compared to a lot of things. e.g. how many pixels your graphics card is pushing right now.
nl 13y ago
BTW, the Gartner analyst (Lydia Leong[1]) who's tweet was quoted is worth following. She tells it like it is, with no bullshit (read some of her stuff about the various OpenStack debacles for example). [1] https://twitter.com/cloudpundit https://twitter.com/cloudpundit
tzury 13y ago
This is the original post http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engine-load-balancing-hits-1-million-requests-per-second.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engin...
judk 13y ago
RPS and $ are not interconvertible units, unless that 1M RPS is financed by the interest on a $10 investment.
bad_user 13y ago
AWS has a really interesting feature in their auto-scaling groups, coupled with their ELB (elastic load balancer). You can configure an auto-scaling group with a variable number of instances that ads or removes instances automatically, based on the ELB's measured latency or the number of requests coming in or many other such metrics. This works out great and results in cost savings, as it can survive spikes, plus during the night the traffic is at most half or even less than the traffic you get during the day. I had a setup that was handling over 30,000 reqs/sec and during the night it kept about 6 h1.medium instances active, while during the day it could go upward to 20 instances, but was usually stable at around 14 instances. This article mentions ELB, but I don't understand - does Google's Cloud Compute offer something similar? Can one vary the number of instances based on the incoming traffic or other metrics?
- krallin 13y ago
  Google Compute added an ELB equivalent (the "GCLB"), but it doesn't have autoscaling built-in. To get autoscaling, you can either roll your own — Google explains how here[0] —, or use a multicloud autoscaling solution (disclaimer: I work for such a provider). [0]: https://cloud.google.com/resources/articles/auto-scaling-on-the-google-cloud-platform https://cloud.google.com/resources/articles/auto-scaling-on-...
  - bad_user 13y ago
    Thanks for the link. I wonder how well it works. Did you try implementing it?
    - krallin 13y ago
      Well, that's what our software does too, so I didn't really have an incentive to do so! Now, judging from how busy the engineers are here, I'd say this is a bit harder than it seems!
- adrr 13y ago
  Google's load balancer offering doesn't need to prewarmed was the main point. Its a fair point, having to prewarn ELBs isn't exactly fun, form takes about 10 minutes to fill out. If you're doing TV ads, lots of stuff is last minute. You can prewarm it yourself by throwing artificial traffic at it but you always risk just taking down the ELB if you ramp up to fast. Weird things happen to ELBs if you spike them with big bursts of traffic, one of service providers had 24 hour backlog of web hooks that they sent out all at once. It caused our ELB to fail all the instances even if we brought up new ones. Also during load you can get other sites to show up on your ELB. Had asp.net error page show up on ours. We run rails. Wish amazon would scale up ELBs instances based on the number instances you have behind it using the ratio calculated on past usage.
X4 13y ago
The cake is a lie, they don't teach howto scale yourself. They teach howto use THEIR infrastructure to scale. I mean it's still really useful to know and all, but the headline makes the impression that Google teaches you howto scale your own company's App from Zero to 1Million RPS.
tobyn 13y ago
This is misleading, $10 is just for the duration of the test. Roughly $58k/mo if $1.33/min.
laz 13y ago
The big thing they're crowing about is because you can spin something like this up quickly on demand in the G cloud. Most sites aren't remotely close to this artificial traffic pattern (1 packet request, 1 packet response). It's kinda cool from an L4 load balancing perspective that it's only one fault tolerant IP address. In terms of L4 LB throughput though, a single box with IPVS will happily do 1M pps.

126 points by zafirk 13y ago

Having beta tested the Google Compute Engine while working at Google, I have only good things to say about it. They've come along way in an extremely short space of time and knowing what they have internally, this is just the beginning. They'll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost.

threeseed 13y ago
> They'll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost. Most likely. But those aren't the only things developers care about when looking for PAAS. There is that whole "Platform" aspect. And AWS destroys Google in this respect. It has far more offerings and more importantly it has a very large ecosystem of companies who will be in the same data centre who you can leverage e.g. Iron.io.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Don't forget support. I know I can get decent AWS support if I pay Amazon. Google? HAH!
  - bgoldy 13y ago
    We actually have come a long way in Support and now offer affordable paid support options and some very high end packages for mission critical operations. Check out https://cloud.google.com/support/packages https://cloud.google.com/support/packages where we have the details. -Brian Head of Marketing, Google Cloud Platform
    - chuhnk 13y ago
      Thanks for mentioning that. Google will probably do something unique with support as the demand increases. To the other comments above; yes aws has a wider range of services available at the moment but they've been at this publicly since 2006. There are services within Google used by devs, managers, etc that blow away anything amazon has. There's a projected timeline for the release of a great deal additions to GCE. 2014-2016 will be game changing in the cloud industry.
    - tracker1 13y ago
      I know these are entirely different departments, and likely have little correlation to reality.. but google has a worse track record than microsoft for supporting some of their most popular products (iGoogle, Reader, free apps account levels)... it's hard for me to trust services to be around in the long run (this is probably more of an emotional bias here). I know that there are api compatible systems out there, and one could roll your own (so to speak), it will get very interesting over time. I'm also curious what happens in the application space for docker.io based cloud offerings in the next year.

dudus 13y ago

Original post http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engine-load-balancing-hits-1-million-requests-per-second.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engin...

wiremine 13y ago

The gist describing how to reproduce the test yourself: https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724

scoot 13y ago

The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn't a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department): 1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe No, r/s != Gb/s.* (Cue the down vote from the google up voters)

bgentry 13y ago
Have you worked extensively with ELBs? They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes, they can't handle spikes well because they take many minutes to respond to changes in traffic volume, and they use an ever-changing set of IP addresses for your load balancer nodes. The GCE load balancer has none of these problems, which makes it a huge advantage over AWS and ELBs. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Heroku. We manage dozens of ELBs for ourselves, and thousands of them for our customers.
- ancarda 13y ago
  >They need pre-warming in advance of significant traffic changes Why?
  - bgentry 13y ago
    Because they consist of a set of EC2 instances, the vertical and horizontal scale of which is determined automatically based on the average traffic profile of each node. Once the traffic has increased enough to warrant a scaling event, it takes minutes for new ELB nodes to come online and go into DNS rotation before they can start serving traffic.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      It's obnoxious that AWS hasn't developed an API call or web interface option for the ELBs to pre-warm them yourself, vs having to contact AWS support to get the pre-warming done "manually".

drakaal 13y ago

This is the reason that our site. http://plexisearch.com http://plexisearch.com uses Google App Engine. Google has allowed us to run "Code" rather than worry about infrastructure. Because it is an "Engine" we don't have to configure much, and the autoscaling is fantastic. Google Edge Cache means we get Better than CDN performance on static assets. There are limitation to AppEngine, but because we can also leverage virtual servers we can create a hybrid environments that let us do things AppEngine won't like install C Libraries, or run Windows (we aren't doing that, but we could). We have been very happy with Google App Engine and since we are running millions of pages a day through our Natural Language Engine it has worked out really well for us. -Brandon Wirtz CTO Stremor.com

bgentry 13y ago
AFAICT this article is talking strictly about Google Compute Engine and its GCLB load balancer product, not about App Engine.
- drakaal 13y ago
  How do you think App Engine works? AppEngine runs on the same hardware and the same process described as a how to is nearly identical to what is obfuscated and provided to AppEngine users via a GUI.

recuter 13y ago

I keep checking to see whether or not I can run my own images yet but Google Compute Engine so far supports less things than even Digital Ocean. What if I don't want to run your version(s) of CentOS/Debian, guys? Hmm? (I hope somebody from there reads this) :) Still, its a very very interesting offering and something to keep an eye on. I bet nobody here is using it yet because its still early days and the thread devolves into such old classics like "you'll never be able to reach a human at Google" and "they changed up their pricing with Google App Engine that one time and my app was no longer free to run all of a sudden!". Sigh. I personally think it would be great if you could spin up the same instances on either cloud and load-balance/fail-over as needed/cheapest. Docker makes it doubly exciting.

bgoldy 13y ago
Stay tuned - Getting custom image support and custom kernels so you can run things like Docker is just around the corner. -Brian (@bgoldy)
p3rfguy 13y ago
You can build, create, deploy and use your own images. Check out https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/images https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/images Anthony F. Voellm Google Cloud Performance Engineering Manager @p3rfguy

yeukhon 13y ago

I am pretty excited and yet shocked to see what Compute Engine has evolved into. The original Compute Engine was about scaling (as cluster) in scientific experiment and yet this news makes me think Compute Engine is becoming the new App Engine but with full control of the VM (plus the amazing autoscaling feature). I always like to control my own VM because I can do much more with a VM than a sandbox (to me an App Engine is just a sandbox loaded with X framework and X database). I have always wanted to work on Compute Engine :( This is an interesting marketing stragery. People who wish to launch a VM can choose CE and people who just want a sandbox quickly they can use App Engine? Though I am really skeptical about the future of App Engine if the CE became cheaper. I am sure if that happens, Google will do everything it can to migrate things over to CE. This is probably many years down the road... I still think CE is really good for computations.

enneff 13y ago
App Engine is not just a place to run your code. It has a nice deployment system with the ability to flip between versions instantly. It provides a few great pieces of core infrastructure: the datastore, task queues, and memcache (there are many others, but those are the essentials). The SDK gives you a stand-alone development server for testing locally. If you want to build web apps (or a backend for mobile apps), App Engine is a great way to go. Compute Engine is for all the other stuff that you can't run on App Engine. Incidentally, the datastore is now available as a stand-alone service, Google Cloud Datastore: https://developers.google.com/datastore/ https://developers.google.com/datastore/ This should benefit Compute Engine users.
- hrjet 13y ago
  I like App-Engine and now that there are open-source, API compatible alternatives, there is no lock-in to worry about either. The biggest drawback for App Engine is lack of async support. The only ways to scale are: multiple-threads (slow) or multiple instances (costly).
  - enneff 13y ago
    Or you can use Go and get high performance concurrency in a single-threaded instance. The best of both worlds. ;-)

danhoc01 13y ago

$10 for a 10 minute test, okay. A month of 200 US-hosted n1-standard-1 machines would cost 200 * $.115 * 30 (days) * 24 (hours)... over $16,000. That doesn't include load-balancing, bandwidth, or any additional charges there may be. The price shouldn't be mentioned anywhere in the article. Demand is elastic of course, and if you really want to scale in a cost-effective manner you also need to do auto-scaling. As far as I can tell (I have no direct experience with GAE), it's much easier on AWS. It would also be interesting to see if you can scale your pool of webservers from 1 -> 200 faster on AWS or GCE. The article does quote @cloudpundit, who hits on the true point of the exercise: Relevance of GCE LB load test: With AWS ELB, if you expect a big spike load, must contact AWS support to have ELB pre-warmed to handle load. I would also guess that Amazon is working to improve ELB to behave similarly, especially now that Google's product has less restrictions than theirs.

espeed 13y ago
GCE instances are charged in 1 min increments (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), not 1 hour increments like AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/). 1 min increment billing enables you to spin up massive Web clusters to handle spikes or Hadoop clusters so big that you can process the entire dataset it a few minutes, while paying less than you would for a smaller AWS cluster that's billed by the hour.
- _delirium 13y ago
  It's definitely finer-grained, but there's still a 10-minute minimum per instance: billing is only per-minute above 10 minutes. So if you run a massively parallel 2-minute Hadoop job, you pay num_instances x 10min. Admittedly that's still a win, since AWS would bill you for 6x as much instance time. But it's not a 30x differential as you might guess from the headline "hourly" vs. "per-minute" pricing.
  - simplemath 13y ago
    A fair point, but the scaling granularity advantage is a powerful cost win nonetheless

bhauer 13y ago

I only skimmed the gist with the instructions for reproducing the test [1], but in that skimming I could not figure out what the request and response were in this simulation. Were these responses 100 bytes, 1k, 10k, 100k? I guess small responses, but I'm not certain. I know the goal of the test is to demonstrate how capacity can be scaled upward in very little time and with comparatively little effort. And for that this demonstration is impressive! That said, the requests per second number is not especially impressive given that a modest single server can easily saturate gigabit Ethernet with 100-byte responses (and it's even easier to do so with larger responses) [2]. I am left wondering, does the $10 cost cover the cost of server instances and bandwidth? If so, that is a very good deal. The bandwidth charges for exceeding the capacity of a gigabit Ethernet connection (1M RPS with even the most trivial requests requires more than 1 gigabit) would be substantial with many hosting providers. [1] https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 [2] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7&test=plaintext http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...

scoot 13y ago
Couldn't agree more. As I (poorly) tried to point out in my earlier off-the-cuff comment, requests-per-second is a meaningless measure without the context of the size of those requests. The Forbes repost and the original google marketing article are both vague on details, and appear to conflate requests-per-second with throughput.
- p3rfguy 13y ago
  Marketing Post.. Ouch :) One of the things I love about working at Google is we in engineering are empowered to share our knowledge. For those wanting the details check out the step-by-step instructions in the Gist (https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724 https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724). The goal was to measure the speed of scaling and load balancing vs egress. Bigger egress would not change the load balancing decisions. Anthony F. Voellm Google Cloud Performance Engineering Manager @p3rfguy
  - 13y ago

jheriko 13y ago

you do need context... a million things a second is not a great metric. these are small numbers compared to a lot of things. e.g. how many pixels your graphics card is pushing right now.

nl 13y ago

BTW, the Gartner analyst (Lydia Leong[1]) who's tweet was quoted is worth following. She tells it like it is, with no bullshit (read some of her stuff about the various OpenStack debacles for example). [1] https://twitter.com/cloudpundit https://twitter.com/cloudpundit

tzury 13y ago

This is the original post http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engine-load-balancing-hits-1-million-requests-per-second.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engin...

judk 13y ago

RPS and $ are not interconvertible units, unless that 1M RPS is financed by the interest on a $10 investment.

bad_user 13y ago

AWS has a really interesting feature in their auto-scaling groups, coupled with their ELB (elastic load balancer). You can configure an auto-scaling group with a variable number of instances that ads or removes instances automatically, based on the ELB's measured latency or the number of requests coming in or many other such metrics. This works out great and results in cost savings, as it can survive spikes, plus during the night the traffic is at most half or even less than the traffic you get during the day. I had a setup that was handling over 30,000 reqs/sec and during the night it kept about 6 h1.medium instances active, while during the day it could go upward to 20 instances, but was usually stable at around 14 instances. This article mentions ELB, but I don't understand - does Google's Cloud Compute offer something similar? Can one vary the number of instances based on the incoming traffic or other metrics?

krallin 13y ago
Google Compute added an ELB equivalent (the "GCLB"), but it doesn't have autoscaling built-in. To get autoscaling, you can either roll your own — Google explains how here[0] —, or use a multicloud autoscaling solution (disclaimer: I work for such a provider). [0]: https://cloud.google.com/resources/articles/auto-scaling-on-the-google-cloud-platform https://cloud.google.com/resources/articles/auto-scaling-on-...
- bad_user 13y ago
  Thanks for the link. I wonder how well it works. Did you try implementing it?
  - krallin 13y ago
    Well, that's what our software does too, so I didn't really have an incentive to do so! Now, judging from how busy the engineers are here, I'd say this is a bit harder than it seems!
adrr 13y ago
Google's load balancer offering doesn't need to prewarmed was the main point. Its a fair point, having to prewarn ELBs isn't exactly fun, form takes about 10 minutes to fill out. If you're doing TV ads, lots of stuff is last minute. You can prewarm it yourself by throwing artificial traffic at it but you always risk just taking down the ELB if you ramp up to fast. Weird things happen to ELBs if you spike them with big bursts of traffic, one of service providers had 24 hour backlog of web hooks that they sent out all at once. It caused our ELB to fail all the instances even if we brought up new ones. Also during load you can get other sites to show up on your ELB. Had asp.net error page show up on ours. We run rails. Wish amazon would scale up ELBs instances based on the number instances you have behind it using the ratio calculated on past usage.

X4 13y ago

The cake is a lie, they don't teach howto scale yourself. They teach howto use THEIR infrastructure to scale. I mean it's still really useful to know and all, but the headline makes the impression that Google teaches you howto scale your own company's App from Zero to 1Million RPS.

tobyn 13y ago

This is misleading, $10 is just for the duration of the test. Roughly $58k/mo if $1.33/min.

laz 13y ago

The big thing they're crowing about is because you can spin something like this up quickly on demand in the G cloud. Most sites aren't remotely close to this artificial traffic pattern (1 packet request, 1 packet response). It's kinda cool from an L4 load balancing perspective that it's only one fault tolerant IP address. In terms of L4 LB throughput though, a single box with IPVS will happily do 1M pps.