
Google launches Compute Engine - velodrome
http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html
======
robomartin
The most important products Google needs to launch are: Real Customer Service
and Sensible Account Dispute Management.

Without these two I would not touch any of these services. They are, almost
without a doubt, radioactive.

Why?

It's an old story, really: Get tangled with Google algo's for any reason and
your account is suspended with no recourse. There goes everything: adsense,
adwords, plus, gmail, drive, docs and whatever else was linked to that
account.

No thanks. Make a real commitment to behave like a real business partner with
me and my clients and you have a deal. Until then, thanks, but no, thanks.

Don't get me wrong, I would definitely like to use these services. I most
definitely do. However, the risk of the totalitarian account suspension
mechanism chopping your head off is just not worth my time.

Charge me $99 a year (think Apple). Put me through the vetting process that
Apple puts you through when you register as a developer (company data, etc.).
Get comfortable with the fact that I am a real business. Then, from that point
forward, let's have a real business-to-business relationship as opposed to a
totalitarian-government-to-insignificant-ant relationship. That's a winning
formula.

~~~
iwejfweoifjweif
Have you had that happen with an account that you were paying for (like google
apps?)

~~~
earl
It's happened to a friend. And not a "friend who heard it" bs, a real live
person who told me the story over beers in sf.

And the gp raises a good point: what happens when the google magic fairies
decide you did something wrong with your adsense account and lock you out of
your compute infrastructure? What a nightmare.

~~~
robomartin
Right, that's the point. Google keep putting more shiny things on the table
but neglect to fix what we are all clamoring for: having a proper business
relationship.

------
devmach
A Question : Since Google has a bad track record with customer service, how
much they have a chance to people trust them ?

They can be "google" and they can be good at infrastructure but i see "image
transfer" is problematic here: i want to know that i can "speak" with someone
when something went wrong , past experiences shows it's nearly impossible.

(When my account is locked ,i don't want to loose my servers, email, docs, im,
storage and thereafter my job...)

~~~
notatoad
_sigh_

i'm so sick of seeing this come up every time google introduces anything new.
they have, at the very least, adequate customer service, as long as you're
their customer. as a gmail user you aren't paying them any money and are
therefore not a customer. If you pay for google apps, you get customer
service. I'm sure that this product will include customer service at least on
par with AWS (which, as far as i'm aware, is basically zilch).

you're not going to 'loose' any servers that you are paying for.

~~~
jeffbarr
> include customer service at least on par with AWS (which, as far as i'm
> aware, is basically zilch)

We have a wide variety of customer service options:
<http://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/>

~~~
finnh
I put down my iphone and opened my laptop just to respond to this.

I've been using AWS for a couple years and never really needed support, so
never tried to contact them. Recently I was assigned an Account Exec who
reached out to make sure everything was cool, introduce himself, and recommend
buying into at least the cheapest support tier (which was much cheaper than I
had remembered). He then qualified that with great advice: "actually, you can
just wait until you need it and sign up right then. No reason to pay before
that".

That impressed me.

In addition, Jeff Barr personally emailed me both times I commented on his
blog posts about AWS. At random hours of the day. I'm beginning to suspect
that "Jeff Barr" is a non de plume fronting a group of people, like Franklin
W. Dixon.

~~~
SpikeGronim
I have met Jeff Barr and can vouch for him. He is in fact a flesh and blood
person. He's just really dedicated to making you love AWS.

~~~
shasta
What? When I met Jeff Barr from Amazon, she was a woman.

~~~
jeffbarr
You'll have to explain that to my wife and our five children.

------
cs702
Hopefully this will result in serious price competition with AWS over time.

I also hope the various APIs of all these cloud-computing services (along with
build-it-yourself alternatives like OpenStack) somehow coalesce or get meta-
abstracted into a single API that works across all services -- akin to what
Canonical is trying to accomplish with Project AWSOME[1] but across all major
cloud environments. One can dream.

[1]
[http://www.canonical.com/content/canonical%E2%80%99s-awsome-...](http://www.canonical.com/content/canonical%E2%80%99s-awsome-
bridges-amazon-and-openstack-clouds)

\--

UPDATE: Thank you commenters for all the suggestions!

~~~
okrasz
For competition, there are already other services backed by large companies:
MS Azure added VMs recently, HP Cloud, IBM Smart Cloud, Rackspace obviously.
And there are also many other providers. So competition is there already. You
can compare prices with <http://www.cloudorado.com/> and you may already find
AWS is quite often not so cheap. So why Google is supposed to change the
picture that much?

~~~
Peeda5
Well its not just about the cost. All those companies have limited features,
or take forever to provision VMs, or have limited capacity, are still
hammering out bugs, or are way inferior to AWS in numerous ways. In effect AWS
doesn't have much serious competition right now in the public space, it really
is vastly more mature than other offerings.

Google will at very likely least get all those implementation details right
and be pretty rock solid at a good price point.

------
blo
Pricing comparison: The smallest GCE instance (2.75 compute units, 3.75 GB)
should be compared to the medium sized EC2 instance (2 units, 3.75GB memory).

That's $0.145/hr GCE vs. $0.16/hr EC2 vs. $0.077/hr EC2 (heavy reserved 1 yr
full time), so the pricing is competitive with Amazon - especially given the
extra 0.75 compute units.

The only unknown is whether the compute units are equivalent - the docs only
say they are Sandy Bridge-based Intel CPUs.

~~~
mtgx
It's more like extra 0.9-1.0 compute, since the prices aren't exactly equal.
So that's indeed 50% more compute compared to Amazon, just like they said at
the keynote.

------
jmvoodoo
I see a lot of comparison on CPU speed and RAM, which is fine, but it seems to
me that EC2's biggest weakness is the miserable IO performance of EBS.

If Google has solved the EBS problem, then this could be amazing.

~~~
rscale
This is exactly what interests me. I keep 20 servers in colocation facility
because I have I/O requirements that can't be reliably met with EBS. Solve
that problem and I'll move as soon as my colo contract term expires.

~~~
csarva
You can only do so much with gigabit ethernet. Add to that the fact that
whatever apps you're running are competing for that same bandwidth and it's
super hard to get good I/O out of it.

~~~
rscale
For around $1000/server (including switch port costs), a cloud provider could
install 2 10Gb ethernet cards into each machine, and run them in an LACP trunk
to create an effective 20Gb link.

I keep hoping that somebody will do that, hook the other end to an SSD target,
and sell me a 'high I/O' node. I want to stop dealing with hardware and colo
facility contracts and I doubt I'm alone.

~~~
wmf
Ssssh, quit trying to inject reality into the cloud.

------
shimon_e
I think people confuse cloud computing with giving money to cloud provider.
You can give all your money to a cloud provider without having any benefits of
cloud computing.

I find developing my app for cloud providers and learning their APIs,
submitting bug reports when stuff doesn't work as expected, etc to be more
work than opening an account with a data centre and renting hardware as
needed. Each to their own.

~~~
jshen
You can provision a server on EC2 exactly the way you do a rented server.
However, on EC2 you can image it after you have it provisioned so if you need
to setup a new one, it's as simple as "make a new server with this image".

I see no way to say that it's more work on EC2. It may have worse performance,
or cost more, but that is an entirely different argument.

~~~
adgar
He seems to be arguing that if you don't know how to use cloud technology, you
won't use it well. I have to say I agree, though I don't know how much that
observation contributes.

~~~
jshen
I realized that. My argument is that you can use EC2 exactly the same as you
do a rented physical server, and you gain added benefits like the ability to
image it and create more servers from that image.

------
georgemcbay
On one hand, I'm a bit underwhelmed by this.

On the other hand, having two very strong nearly-direct competitors in this
area is bound to have a very positive (for customers) longer term pricing
impact. For that reason, I hope they succeed with this.

------
vannevar
Google is looking more and more like Microsoft, launching wave after wave of
me-too products and services in what looks like an increasingly desperate
effort to diversify its revenue stream. Where is the focus?

~~~
Bjartr
>Where is the focus?

Every Google product exists to one end: Get more people looking at Google Ads.

Google ads are so pervasive that almost anything that gets people to be on the
internet more is straight up beneficial to Google.

Search? Ads right there.

Gmail? Ads right there.

Youtube? Ads right there.

Google 411? Collect massive quantities of voice samples to train the systems
that became Youtube's automatic subtitle system. More features on Youtube =
more eyes on ads.

Android? Web browser in your pocket = ad delivery in your pocket. Then there's
in app ads too. And then there's the invaluable data mining that makes the ads
worth more to sellers by making them more effective.

Google+? Never leaving Facebook means never seeing a Google ad, action had to
be taken.

Google+/Chrome/Currents for iOS? Get people on that other device looking at
more ads too!

Self driving car? Can you imagine how many ads you could be looking at during
the time you normally spend driving?!

Glass? Ads ALL THE TIME.

~~~
rblackwater
Correct. Microsoft's OEMs were the real customers and Google's corporate
partners are the real customers. Users are the products.

------
jstalin
Am I reading this right? $.14 per hour for the cheapest tier of instance?
That's over $100 a month.

The cheapest tier on Amazon is less than $15 a month.

~~~
vladd
Yeah, the current price is ridiculous for:

\- jobs that can fit in 1.7 GB of RAM or less (Amazon's Small Instance has 1.7
GB of RAM and is about half the price than the cheapest Google plan).

\- reserved heavy utilization jobs (compared to Amazon Medium 3.75 GB RAM
Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances, Google is 100+ USD/month versus 35.65
USD/month for Amazon).

For jobs requiring 3+ GB of RAM and non-reserved utilization, prices seem to
be about the same (and CPU performance seems to be slightly better for
Google).

The Product Management question is: if not the price, then what? Without a
killer Amazon feature, they're just going to play catch-up.

Maybe with the Google brand? AppEngine existing customers? Access to special
data-sets or APIs? Future price drops? The later might be the most likely,
once they reach scale, since their data-centers are famous for being energy-
efficient.

~~~
tlogan
Google will promote their excellent customer service and how they provide
excellent support to developers when things go wrong (i.e., their API is
down). /sarcasm

------
velodrome
"The economy of scale and efficiency of our data centers allows Google Compute
Engine to give you 50% more compute for your money than with other leading
cloud providers."

[http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-
compute-...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/06/google-compute-
engine-computing-without.html)

I wonder how cost efficient the instances are vs. EC2.

------
brainless
Is anyone getting 500 errors for the documentation? I am constantly getting
these while all other sites open fine. Quite surprised to get 500 errors from
Google.

~~~
asto
I've got 3 of those errors in the last 2 days. The 500 error page seems poorly
formatted when compared to their 404 page which suggests they'd be surprised
about anyone getting 500 errors too!

------
NonEUCitizen
Amazon has free microinstance for 1st year. Looks like there's no free 1st
year here?

~~~
ridruejo
From the spokesperson comments they are targeting first the people with really
large downloads, not worrying too much about entry-level developer adoption.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I assume you mean workloads rather than downloads? Their Cloud Storage and
[insert some CDN] should be sufficient for just downloads.

------
dm8
Cost-wise how effective it is? Of all the services out there EC2 seems to be
the cheapest with so many services. Its like mini swiss knife for cloud
computing.

------
mrb
Wow, persistent storage is really cheap!

Google sells 1GB at a fixed cost of $0.10. No monthly cost. Whereas an Amazon
EC2 EBS volume costs $0.10 per GB _every month_ you keep it around.

Google sounds ideal for storing large amount of data that is not used very
often.

~~~
eggnet
No, it is per month.

~~~
reustle
Yep, the site may have since been updated, but it now says: $0.10 GB/month

~~~
mrb
You are right. The price list was updated _just now_ in the last hour. It said
"$0.10 per GB".

~~~
DiabloD3
Thats a little creepy.

------
clhodapp
I wonder if the reason that they don't offer less powerful, cheaper machines
is that Google itself does not use such machines; You aren't "scaling like
Google" if you are not using the same types of machines as they use in their
actual architecture.

Edit: You guys are right, obviously, they will almost certainly offer slower,
cheaper machines at some point (even if this wasn't part of their original
plan, there is a visible demand, which should motivate action). However, my
real point is that I'm guessing that this initial roll-out does map more
closely to what they use themselves than whatever their eventual full catalog
of offerings looks like.

~~~
wmf
You can make VMs as small as you want.

~~~
aliguori
But at odd sizes, density becomes harder to achieve. Local disk I/O tends to
be harder to deal with with small machines.

It's a lot easier to satisfy 4 8-VCPU guests than 32 1-VCPU guests if you've
only got a handful of spinning disks...

~~~
wmf
I suspect cheapskates will take however little you give them in terms of I/O.
I'm opposed to local disk, but that's a different discussion...

~~~
SpikeGronim
I'm curious what you would replace local disk with. EBS? Now all the root
devices in your system are dependent on a functioning network, greatly
magnifying the impact of network failures. I am all for I/O optimized
instances with relatively little CPU or RAM. I like having my disks local to
my instances though.

------
peq
It is 2012, we have Html5, and still people designing pricing pages use __*
instead of links or hover texts.

~~~
wickedchicken
you're right! hover texts work super well on touch devices, and if there's one
thing I love it's clicking on links to get a sentence of information.

~~~
Strom
It's possible to serve different content to touch devices. Also while I don't
have the statistics, I'm willing to bet that touch devices are a very small
minority when it comes to viewing this pricing page.

------
aristus
I think the big story here is that Egress is 1/10th the cost of AWS.

~~~
harshreality
Internet egress is on the order of $.10/GB, so that can't be what you're
talking about.

The $.01/GB rate for inter-zone egress is promotional. In the fine print,
Google says they will eventually charge internet egress rates.

~~~
aristus
Ouch. That's your new kind of lock-in right there. It's not going to be about
software compatibility, it's going to be about the extreme high cost of
running on more than one cloud and sharing data between them.

------
brainless
Regarding pricing is my assumption right: The Google CPU equivalent is Sandy
Bridge, which was released in 2011 onward. While Amazon's is 2007 Xeon
equivalent. Also their base memory is 3.75 GB, Amazon's small is 1.7GB.

So would it be ok to assume the Google n1-standard-1 equivalent would perform
better than medium on AWS?

~~~
justinsb
Google said 50% better price/performance, and I believe Google's culture is
less tolerant of marketing "exaggerations" than is Amazon's.

As a simple, concrete, example: Amazon's GBs are 10^9 bytes; Google and the
rest of the world defines them as 2^30. That's why EC2 instances have such
weird memory sizes. So EC2's "17.1 GB" is what the rest of the world calls
16GB.

~~~
saurik
No: hard drive manufactures and in fact most storage uses define gigabytes the
way Amazon does. If you want to talk about gibibytes, please use tr
appropriate terminology.

~~~
justinsb
Well, I think that's still controversial, but it sells hard drives. For RAM, I
still buy a 16GB DIMM; if I buy it from Amazon I expect it to show up as 16GB,
not 14.9GB. With EC2, that's not the case.

But the point is that I trust Google, when I see something from Amazon I know
to check the fine print.

------
tszming
Google first need to convince their engineers as well as managements to deploy
critical systems (hopefully not just support.google.com or some internal
properties) to compute engine just like what Amazone does for EC2 (they
powered amazon.com)

------
akh
It's interesting to see how a lot of the discussions here are around costs.
We've just added support for the Google Compute Engine and Cloud Storage to
our cloud cost simulation software at <http://www.ShopForCloud.com>
([http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/06/we-now-support-
google-c...](http://blog.shopforcloud.com/2012/06/we-now-support-google-
compute-engine.html)). Anyone can use our tool to estimate and forecast their
costs across AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and now, Google. We'd be happy
to hear your feedback.

~~~
osipov
The tool has a lot of potential but right now it is too hard to use. I don't
want to have to pick a specific configuration from a specific cloud computing
provider upfront. I want to be able to specify CPU/RAM/HDD like with
cloudorado.com and then get the price comparison reports.

~~~
akh
Thanks for the feedback, that's been one of the most requested features and
it's on our list...

------
druiid
Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Google doesn't have the
greatest track record with 'cloud'... I wouldn't put anything mission critical
up there for a while. That said, the pricing is a mixed bag. It's technically
more expensive than ec2, but the storage at the 15gig mem level is fairly
good. I can see this being useful for quick and dirty data processing tasks.
I'm not so sure at this pricing that I'd ever want to run 24/7 type
applications on it.

~~~
j_baker
Isn't saying that Google doesn't have a good track record with 'cloud' a bit
like saying that Toyota doesn't have a good track record with 'automobiles'? I
mean, Google's business is built upon the cloud. Like Google's services or
not, they're clearly providing some 'cloud' value to someone.

~~~
druiid
I tried to clarify in a followup comment realizing that I wasn't being clear
enough. Google as a whole certainly is all 'cloud' and I can't think of any
times I've seen their homepage down for instance. I was comparing their
service platforms such as apps + pricing.

------
dnlbyl
Looks like GCE has instances in the US only right now
[https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resourc...](https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resources#zones)

EC2 is available in Ireland, Tokyo, Singapore and Sao Paulo as well as the 3
instances in the US.

------
VigUi7vv8G2
Nice, some competition with Amazon should be good. Their previous cloud
projects were too esoteric. In order to use them you had to program to their
API, and how usage translated to billing was a little obscure.

------
jbarham
Here's what I said when the rumour about Compute Engine came out: "If Google
can deliver a semi-decent IaaS offering that works well with App Engine they
will have a uniquely powerful platform."
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150261>)

Looks like Google have done just that and IMO this now puts AWS on defence
since they don't have anything comparable to App Engine.

Google solved the hard problem first: creating a general purpose automatically
scalable web platform. With Compute Engine instances you can now fill in the
holes in App Engine--SQL databases, native binaries etc.

This definitely changes the hosting game.

~~~
Bjartr
>since they don't have anything comparable to App Engine.

True, but other services that are comparable to App Engine (as I understand
it) use AWS. So Amazon is still getting a nice slice of that.

------
suprgeek
Does anyone know if there is an equivalent of the Cloudwatch API on GCE? The
very first step in fault detection would be to provide an API that provides
some Metrics

------
fizx
Anyone know where the datacenters are going to be?

------
bashzor
So, in practical terms, how much does it cost to crack a 9 character password?
A-Za-z0-9, just using raw CPU power (no memory or disk space or bandwidth
needed).

If that's anywhere under $100, nobody's hash is safe anymore.

~~~
digeridoo
or you just use a better hashing algorithm...

Anyway, you're better off going for EC2 GPUs.
[http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/amazon-
ec2-enables-...](http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-security/amazon-ec2-enables-
brute-force-attacks-the-cheap-447)

