15 ms·

Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available

92 points by aryann 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
philip1209 13y ago
This strikes me as an odd time to release the platform. My impression is that most companies avoid major infrastructure changes during the holiday season to maintain uptime for the surge in revenue. Even for B2B companies, it is the final month of the quarter. I would think that early January would be the best time launch and promote a new service that requires major infrastructure changes by clients.
- k3n 13y ago
  You'd be surprised, for a lot of industries -- and for select departments of others -- the holidays are a source of relative slowdown. I've done more than one migration, roll-out, or refresh over the holidays, since there's usually less users to concurrently support (and thus downtime is less disruptive).
- abraham 13y ago
  There are probably a fair amount of engineers on holiday vacation that might tinker with the platform for personal projects.
albertyw 13y ago
Amazon EC2 vs Google CE - Fight.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Does anyone just use EC2/CE though ? Surely it is about the entire platform.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Yes, lots of our customers do deploy to EC2 just to have the VM management facilities.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
shuzchen 13y ago
People looking to test this out might want to try apply for the starterpack (https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/ promo code brdo-in). I know a few people with pretty vague ideas that still got accepted, although I'm not sure if they'll be more selective now that the service is generally available.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
  Google level of support.
trimbo 13y ago
Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?
- lerchmo 13y ago
  support is fantastic, we have a large cluster on GCE. I don't know how support will scale with general availability though.
  - trimbo 13y ago
    You've called them on the phone? What were the incident(s) / support needs like on your part?
  - threeseed 13y ago
    You know it seems very suspicious to create a new account to say this. Especially since the common wisdom (and from my personal experience as well) is that Google's support is woeful.
    - bgoldy 13y ago
      I know that's the historical wisdom but we are working very and investing heavily to make sure that isn't true in general, and specifically for Cloud Platform. We've scaled our support team dramatically to support the influx of paid support with GA and are working hand-in-hand with lots of customers everyday. It's obviously never perfect, but I can assure you it's important to us and we are doing everything we can to make the experience with support as good as we can. -Brian
      - Intermernet 13y ago
        Perhaps, and I'm not trying to be facetious, a detailed blog post regarding firstly, that this (customer service) has been an issue in the past, and secondly, the measures that have been taken ("We've scaled our support team dramatically") to ameliorate the support problem. I see Google developing a bad reputation for customer service (on HN at least. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837249 for the most recent example) and some honest recognition of the problem could go a long way to restoring this. I apologize if you aren't the correct person to direct this to; perhaps you can divert it to the correct channel.
codex 13y ago
One salient new feature: Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.
- tlb 13y ago
  I'm curious about how regular hardware maintenance improves reliability. Are you just cleaning out dust? Or do you do periodic stress tests to catch failures early?
  - amaks 13y ago
    HW does fail over time and needs to be replaced. This involves shutdown of physical infrastructure at different levels.
  - bgoldy 13y ago
    regular maintenance helps with reliability because we do a lot of work proactively with power, hvac, switches, etc. which reduces likelihood of failure. Being able to perform maintenance in general is generally good for the stability of our system. -Brian
jhgg 13y ago
I really look forward to a price / performance comparison between GCE and AWS. Persistent disk performance and no charge for IO looks really nice. It'll be great to see some real world numbers and benchmarks. Some key metrics I'm looking for are disk performance, CPU performance (how fast a single core is rated relative to amazon's ECU) and network performance!
- regecks 13y ago
  There are some initial benchmarks here: http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine
  - bgoldy 13y ago
    The guys at Scalr were working on some benchmarking AFAIK. It's not up yet but I expect it will be soon-ish. http://blog.scalr.com/ http://blog.scalr.com/
zafirk 13y ago
Conceptual overview of Compute Engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80
recuter 13y ago
Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution as well as any kernel or software you like. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD. ==== Finally! I'm going to try and make TinyCore run: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux 10MB images, 28MB of RAM, should boot in under 10 seconds.
NateDad 13y ago
No Ubuntu?
mrwnmonm 13y ago
now i'm confused between app engine and compute engine :(

92 points by aryann 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

This strikes me as an odd time to release the platform. My impression is that most companies avoid major infrastructure changes during the holiday season to maintain uptime for the surge in revenue. Even for B2B companies, it is the final month of the quarter. I would think that early January would be the best time launch and promote a new service that requires major infrastructure changes by clients.

k3n 13y ago
You'd be surprised, for a lot of industries -- and for select departments of others -- the holidays are a source of relative slowdown. I've done more than one migration, roll-out, or refresh over the holidays, since there's usually less users to concurrently support (and thus downtime is less disruptive).
abraham 13y ago
There are probably a fair amount of engineers on holiday vacation that might tinker with the platform for personal projects.

albertyw 13y ago

Amazon EC2 vs Google CE - Fight.

threeseed 13y ago
Does anyone just use EC2/CE though ? Surely it is about the entire platform.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Yes, lots of our customers do deploy to EC2 just to have the VM management facilities.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

shuzchen 13y ago

People looking to test this out might want to try apply for the starterpack (https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/ https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/ promo code brdo-in). I know a few people with pretty vague ideas that still got accepted, although I'm not sure if they'll be more selective now that the service is generally available.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
Google level of support.

trimbo 13y ago

Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has anyone actually tried their phone support for this service and can weigh in on it?

lerchmo 13y ago
support is fantastic, we have a large cluster on GCE. I don't know how support will scale with general availability though.
- trimbo 13y ago
  You've called them on the phone? What were the incident(s) / support needs like on your part?
- threeseed 13y ago
  You know it seems very suspicious to create a new account to say this. Especially since the common wisdom (and from my personal experience as well) is that Google's support is woeful.
  - bgoldy 13y ago
    I know that's the historical wisdom but we are working very and investing heavily to make sure that isn't true in general, and specifically for Cloud Platform. We've scaled our support team dramatically to support the influx of paid support with GA and are working hand-in-hand with lots of customers everyday. It's obviously never perfect, but I can assure you it's important to us and we are doing everything we can to make the experience with support as good as we can. -Brian
    - Intermernet 13y ago
      Perhaps, and I'm not trying to be facetious, a detailed blog post regarding firstly, that this (customer service) has been an issue in the past, and secondly, the measures that have been taken ("We've scaled our support team dramatically") to ameliorate the support problem. I see Google developing a bad reputation for customer service (on HN at least. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6837249 for the most recent example) and some honest recognition of the problem could go a long way to restoring this. I apologize if you aren't the correct person to direct this to; perhaps you can divert it to the correct channel.

codex 13y ago

One salient new feature: Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.

tlb 13y ago
I'm curious about how regular hardware maintenance improves reliability. Are you just cleaning out dust? Or do you do periodic stress tests to catch failures early?
- amaks 13y ago
  HW does fail over time and needs to be replaced. This involves shutdown of physical infrastructure at different levels.
- bgoldy 13y ago
  regular maintenance helps with reliability because we do a lot of work proactively with power, hvac, switches, etc. which reduces likelihood of failure. Being able to perform maintenance in general is generally good for the stability of our system. -Brian

jhgg 13y ago

I really look forward to a price / performance comparison between GCE and AWS. Persistent disk performance and no charge for IO looks really nice. It'll be great to see some real world numbers and benchmarks. Some key metrics I'm looking for are disk performance, CPU performance (how fast a single core is rated relative to amazon's ECU) and network performance!

regecks 13y ago
There are some initial benchmarks here: http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine
- bgoldy 13y ago
  The guys at Scalr were working on some benchmarking AFAIK. It's not up yet but I expect it will be soon-ish. http://blog.scalr.com/ http://blog.scalr.com/

zafirk 13y ago

Conceptual overview of Compute Engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80

recuter 13y ago

Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution as well as any kernel or software you like. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD. ==== Finally! I'm going to try and make TinyCore run: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux 10MB images, 28MB of RAM, should boot in under 10 seconds.

NateDad 13y ago

No Ubuntu?

mrwnmonm 13y ago

now i'm confused between app engine and compute engine :(