7 ms·

What's the Best Cloud? Probably GCP

193 points by pbbakkum 11y ago

nottednelson 11y ago
In a similar vein: http://journalofcloudcomputing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13677-015-0049-1 http://journalofcloudcomputing.springeropen.com/articles/10....
- vgt 11y ago
  And some of Spotify's experiences with Google Cloud: https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/10/spotifys-event-delivery-the-road-to-the-cloud-part-iii/ https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/10/spotifys-event-delivery-...
dastbe 11y ago
Does this line strike anyone else as just not true based on their numbers? Quizlet is now the ~50th biggest website in the U.S.
- dberg 11y ago
  Yes http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Don't trust Alexa results, they are mostly useless. Quantcast is usually more accurate and Quizlet US Rank on Quantcast is 37.
  - mirashii 11y ago
    On the other hand, https://www.quantcast.com/quizlet.com https://www.quantcast.com/quizlet.com
    - dastbe 11y ago
      oof, someone there needs to look into their mobile experience. The homepage is fine but the minute I search for something it goes to junk. http://imgur.com/TcuxQ6t http://imgur.com/TcuxQ6t
- gregmac 11y ago
  Actually 150th in the US and 794th world-wide, according to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com Not to say 150th isn't impressive or likely a lot of traffic.. but if you're going to post a number and claim like that, it should be accurate.
  - jvehent 11y ago
    > Not to say 150th isn't impressive or likely a lot of traffic.. Ballpark, I'd say that's between 700 and 1,000 hits/second on the main frontend. I sort of doubt either AWS or GCP is so much faster than the other for this kind of load.
    - boulos 11y ago
      They mentioned 200k/minute (just over 3k/second) in the post.
cortesoft 11y ago
My main concern with picking GCP would be that Google has a history of shutting down projects. I feel like they are more likely to shutter GCP than Amazon is with AWS.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  I think if they demonstrate that they dogfood it the way Amazon does it will go a long way. Based on talks I've seen I know some internal teams use it (or at least did when it was free for them).
  - profeta 11y ago
    they also used google reader for gmail (it was integrated on the top of the inbox). it didn't stop them from killing it.
    - boulos 11y ago
      This has been said a lot, but: - Reader wasn't a product that was explicitly bringing in lots of revenue, Cloud is (and we just hired Diane to run the business). - Lots of us regret that Reader was shut down ;). Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
      - profeta 11y ago
        The point is not the entire product. Everyone is afraid that the product will still be around, but the feature that drove them to it will be killed. and there is no way you can disprove that fear from google products. You guys do that even with search.
  - boulos 11y ago
    We don't talk about our own usage a lot, because we mostly care about customers (like Quizlet!) talking about their usage in their own terms. However, I personally worked with Chrome's Clusterfuzz team when we launched Preemptible VMs (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Introducing-Preemptible-VMs-a-new-class-of-compute-available-at-70-off-standard-pricing.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Introducing-Pre...) and they're still there today. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and launched Preemptible VMs).
merb 11y ago
The Best Cloud is probably a combination of all. Since that would give you the highest Availability.
- abalos 11y ago
  This really sounds like a "theoretical" best. Practically this sounds like a huge burden on developers.
  - keithb- 11y ago
    Not trying to single you out (your statement is totally on point), but generally we need a word for this developer-centric view of Cloud. My kids write javascript and might be considered developers, but they don't have the faintest idea about operating systems, containers, services, or anything non-superficial in the stack let alone IAM, I18N, consensus, etc. Cloud is not any less of an operational model as it is a development platform. Anyone else have to read "Madame Bovary" in high school? Maybe this focus on developer is a form of provincialism. Come on: someone smarter than me must have coined this already.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 11y ago
  I actually know of some companies that run part of their infrastructure on AWS and part on GCP. There are companies that help you run "seamlessly" on any cloud provider you want so in theory you can use them to balance your services between cloud provider for cost or performance.
partiallypro 11y ago
"Azure was eliminated since its a Linux-second cloud" I have a feeling this person never really dove into Azure, and just wrote it off because it had Microsoft services built in; and of course various sysadmins still have a strong bias against Microsoft, especially if they are Open Source advocates. Seems like the entire article is mostly just comparing AWS to GCP instead of giving an actual overview of the cloud landscape, just brushes off every other provider (that's not AWS or GCP) without diving into an actually reason -why.-
- amaks 11y ago
  Azure is also slower in block device speeds: http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/aws-vs-google-cloud-vs-microsoft-azure-how-do-they-compare-and-which-one-is-right-for-your-business-4802310 http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/aws-vs-google-clo...
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Honest question. If you are a 100% linux shop, what do you gain with Azure? Do they have better linux chops than GCE or AWS?
  - shireboy 11y ago
    To me, the more interesting aspect of any of the clouds is the PaaS offerings. I like the idea of not knowing or caring what OS my stuff is running on or how many VMs back it. Throw some Node.js up into a cloud and have it run and scale automatically without me having to harden, patch, and maintain machines. Same with data - flip a switch and have a geo-redundant well managed database service as opposed to configuring and monitoring such a beast myself. I like Azure Web Apps, Sql, and Storage PaaS offerings, as well as hosted Mongo and similar 3rd party services. In general, my experience is that they are cheaper and better managed than most stuff my customers roll themselves. I would suggest that any "100% anything" shop look at the PaaS offerings of the various clouds and see if the benefits outweigh the risks.
    - boulos 11y ago
outside1234 11y ago
This should really be titled "A comparison of AWS and GCP." It totally wrote off Azure (2nd in market size) because its a "Linux second" cloud (what does that even mean in a virtualized world). Also, you forgot to analyze support and SLAs around functionality. Good luck with GCP when something goes wrong or they decide to sunset a feature.
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Support is much better on GCP than AWS. Reference: https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/ https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in... One of the reasons why Spotify went with Google Cloud is because of their superior support.
  - unusximmortalis 11y ago
    ok but the point about the title still stands :) <<This should really be titled "A comparison of AWS and GCP.">>
  - dastbe 11y ago
    Could you quote the line you're referencing? The key differentiator in that article sounds like data services (dataproc et al) and I don't see anything mentioning support.
  - outside1234 11y ago
    Spotify is one datapoint, and I hate to be cynical, but was probably paid off (in free / drastically reduced priced cloud services ala Netflix on AWS) by Google to write all of that. Even if not, they are such a large well known name that they probably got special treatment. The real proof in the pudding is the support that the 99% get, not the special case 1%.
    - vgt 11y ago
      At the end of the article, Quizlet noted their experience with GCP support: "Overall it was a smooth transition and we're very glad that we picked GCP as our provider - we've received excellent support and scaled up our deployment with few incidents."
jessaustin 11y ago
So much drama for reserved instances. Different prices for different terms of service is a centuries-old business practice. If it's not for you, then don't buy it.
- wmf 11y ago
  Pointing out that automatic discounts are strictly better than reserved instances sounds like actionable information, not drama IMO.
tingley 11y ago
The disparity in disk snapshot performance was surprising.
blakesterz 11y ago
Interesting read. Can someone explain this point to me? "Software-defined networking means that google.com appears to be one hop away" One hop from...? Everywhere? Each server? How does that help? I understand 'traceroute' but not where that single hop to Google comes in and why that's great.
- obulpathi 11y ago
  Yep. That's right.Google has built their custom networking. It's like when a machine A sends packet to machine B, the packet is handed over to Google SDN (Software-defined Network), which carries to over their private network and then injects the packet into machine B. Googles network is an order of magnitude faster compared to AWS.
  - StreamBright 11y ago
    You mean if AWS has 50ms data center latency than GCP has 5ms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
    - obulpathi 11y ago
      Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster. Reference: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-comp...
      - otterley 11y ago
        What did you use to copy the file? If you used scp, your results are invalid and you must re-run the test again with a different protocol: you can't take advantage of large TCP window sizes with it because ssh uses a small, fixed send/receive buffer size. scp will penalize the performance of large transfers over high-latency links, even if the bandwidth between them is high.
StreamBright 11y ago
I am not sure about the technical merit of this link. Best of show: "Google probably has the best networking technology on the planet." How do we quantify this? "This is important for several reasons. On EC2, if a node has a hardware problem, it will likely mean that you'll need to restart your virtual machine." I would much rather create a service that can tolerate single node outages than relying on "live migrations". I am not sure what he meant by the SSD comparison, Amazon EBS that can be SSD but still it is a network mounted storage. "Most of GCP's technology was developed internally and has high standards of reliability and performance." Guess what AWS was developed for. I like hand-wavy, articles as much as any other guy, but it seems to me they picked GCP and wrote an article to justify it, an cooked up some numbers with single dimension comparisons to make it look like scientific. I wish I was working on single dimension problems in real life, but it is always more complex than that. I am more interested in worst case scenarios and SLAs than micro-benchmark results when comparing cloud vendors. Discarding Azure was purely arbitrary, in fact, Azure is more than happy running Linux or other non-Windows operating systems, I am not sure where he got the idea of " Linux-second cloud". https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/running-freebsd-in-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/running-freebsd-in-az...
- mikecb 11y ago
  If you're interested in datacenter networking, can't miss ONS. Amin Vahdat, the guy in charge of networking at Google, has keynoted the past two years, with hardware in 2015[1] and software in 2014[2]. Mark Russinovich also spoke about Azure's SDN, but it doesn't come close to Amin's presentation. Every once in a while you'll hear some random spec from one of these companies, and it's always pretty surprising, but Amin's team has achieved 5 Petabit/s in bisectional bandwidth. It's more than surprising. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaAZAII2x0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaAZAII2x0w [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4gOZrUwWmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4gOZrUwWmc [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RffHFIhg5Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RffHFIhg5Sc
  - StreamBright 11y ago
    Thanks for the links! This is a pretty interesting topic and I am going to watch these videos.
vgt 11y ago
Another great article previously written by Quizlet on their Google Cloud efforts: https://quizlet.com/blog/287-million-events-per-day-and-1-engineer-how-i-built-quizlets-data-pipeline-with-bigquery-and-go https://quizlet.com/blog/287-million-events-per-day-and-1-en... TL;DR: One engineer leveraged Google BigQuery's Streaming API to build a pipeline to analyze ~300 million events per day in realtime.
dcgudeman 11y ago
From 2007 to 2015 Quizlet ran on Joyent, a cloud platform built on SmartOS, which is a Solaris fork (Joyent also offers Linux hosting). I would like know why they made that choice.
neom 11y ago
This is the best post on this subject I've read in awhile. If you're building your application in a modern manner, half the stuff I see in ridiculous comparison posts shouldn't matter. Disposable infrastructure is a thing. If you're making a choice of "the best cloud" (k...) with that fact in mind you should mostly be considering cost over time and capability to innovate on core offerings. Given unit economics and the continual drop in price of commodity hardware, everything is going to become utility pricing, and services like lambda will help you optimize your costs. Personally I'd put all my chips on AWS over GCP. Also, nice to see someone finally identify DigitalOcean as a B2C provider.
manishsharan 11y ago
I don't agree with the OP ; however GCP's sub-hour billing is nice. I need to process a lot of tasks that take longer that 5 minutes which makes them unsuitable for AWS Lambda. With GCP , I only end up paying for a maximum of 10 ~15 minutes-- which is a nice cost saving. Dear AWS -- if you are reading this, match this and I will never ever leave you, not even for 10 minutes. edit : typo
kalkin 11y ago
Strange to do a whole long section on price-comparison without talking about AWS's spot instances, which are often much cheaper than the reserved instances.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  True, but how do you quantify the work? Real world on AWS is Buy X capacity reserved Buy Y capacity spot instance Buy Z capacity on demand to fill in the peaks And it becomes a function of putting in more time = cheaper total bill. GCE workflow is: Buy the instances you need, bill will work out at the end of the month.
- fhoffa 11y ago
  Note that Google Cloud offers preemptible instances, up to 70% cheaper than the normal ones. https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ It would be interesting to see Quizlet thoughts on GCP preemptible VMs vs AWS spot instances and why they think they are better (or not?), but that could be the subject of a whole different post. (Disclaimer: I work at Google - https://twitter.com/felipehoffa https://twitter.com/felipehoffa)
  - kalkin 11y ago
    Interesting. I did a quick search for "GCP spot instances" and didn't find anything. I'd be interested in a comparison too!
mwcampbell 11y ago
I wonder why Quizlet didn't just stick with Joyent but switch from SmartOS to the newer Linux-based infrastructure containers and/or Docker containers. Joyent put a lot of effort into reviving LX-branded zones on Illumos precisely to address the concern that this article raises with using an OS other than Linux. Also, why dismiss DigitalOcean as a niche provider for hobbyists? The simple pricing, with lots of data transfer included, should appeal to a lot of businesses too.
- bcantrill 11y ago
  (I'm the CTO of Joyent.) Sadly (and despite repeated pleading), Quizlet didn't bother to do anything -- at all -- with LX-branded zones. This was a bit dispiriting because they were part of the motivation for the work (namely, a customer of ours that was upfront with the "impossible" demand of the performance they saw in a SmartOS container but with their Linux stack). I think that even by the time the LX-branded zone work was clearly on a production trajectory (i.e., late 2014), they had already implicitly decided to move away from Joyent to a more established brand. That's fine, and I don't fault them for it (and I definitely appreciate their kind words for Joyent in general and our support and engineering teams in particular) -- but I do wish they'd been more upfront about their rationale.
- wmf 11y ago
  It seems clear from the article that they want actual Linux, not "I can't believe it's not Linux" LX-branded zones, not Linux running in a VM on Solaris, and not Linux running in a VM on Hyper-V. This is somewhat irrational, but people are that way.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
When we were using GCP, it would live-migrate our db almost once a day, which caused us problems that were hard to figure out. I don't believe the frequency of a live-migrate was anywhere near as close on AWS. I don't know if GCP still does that as often since this was about 1-2 years ago.
- boulos 11y ago
  The rate of host failure on AWS versus the rate of our live migrations isn't apples-to-apples. There are a lot of reasons we perform live migration, and host failure is just one of them (see https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/03/Google-Compute-Engine-uses-Live-Migration-technology-to-service-infrastructure-without-application-downtime.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/03/Google-Compute-...). While I'm surprised by your "almost once a day" (seems high), we have also made a lot of improvements in the last year to make them even less impactful. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
tshtf 11y ago
Security conscious users would be best served by staying with AWS EC2 right now. GCP lacks all of the IAM functionality in AWS.
- boulos 11y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/iam https://cloud.google.com/iam This is very recent though, and not considered Generally Available yet across the platform (meaning fully hardened, supported, and backed by an SLA). Take another look! Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
  - sharpy 11y ago
    Interesting. It seems that Google IAM is very similar to AWS IAM yet very different in one aspect. In AWS, you can define exactly what subset of APIs/resources are accessible to a role, which is very flexible, but also can be very confusing. It seems Google has taken the approach of pre-defining sensible roles.
shaftway 11y ago
I've just got to say, this is probably the best article I've ever read, all thanks to Cloud-to-Butt.
wowoc 11y ago
My main concern with GCP is its unreliability. BigQuery API randomly giving 40x/50x errors (that has been happening for over a year), signed URL API returning series of 50Xs every few days, CPU on instances going up to 100% for some unknown reason (they stay in that state until manually rebooted), and many other bigger or smaller issues. And they never respond to your questions. The UI is also weird (at least by my taste), for example it is not possible to search instances by their addresses, it is not possible to spin up more than one instance at once, and so on. AWS has an ugly console, but it feels more productive.
- boulos 11y ago
  Sorry to hear you've had a bad time. All of our Generally Available services have an SLA, including BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sla https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sla which has a 99.9% monthly uptime target. Are you seeing errors more often than that? Additionally (and this isn't required), do you have a support package? I'm curious where you've been asking questions without response. If it's StackOverlow, that is best effort, but we do really try. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
  - wowoc 11y ago
    I asked my co-worker who usually contacts support, and in most cases we actually got some response (mine never got any reply though), but it was always full of buck passing. Like saying that these routing issues you're writing about must be caused by your browser, etc., then ignoring further questions.
lobster_johnson 11y ago
Google's cloud does look extremely promising, but the one thing blocking us from migrating (which we would ultimately like, I think) is the lack of PostgreSQL support in CloudSQL. AWS's RDS is mature and pretty great.
kyledrake 11y ago
I see a lot of these sort of articles, and I really have to bring this up, because I don't understand why people don't realize it when they decide where to host their infrastructure: Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive. $0.12 per gigabyte, upwards of $0.19 per gigabyte for Asia. Paying $0.12 for every time you send an Ubuntu ISO is crazy. A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it. A DDoS could make you declare bankruptcy. I have a server with OVH I can theoretically push 100+TB per month through and only pay $100. I get DDoS protection included. It may not be perfect DDoS, but it's not the $6000/mo I'd need to pay for Cloudflare to get the same thing with GCP (I need wildcards), plus the $0.12 per GB for anything not cached by them. I know from people in the industry that they pay less than a cent per GB. Google, if you want to differentiate your cloud services, start charging better prices for bandwidth and do something about DDoS (project shield should be baked into your offerings). $0.02 would be reasonable and you'll still make a profit. That goes for all the other "great value" cloud services that are actually very expensive for anybody doing work that actually needs bandwidth on the internet.
- virtuallynathan 11y ago
  To put those numbers into standard transit pricing using US-East (AWS): Up to 10 TB / month - $30/Mbps Next 350 TB / month - $16.50/Mbps Traffic within the same Region - $3.50/Mbps Traffic to another region - $6.50/Mbps The outbound traffic starts at $45/Mbps in AsiaPac and $85/Mbps in Latin America. In the US and most of the EU, at >1Gbps (~350TB/mo) volume, transit pricing is well under $1/Mbps. Most of Asia should be under $10/Mbps, and south america is quite a bit higher, but not $70/Mbps. See: https://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2015/09/09/ip-transit-prices-continue-falling-major-discrepancies-remain/index.html https://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2015/09/0... http://blog.telegeography.com/bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trends-in-15-minutes http://blog.telegeography.com/bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trend...
  - kyledrake 11y ago
    $1/Mbps seems closer to what I would expect the price to be. 30x over market is an astonishing price markup. I don't understand how any startup I've built that used a lot of bandwidth could take that risk on infrastructure. I would actually be concerned about being successful.
Eugr 11y ago
They forgot to mention another nice feature of GCE - custom machine types. You can choose number of vCPUs and amount of memory and also the amount of local (ephemeral in AWS speak) storage in 375GB increments. This is a huge advantage. For instance, some of our jobs are computationally-intensive but relatively light on memory. In GCE I can run 32 core machine with 28GB RAM and it will cost me $887.68/month (without any sustained use discounts). In AWS, the closest option I have is c4.8xlarge (36 cores / 60 GB RAM) which will cost $1,226.10/mo. And if I need local (ephemeral) storage in AWS, I'm severely limited in instance types I can choose from, while in GCE you can attach local SSD to any instance type, including custom. If you factor in per-minute billing in GCE and automatic sustained use discounts, we are talking about serious savings without any advance planning (required for using reserved instances). EC2 still has some advantages - it supports GPU-equipped instances, for example, but for our computational pipelines GCE is a clear winner for now (and Cloud Dataproc is so much nicer than EMR!).
- StreamBright 11y ago
  This is good to know, I was running into the problem of not having the right instance type for my workload before. We ended up changing up our stack to make it fit better on AWS.
  - abrookewood 11y ago
    That's pretty annoying ... happened to us as well though. We had a requirement for PostgreSQL with 512GB of RAM. Can't do that on AWS, so we had to shard the database.
    - Eugr 11y ago
      To be fair, GCE tops at 208 GB RAM currently, so you won't get your instance type there as well.
      - abrookewood 11y ago
        Wow .. that's even lower than AWS (max is 244GB): http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/
sunsu 11y ago
Unless you rely on UDP!!! https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detail?id=87 https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai... We had a gold level support ticket open about this for months and they recently responded that they are making it a "feature request". Yes, proper UDP packet reassembly is a " feature request".
- StreamBright 11y ago
  Not all the clouds are equal. :) DC networking is much fun, even when you are on SDNs.
betaby 11y ago
Well, "Compute Engine networks do not support IPv6 at all."
- jpatokal 11y ago
  "However, Google is a major advocate of IPv6 and it is an important future direction." https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/networks-and-firewalls https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/networks-and-firewalls
dcgoss 11y ago
As others have said, the simplicity of GCP has made it a pleasure to use. It has a great UI (material design), and the UX makes sense (the dashboard shows you a summary of your resources, resources are organized by project, notification/status icon animates when resources are changing, etc). Going back to the AWS dashboard feels clunky. There aren't a million different image types for each region and zone - simple, autoupdated base images are available for Ubuntu, CoreOS, etc. It has easy to understand base machine types and custom machine types with tailored specs can be created if needed. Product/service naming is clear (ex. Compute Engine vs EC2, Cloud Storage vs S3). Addons like one-click secure web SSH sessions and Cloud Shell are amazing, no more key pairs to worry about. Google Container Engine, with a hosted Kubernetes master, is a great concept and more transparent than closed source AWS ECS. Their on-demand per minute pricing with sustained usage discounts is almost always significantly cheaper than AWS on demand instances, and your discounts are given automatically. Try the two calculators for yourself: Google (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/), AWS (https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html). Also, I have seen Google engineers all over HN (look at the comments on this post!) and other sites responding, commenting, and blogging - they seem actively engaged while I have seen very little from AWS. That is not to say GCP is without problems. AWS IAM is still superior - it is easier to grant access to specific services for specific users, or have an account for a web server to upload to S3. Part of that is due to the fact that there is more plug-and-play tooling available for AWS today - boto comes to mind (boto GCP integration isn't as seamless as with AWS), as well as WAL-E. AWS's new certificate manager with free, auto-renewed SSL certs and installation on EC2 is awesome. S3 is cheaper than Google Cloud Storage. AWS has a longer free tier. Luckily, tools like Terraform allow us to mix and match services from each cloud.
- lobster_johnson 11y ago
  > It has a great UI (material design) ... I disagree here. I find Google's UI to be the clunkier one. Sure, AWS is positively antique, but it's clean, readable, understandable and predictable in a homely Web 2.0 (or even 1.0) way. Google's UI seems haphazardly put together by comparison, from the super tiny font to how common tasks are too often hidden away — the hamburger menu and the project selector being two examples. The progress of a task is also often hidden away and fairly inscrutable, such as when creating a container cluster. When I started looking into the container support, I found that there's basically no web console for it. You can create clusters and see some summary of status about the cluster, but you can't see pods, replication controller settings, etc. — it turns out that the "Container Engine" is little more than a prebuilt Linux image with a startup shell script that starts up Kubernetes. AWS's ECS is the same way, but at least it has screens for creating jobs, adjusting resource settings and so on. Google Cloud seems pretty great, but the web console definitely has a long way to go.

193 points by pbbakkum 11y ago

In a similar vein: http://journalofcloudcomputing.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13677-015-0049-1 http://journalofcloudcomputing.springeropen.com/articles/10....

vgt 11y ago
And some of Spotify's experiences with Google Cloud: https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/10/spotifys-event-delivery-the-road-to-the-cloud-part-iii/ https://labs.spotify.com/2016/03/10/spotifys-event-delivery-...

dastbe 11y ago

Does this line strike anyone else as just not true based on their numbers? Quizlet is now the ~50th biggest website in the U.S.

dberg 11y ago
Yes http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  Don't trust Alexa results, they are mostly useless. Quantcast is usually more accurate and Quizlet US Rank on Quantcast is 37.
- mirashii 11y ago
  On the other hand, https://www.quantcast.com/quizlet.com https://www.quantcast.com/quizlet.com
  - dastbe 11y ago
    oof, someone there needs to look into their mobile experience. The homepage is fine but the minute I search for something it goes to junk. http://imgur.com/TcuxQ6t http://imgur.com/TcuxQ6t
gregmac 11y ago
Actually 150th in the US and 794th world-wide, according to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/quizlet.com Not to say 150th isn't impressive or likely a lot of traffic.. but if you're going to post a number and claim like that, it should be accurate.
- jvehent 11y ago
  > Not to say 150th isn't impressive or likely a lot of traffic.. Ballpark, I'd say that's between 700 and 1,000 hits/second on the main frontend. I sort of doubt either AWS or GCP is so much faster than the other for this kind of load.
  - boulos 11y ago
    They mentioned 200k/minute (just over 3k/second) in the post.

cortesoft 11y ago

My main concern with picking GCP would be that Google has a history of shutting down projects. I feel like they are more likely to shutter GCP than Amazon is with AWS.

brazzledazzle 11y ago
I think if they demonstrate that they dogfood it the way Amazon does it will go a long way. Based on talks I've seen I know some internal teams use it (or at least did when it was free for them).
- profeta 11y ago
  they also used google reader for gmail (it was integrated on the top of the inbox). it didn't stop them from killing it.
  - boulos 11y ago
    This has been said a lot, but: - Reader wasn't a product that was explicitly bringing in lots of revenue, Cloud is (and we just hired Diane to run the business). - Lots of us regret that Reader was shut down ;). Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
    - profeta 11y ago
      The point is not the entire product. Everyone is afraid that the product will still be around, but the feature that drove them to it will be killed. and there is no way you can disprove that fear from google products. You guys do that even with search.
- boulos 11y ago
  We don't talk about our own usage a lot, because we mostly care about customers (like Quizlet!) talking about their usage in their own terms. However, I personally worked with Chrome's Clusterfuzz team when we launched Preemptible VMs (https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Introducing-Preemptible-VMs-a-new-class-of-compute-available-at-70-off-standard-pricing.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/05/Introducing-Pre...) and they're still there today. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and launched Preemptible VMs).

merb 11y ago

The Best Cloud is probably a combination of all. Since that would give you the highest Availability.

abalos 11y ago
This really sounds like a "theoretical" best. Practically this sounds like a huge burden on developers.
- keithb- 11y ago
  Not trying to single you out (your statement is totally on point), but generally we need a word for this developer-centric view of Cloud. My kids write javascript and might be considered developers, but they don't have the faintest idea about operating systems, containers, services, or anything non-superficial in the stack let alone IAM, I18N, consensus, etc. Cloud is not any less of an operational model as it is a development platform. Anyone else have to read "Madame Bovary" in high school? Maybe this focus on developer is a form of provincialism. Come on: someone smarter than me must have coined this already.
TheGuyWhoCodes 11y ago
I actually know of some companies that run part of their infrastructure on AWS and part on GCP. There are companies that help you run "seamlessly" on any cloud provider you want so in theory you can use them to balance your services between cloud provider for cost or performance.

partiallypro 11y ago

"Azure was eliminated since its a Linux-second cloud" I have a feeling this person never really dove into Azure, and just wrote it off because it had Microsoft services built in; and of course various sysadmins still have a strong bias against Microsoft, especially if they are Open Source advocates. Seems like the entire article is mostly just comparing AWS to GCP instead of giving an actual overview of the cloud landscape, just brushes off every other provider (that's not AWS or GCP) without diving into an actually reason -why.-

amaks 11y ago
Azure is also slower in block device speeds: http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/aws-vs-google-cloud-vs-microsoft-azure-how-do-they-compare-and-which-one-is-right-for-your-business-4802310 http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/aws-vs-google-clo...
brianwawok 11y ago
Honest question. If you are a 100% linux shop, what do you gain with Azure? Do they have better linux chops than GCE or AWS?
- shireboy 11y ago
  To me, the more interesting aspect of any of the clouds is the PaaS offerings. I like the idea of not knowing or caring what OS my stuff is running on or how many VMs back it. Throw some Node.js up into a cloud and have it run and scale automatically without me having to harden, patch, and maintain machines. Same with data - flip a switch and have a geo-redundant well managed database service as opposed to configuring and monitoring such a beast myself. I like Azure Web Apps, Sql, and Storage PaaS offerings, as well as hosted Mongo and similar 3rd party services. In general, my experience is that they are cheaper and better managed than most stuff my customers roll themselves. I would suggest that any "100% anything" shop look at the PaaS offerings of the various clouds and see if the benefits outweigh the risks.
  - boulos 11y ago

outside1234 11y ago

This should really be titled "A comparison of AWS and GCP." It totally wrote off Azure (2nd in market size) because its a "Linux second" cloud (what does that even mean in a virtualized world). Also, you forgot to analyze support and SLAs around functionality. Good luck with GCP when something goes wrong or they decide to sunset a feature.

obulpathi 11y ago
Support is much better on GCP than AWS. Reference: https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-infrastructures-googley-future/ https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/02/23/announcing-spotify-in... One of the reasons why Spotify went with Google Cloud is because of their superior support.
- unusximmortalis 11y ago
  ok but the point about the title still stands :) <<This should really be titled "A comparison of AWS and GCP.">>
- dastbe 11y ago
  Could you quote the line you're referencing? The key differentiator in that article sounds like data services (dataproc et al) and I don't see anything mentioning support.
- outside1234 11y ago
  Spotify is one datapoint, and I hate to be cynical, but was probably paid off (in free / drastically reduced priced cloud services ala Netflix on AWS) by Google to write all of that. Even if not, they are such a large well known name that they probably got special treatment. The real proof in the pudding is the support that the 99% get, not the special case 1%.
  - vgt 11y ago
    At the end of the article, Quizlet noted their experience with GCP support: "Overall it was a smooth transition and we're very glad that we picked GCP as our provider - we've received excellent support and scaled up our deployment with few incidents."

jessaustin 11y ago

So much drama for reserved instances. Different prices for different terms of service is a centuries-old business practice. If it's not for you, then don't buy it.

wmf 11y ago
Pointing out that automatic discounts are strictly better than reserved instances sounds like actionable information, not drama IMO.

tingley 11y ago

The disparity in disk snapshot performance was surprising.

blakesterz 11y ago

Interesting read. Can someone explain this point to me? "Software-defined networking means that google.com appears to be one hop away" One hop from...? Everywhere? Each server? How does that help? I understand 'traceroute' but not where that single hop to Google comes in and why that's great.

obulpathi 11y ago
Yep. That's right.Google has built their custom networking. It's like when a machine A sends packet to machine B, the packet is handed over to Google SDN (Software-defined Network), which carries to over their private network and then injects the packet into machine B. Googles network is an order of magnitude faster compared to AWS.
- StreamBright 11y ago
  You mean if AWS has 50ms data center latency than GCP has 5ms? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
  - obulpathi 11y ago
    Google’s network is so fast, however, that this kind of multi-cloud might just be possible. To illustrate the difference in speeds, we ran a bandwidth benchmark in which we copied a single, 500 Mb file between two regions. It took 242 seconds on AWS at an average speed of 15 Mbit/s, and 15 seconds on GCE with an average speed of 300Mbit/s. GCE came out 20x faster. Reference: https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ https://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-comp...
    - otterley 11y ago
      What did you use to copy the file? If you used scp, your results are invalid and you must re-run the test again with a different protocol: you can't take advantage of large TCP window sizes with it because ssh uses a small, fixed send/receive buffer size. scp will penalize the performance of large transfers over high-latency links, even if the bandwidth between them is high.

StreamBright 11y ago

I am not sure about the technical merit of this link. Best of show: "Google probably has the best networking technology on the planet." How do we quantify this? "This is important for several reasons. On EC2, if a node has a hardware problem, it will likely mean that you'll need to restart your virtual machine." I would much rather create a service that can tolerate single node outages than relying on "live migrations". I am not sure what he meant by the SSD comparison, Amazon EBS that can be SSD but still it is a network mounted storage. "Most of GCP's technology was developed internally and has high standards of reliability and performance." Guess what AWS was developed for. I like hand-wavy, articles as much as any other guy, but it seems to me they picked GCP and wrote an article to justify it, an cooked up some numbers with single dimension comparisons to make it look like scientific. I wish I was working on single dimension problems in real life, but it is always more complex than that. I am more interested in worst case scenarios and SLAs than micro-benchmark results when comparing cloud vendors. Discarding Azure was purely arbitrary, in fact, Azure is more than happy running Linux or other non-Windows operating systems, I am not sure where he got the idea of " Linux-second cloud". https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/running-freebsd-in-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/running-freebsd-in-az...

mikecb 11y ago
If you're interested in datacenter networking, can't miss ONS. Amin Vahdat, the guy in charge of networking at Google, has keynoted the past two years, with hardware in 2015[1] and software in 2014[2]. Mark Russinovich also spoke about Azure's SDN, but it doesn't come close to Amin's presentation. Every once in a while you'll hear some random spec from one of these companies, and it's always pretty surprising, but Amin's team has achieved 5 Petabit/s in bisectional bandwidth. It's more than surprising. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaAZAII2x0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaAZAII2x0w [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4gOZrUwWmc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4gOZrUwWmc [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RffHFIhg5Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RffHFIhg5Sc
- StreamBright 11y ago
  Thanks for the links! This is a pretty interesting topic and I am going to watch these videos.

vgt 11y ago

Another great article previously written by Quizlet on their Google Cloud efforts: https://quizlet.com/blog/287-million-events-per-day-and-1-engineer-how-i-built-quizlets-data-pipeline-with-bigquery-and-go https://quizlet.com/blog/287-million-events-per-day-and-1-en... TL;DR: One engineer leveraged Google BigQuery's Streaming API to build a pipeline to analyze ~300 million events per day in realtime.

dcgudeman 11y ago

From 2007 to 2015 Quizlet ran on Joyent, a cloud platform built on SmartOS, which is a Solaris fork (Joyent also offers Linux hosting). I would like know why they made that choice.

neom 11y ago

This is the best post on this subject I've read in awhile. If you're building your application in a modern manner, half the stuff I see in ridiculous comparison posts shouldn't matter. Disposable infrastructure is a thing. If you're making a choice of "the best cloud" (k...) with that fact in mind you should mostly be considering cost over time and capability to innovate on core offerings. Given unit economics and the continual drop in price of commodity hardware, everything is going to become utility pricing, and services like lambda will help you optimize your costs. Personally I'd put all my chips on AWS over GCP. Also, nice to see someone finally identify DigitalOcean as a B2C provider.

manishsharan 11y ago

I don't agree with the OP ; however GCP's sub-hour billing is nice. I need to process a lot of tasks that take longer that 5 minutes which makes them unsuitable for AWS Lambda. With GCP , I only end up paying for a maximum of 10 ~15 minutes-- which is a nice cost saving. Dear AWS -- if you are reading this, match this and I will never ever leave you, not even for 10 minutes. edit : typo

kalkin 11y ago

Strange to do a whole long section on price-comparison without talking about AWS's spot instances, which are often much cheaper than the reserved instances.

brianwawok 11y ago
True, but how do you quantify the work? Real world on AWS is Buy X capacity reserved Buy Y capacity spot instance Buy Z capacity on demand to fill in the peaks And it becomes a function of putting in more time = cheaper total bill. GCE workflow is: Buy the instances you need, bill will work out at the end of the month.
fhoffa 11y ago
Note that Google Cloud offers preemptible instances, up to 70% cheaper than the normal ones. https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/ It would be interesting to see Quizlet thoughts on GCP preemptible VMs vs AWS spot instances and why they think they are better (or not?), but that could be the subject of a whole different post. (Disclaimer: I work at Google - https://twitter.com/felipehoffa https://twitter.com/felipehoffa)
- kalkin 11y ago
  Interesting. I did a quick search for "GCP spot instances" and didn't find anything. I'd be interested in a comparison too!

mwcampbell 11y ago

I wonder why Quizlet didn't just stick with Joyent but switch from SmartOS to the newer Linux-based infrastructure containers and/or Docker containers. Joyent put a lot of effort into reviving LX-branded zones on Illumos precisely to address the concern that this article raises with using an OS other than Linux. Also, why dismiss DigitalOcean as a niche provider for hobbyists? The simple pricing, with lots of data transfer included, should appeal to a lot of businesses too.

bcantrill 11y ago
(I'm the CTO of Joyent.) Sadly (and despite repeated pleading), Quizlet didn't bother to do anything -- at all -- with LX-branded zones. This was a bit dispiriting because they were part of the motivation for the work (namely, a customer of ours that was upfront with the "impossible" demand of the performance they saw in a SmartOS container but with their Linux stack). I think that even by the time the LX-branded zone work was clearly on a production trajectory (i.e., late 2014), they had already implicitly decided to move away from Joyent to a more established brand. That's fine, and I don't fault them for it (and I definitely appreciate their kind words for Joyent in general and our support and engineering teams in particular) -- but I do wish they'd been more upfront about their rationale.
wmf 11y ago
It seems clear from the article that they want actual Linux, not "I can't believe it's not Linux" LX-branded zones, not Linux running in a VM on Solaris, and not Linux running in a VM on Hyper-V. This is somewhat irrational, but people are that way.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

When we were using GCP, it would live-migrate our db almost once a day, which caused us problems that were hard to figure out. I don't believe the frequency of a live-migrate was anywhere near as close on AWS. I don't know if GCP still does that as often since this was about 1-2 years ago.

boulos 11y ago
The rate of host failure on AWS versus the rate of our live migrations isn't apples-to-apples. There are a lot of reasons we perform live migration, and host failure is just one of them (see https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/03/Google-Compute-Engine-uses-Live-Migration-technology-to-service-infrastructure-without-application-downtime.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/03/Google-Compute-...). While I'm surprised by your "almost once a day" (seems high), we have also made a lot of improvements in the last year to make them even less impactful. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

tshtf 11y ago

Security conscious users would be best served by staying with AWS EC2 right now. GCP lacks all of the IAM functionality in AWS.

boulos 11y ago
https://cloud.google.com/iam https://cloud.google.com/iam This is very recent though, and not considered Generally Available yet across the platform (meaning fully hardened, supported, and backed by an SLA). Take another look! Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
- sharpy 11y ago
  Interesting. It seems that Google IAM is very similar to AWS IAM yet very different in one aspect. In AWS, you can define exactly what subset of APIs/resources are accessible to a role, which is very flexible, but also can be very confusing. It seems Google has taken the approach of pre-defining sensible roles.

shaftway 11y ago

I've just got to say, this is probably the best article I've ever read, all thanks to Cloud-to-Butt.

wowoc 11y ago

My main concern with GCP is its unreliability. BigQuery API randomly giving 40x/50x errors (that has been happening for over a year), signed URL API returning series of 50Xs every few days, CPU on instances going up to 100% for some unknown reason (they stay in that state until manually rebooted), and many other bigger or smaller issues. And they never respond to your questions. The UI is also weird (at least by my taste), for example it is not possible to search instances by their addresses, it is not possible to spin up more than one instance at once, and so on. AWS has an ugly console, but it feels more productive.

boulos 11y ago
Sorry to hear you've had a bad time. All of our Generally Available services have an SLA, including BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sla https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/sla which has a 99.9% monthly uptime target. Are you seeing errors more often than that? Additionally (and this isn't required), do you have a support package? I'm curious where you've been asking questions without response. If it's StackOverlow, that is best effort, but we do really try. Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
- wowoc 11y ago
  I asked my co-worker who usually contacts support, and in most cases we actually got some response (mine never got any reply though), but it was always full of buck passing. Like saying that these routing issues you're writing about must be caused by your browser, etc., then ignoring further questions.

lobster_johnson 11y ago

Google's cloud does look extremely promising, but the one thing blocking us from migrating (which we would ultimately like, I think) is the lack of PostgreSQL support in CloudSQL. AWS's RDS is mature and pretty great.

kyledrake 11y ago

I see a lot of these sort of articles, and I really have to bring this up, because I don't understand why people don't realize it when they decide where to host their infrastructure: Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive. $0.12 per gigabyte, upwards of $0.19 per gigabyte for Asia. Paying $0.12 for every time you send an Ubuntu ISO is crazy. A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it. A DDoS could make you declare bankruptcy. I have a server with OVH I can theoretically push 100+TB per month through and only pay $100. I get DDoS protection included. It may not be perfect DDoS, but it's not the $6000/mo I'd need to pay for Cloudflare to get the same thing with GCP (I need wildcards), plus the $0.12 per GB for anything not cached by them. I know from people in the industry that they pay less than a cent per GB. Google, if you want to differentiate your cloud services, start charging better prices for bandwidth and do something about DDoS (project shield should be baked into your offerings). $0.02 would be reasonable and you'll still make a profit. That goes for all the other "great value" cloud services that are actually very expensive for anybody doing work that actually needs bandwidth on the internet.

virtuallynathan 11y ago
To put those numbers into standard transit pricing using US-East (AWS): Up to 10 TB / month - $30/Mbps Next 350 TB / month - $16.50/Mbps Traffic within the same Region - $3.50/Mbps Traffic to another region - $6.50/Mbps The outbound traffic starts at $45/Mbps in AsiaPac and $85/Mbps in Latin America. In the US and most of the EU, at >1Gbps (~350TB/mo) volume, transit pricing is well under $1/Mbps. Most of Asia should be under $10/Mbps, and south america is quite a bit higher, but not $70/Mbps. See: https://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2015/09/09/ip-transit-prices-continue-falling-major-discrepancies-remain/index.html https://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2015/09/0... http://blog.telegeography.com/bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trends-in-15-minutes http://blog.telegeography.com/bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trend...
- kyledrake 11y ago
  $1/Mbps seems closer to what I would expect the price to be. 30x over market is an astonishing price markup. I don't understand how any startup I've built that used a lot of bandwidth could take that risk on infrastructure. I would actually be concerned about being successful.

Eugr 11y ago

They forgot to mention another nice feature of GCE - custom machine types. You can choose number of vCPUs and amount of memory and also the amount of local (ephemeral in AWS speak) storage in 375GB increments. This is a huge advantage. For instance, some of our jobs are computationally-intensive but relatively light on memory. In GCE I can run 32 core machine with 28GB RAM and it will cost me $887.68/month (without any sustained use discounts). In AWS, the closest option I have is c4.8xlarge (36 cores / 60 GB RAM) which will cost $1,226.10/mo. And if I need local (ephemeral) storage in AWS, I'm severely limited in instance types I can choose from, while in GCE you can attach local SSD to any instance type, including custom. If you factor in per-minute billing in GCE and automatic sustained use discounts, we are talking about serious savings without any advance planning (required for using reserved instances). EC2 still has some advantages - it supports GPU-equipped instances, for example, but for our computational pipelines GCE is a clear winner for now (and Cloud Dataproc is so much nicer than EMR!).

StreamBright 11y ago
This is good to know, I was running into the problem of not having the right instance type for my workload before. We ended up changing up our stack to make it fit better on AWS.
- abrookewood 11y ago
  That's pretty annoying ... happened to us as well though. We had a requirement for PostgreSQL with 512GB of RAM. Can't do that on AWS, so we had to shard the database.
  - Eugr 11y ago
    To be fair, GCE tops at 208 GB RAM currently, so you won't get your instance type there as well.
    - abrookewood 11y ago
      Wow .. that's even lower than AWS (max is 244GB): http://www.ec2instances.info/ http://www.ec2instances.info/

sunsu 11y ago

Unless you rely on UDP!!! https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detail?id=87 https://code.google.com/p/google-compute-engine/issues/detai... We had a gold level support ticket open about this for months and they recently responded that they are making it a "feature request". Yes, proper UDP packet reassembly is a " feature request".

StreamBright 11y ago
Not all the clouds are equal. :) DC networking is much fun, even when you are on SDNs.

betaby 11y ago

Well, "Compute Engine networks do not support IPv6 at all."

jpatokal 11y ago
"However, Google is a major advocate of IPv6 and it is an important future direction." https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/networks-and-firewalls https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/networks-and-firewalls

dcgoss 11y ago

As others have said, the simplicity of GCP has made it a pleasure to use. It has a great UI (material design), and the UX makes sense (the dashboard shows you a summary of your resources, resources are organized by project, notification/status icon animates when resources are changing, etc). Going back to the AWS dashboard feels clunky. There aren't a million different image types for each region and zone - simple, autoupdated base images are available for Ubuntu, CoreOS, etc. It has easy to understand base machine types and custom machine types with tailored specs can be created if needed. Product/service naming is clear (ex. Compute Engine vs EC2, Cloud Storage vs S3). Addons like one-click secure web SSH sessions and Cloud Shell are amazing, no more key pairs to worry about. Google Container Engine, with a hosted Kubernetes master, is a great concept and more transparent than closed source AWS ECS. Their on-demand per minute pricing with sustained usage discounts is almost always significantly cheaper than AWS on demand instances, and your discounts are given automatically. Try the two calculators for yourself: Google (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/), AWS (https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html). Also, I have seen Google engineers all over HN (look at the comments on this post!) and other sites responding, commenting, and blogging - they seem actively engaged while I have seen very little from AWS. That is not to say GCP is without problems. AWS IAM is still superior - it is easier to grant access to specific services for specific users, or have an account for a web server to upload to S3. Part of that is due to the fact that there is more plug-and-play tooling available for AWS today - boto comes to mind (boto GCP integration isn't as seamless as with AWS), as well as WAL-E. AWS's new certificate manager with free, auto-renewed SSL certs and installation on EC2 is awesome. S3 is cheaper than Google Cloud Storage. AWS has a longer free tier. Luckily, tools like Terraform allow us to mix and match services from each cloud.

lobster_johnson 11y ago
> It has a great UI (material design) ... I disagree here. I find Google's UI to be the clunkier one. Sure, AWS is positively antique, but it's clean, readable, understandable and predictable in a homely Web 2.0 (or even 1.0) way. Google's UI seems haphazardly put together by comparison, from the super tiny font to how common tasks are too often hidden away — the hamburger menu and the project selector being two examples. The progress of a task is also often hidden away and fairly inscrutable, such as when creating a container cluster. When I started looking into the container support, I found that there's basically no web console for it. You can create clusters and see some summary of status about the cluster, but you can't see pods, replication controller settings, etc. — it turns out that the "Container Engine" is little more than a prebuilt Linux image with a startup shell script that starts up Kubernetes. AWS's ECS is the same way, but at least it has screens for creating jobs, adjusting resource settings and so on. Google Cloud seems pretty great, but the web console definitely has a long way to go.