
Google Cloud Platform - luu
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/09/Google-Cloud-Platform-delivers-the-industrys-best-technical-and-differentiated-features.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ClPlBl+%28Cloud+Platform+Blog%29
======
vladimirralev
Just less than an hour ago I got 10+ alerts that my monitoring agents on GCE
machines are unreachable for 5 mins again and networking is down. I see this
at least once a month, separately the cloud SQL has weird outages again about
once-twice a month. I also run some real hardware machines in a datacenter and
have none of these problems. I am not impressed with Google's cloud.

~~~
boulos
Sorry to hear that; which zone are you in? I don't see any notice of an
outage, but I'd be happy to investigate for you (I work on Compute Engine).

To your other issue with Cloud SQL, there is sadly a mandatory downtime with
every release they do (often weekly). The team is working on it and knows it's
unacceptable for serving workloads.

Edit: Here's a link to the maintenance note in the FAQ for reference -
[https://cloud.google.com/sql/faq#maintenancerestart](https://cloud.google.com/sql/faq#maintenancerestart)

~~~
vladimirralev
Very strange, you should be able to observe these in almost any monitor. I see
this in multiple projects/networks.

Outage today was on us-central1-a. I got alerts from multiple agents - new
relic, zabbix and ssh monitor so I don't think it can be blamed on tools or
something like this. It happened in two bursts, this is the first one
[http://imgur.com/XdzuJ2r](http://imgur.com/XdzuJ2r) with messages from both
zabbix and new relic, the time zone in the emails is EEST. These are all
different machines, no duplication.

~~~
boulos
This is what I get for not being in SRE (I don't get paged, I just poll our
incident lists, etc.): there was definitely a blip at that time, people are on
it right now looking into the root cause (but it was automatically remediated
within just a couple minutes as you saw). Regardless, sorry for the blip _and_
for being wrong about the all clear.

------
stephen
Wow. Kind of surprised such a borderline-desperate sounding post was allowed
on the official Google blog.

I basically read this as "we're so technically superior in several ways ...
wtf is everyone still using AWS instead of us?"

It reminds me of the attitude of one Google engineer I know, which is
basically Google is such an amazing place, with such visionary leaders, and
across-the-board smart engineers, that they can wander into any domain they
want, and just assume they'll succeed/print money like AdWords.

I'm paraphrasing and also probably putting words into his mouth, so apologies
for phrasing it in the extreme to make a point.

Part of me wishes it was that way: as long as you had the smartest people +
biggest warchest (which they basically do), victory would be pre-determined.
But capitalism has a way, if anything, of handicapping the existing giants,
and you can't just wander into a field "because we're really smart" and assume
you'll win.

</armchair business insight>. Feel free to correct my assumptions/biases.

~~~
milesward
__disclaimer: I am the author, and work at Google Cloud Platform __

Stephen, thanks for the direct feedback, seriously! We weren 't shooting for
desperate, if anything I had a bit of geek pride in my voice when saying it at
our GCP Next events, and then typing it down for this post. As I've been
helping folks onboard and understand the platform, I found myself explaining
these facts pretty frequently, so I figured having it written down might be
helpful for others. Any suggestions on what kinds of content you'd like to see
us deliver? Things you'd want to know? I'm game!

~~~
sandstrom
# Why I think it was bad

Saying "we're the better cloud" is a frail argument. Both GCP and AWS has
strengths and weaknesses. People know that. Saying "we're the best" feels
simplistic (and insincere).

Second, some of the things you mention (live migration, scalability, etc) are
things that AWS also provide.

# What is good

The last part of your post, _So, how can you optimize_ , was good. It wasn't
bashing AWS, it was general, sound advice on how to build things for a cloud
platform. More of that would have resulted in a better post.

Nearline is another good offering. You got great publicity on that when it was
released recently. I think many felt it had better and simpler pricing, and a
better structure for retrieval than glacier. That's what you should focus on.

No need to criticize your competitors or arguing that you're better than them
in every dimension. Instead, build good products and let the customer decide.

~~~
milesward
__disclaimer: I 'm the OP and work for GCP __

Sandstrom, thanks for the detailed feedback. Spending most of my day talking
with customers, I 've found that many, many folks don't really know those
strengths and weaknesses very well. This post was written really in direct
response to questions we get every day about "why should I choose GCP?"

A great example; in your comment you describe AWS as having live migration,
which they do not. It's exactly this kind of misinformation that we were
aiming to clear up.

I hear you loud and clear on more technical guidance; my team has been
building
[http://cloud.google.com/solutions](http://cloud.google.com/solutions) for the
last year, let me know if that helps or if you have any ideas on what we
should build next!

Thanks again!

~~~
sandstrom
Yes, you are right regarding live migration. I though that's what they used to
avoid reboots for one of the Xen-vulnerabilities earlier this year. But it
wasn't, it was a hot-patch of some sort. Thanks for clarifying.

------
jread
Although GCP has some distinguishing technical features like live migrations,
based on my own independent availability monitoring, it hasn't been any more
reliable than other cloud services including Azure and DigitalOcean. In fact,
over the past year, EC2 has been much more reliable than GCE. The most common
problems I've observed are network blips that may or may not get reported on
the GCP status page.

[https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-
google](https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-google)
[https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-
aws](https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-aws)
[https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-
azure](https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-azure)
[https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-
digitalocean](https://cloudharmony.com/status-1year-for-digitalocean)

------
benburton
I particularly love Cloud Platform's Nearline storage for personal media
archival. Previously I was using Amazon's Glacier, but the interface was
clunky and the load times were too slow. Cloud Platform's web UI,
comparatively, has been an absolute joy to use at a roughly similar price
point.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Note that while Nearline's pricing is identical to glacier, it's response time
is almost immediate, compared to ~4 hours for glacier.

~~~
crazysim
The pricing is actually no longer identical. Amazon's latest price refreshes
dropped Glacier to below Nearline and introduced a new S3 object type (e.g.
Reduced Redundancy Storage) called Infrequent Access that's a lot more like
Nearline.

~~~
sandstrom
I like the new Infrequent Access, but I'd like to understand the tradeoffs
better. What's the downside compared to regular S3?

It mentions 99.9% availability instead of 99.99%, but it would be useful to
understand how that is manifested in reality, and what the underlying
architectural difference is.

I tried to ask jeffbarr here[1], but got no answer.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10230937)

~~~
jeffbarr
Sorry I missed that, I have been working 16+ hours per day to get ready for
re:Invent.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Please take a break when you can!

------
cwmma
Using both GCP and AWS the one place GCP really stands out is container
engine, it's much better then elastic bean stalk for deploying and managing
apps.

Otherwise: cloud storage has a more limited api then s3 (s3 allows you to
query by start key, cloud storage only by prefix), cloud sql doesn't support
postgres (which is a necessity Geospatial apps) and there is something weird
with there network that causes server sent events to be unusable from compute
engine instances.

~~~
derFunk
You should try ec2 container services. That's superior to beanstalk.

------
bsimpson
Can we fix the title? The official title is "Google Cloud Platform delivers
the industry's best technical and differentiated features". "Google Cloud
Platform" is a meaninglessly vague title, especially considering the source is
the official GCP blog.

That'd be like posting an article titled "Washington Post Delivering News to
Best New Platforms" as simply "Washington Post". I realize that the original
title is too sales-y, but if I knew it was marketing, I wouldn't have clicked.

------
frakkingcylons
I gave GCP a try recently because one of my workloads on DigitalOcean started
to be come unreasonably expensive. I use AWS S3 for object storage, but while
their other offerings seem to be pretty powerful, it's more complicated than
what I need. As a hobby-level user, I'm really liking what I see with GCP so
far.

One GCP offering that I think deserves more attention is Managed VMs (part of
App Engine). You provide your app + runtime in a Docker container, and App
Engine will run that container in a Compute Engine VM and do a bunch of cool
stuff for like health checking, autoscaling, and log aggregation. It's limited
in a lot of respects, but it's a basic cluster manager like Kubernetes or ECS
but easier to use for simple services IMO.

------
spullara
Google doesn't realize that this isn't why AWS is winning. AWS has better
support, more services, more options and is easier to use.

~~~
kiyoto
Compared to GCP, perhaps, but AWS's support is pretty atrocious too. The real
reason AWS wins is because they know how to sell platforms: as you said, it's
about more services, more options, and yes, more _selling_. You can't just
build the best components and wait for people to try them. You have to go
listen to customers and propose how to build what they need using your
platform. This is by far the biggest difference between GCP and AWS: the
technical salesperson mindset.

~~~
zwily
Your experience with AWS support is generally correlated with how much you
pay. After many years of grumbling, we're finally at the highest level and
support is pretty great. As it should be, given the price.

You're exactly right about the "technical salesperson mindset". It's awesome
see new features come out several times a year that feel like direct response
to our feedback. Google is impressive, but I don't get the feeling they would
be as responsive to customer requests.

~~~
dmourati
"Your experience with AWS support is generally correlated with how much you
pay"

Can't say I've found this to be the case. We spend a minor fortune each month,
have premium support, and get really poor help. I thought mostly everyone
agreed AWS support stinks.

Part of the problem, I've realized, is we are not contacting support for
trivial, common items. Rather we engage with them on outages in their service
(ahem "elevated error rates"). On these and other similarly complex issues,
their front-line support staff is ill equipped and they mostly resort to
saying "I've escalated to the service team."

------
sidcool
Quite bike claims made in the post. AWS is the unquestioned standard at my
workplace. I am inkling to fund the GCP a try. Do they have some migration
doc?

~~~
boulos
One of the folks in Developer Relations made this side-by-side service
"mapping": [https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-
clou...](https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/docs/map-aws-google-cloud-
platform) (some aren't really 1:1, but you know close enough). It's not a
"migration doc" but at least gives you a sense of what pieces to put together.
Some services have really easy mappings (say S3 => GCS which supports the S3
XML API except multipart uploads) while others have really obvious
"conceptual" mappings (say EC2 => GCE).

Does that help?

~~~
sidcool
That does give me a direction, thanks a lot!

------
cominatchu
I tried both Google Container Engine and Amazon EC2 Container Service recently
for a docker deployment. Google was the clear winner: they have support for
private registries (Amazon requires you to use a third party or set it all up
yourself), Google gives you a preconfigured, Debian-based base image so you
don't have to do any setup or maintenance (with keys already exchanged that
allow login with the gcloud command, no work required), and Kubernetes itself
(which Google Container Engine uses for orchestration) is really nice. Also
Google cloud logging (currently free) just works out of the box with their
container engine and streams your container's stdout to their logs. Kubernetes
itself is open source so you always have the option to move on your own metal
if your deployment grows to that size. Would highly recommend Google Container
Engine.

~~~
res0nat0r
Also check out Joyent, you can launch containers natively from your laptop on
their cloud bare metal, no underlying instances for you to manage are
required. Plus their 128m size container is only .003c/hr and is billed by the
minute.

~~~
tracker1
It's also worth noting that it's shared cpu prioritization so you will get at
least your allocation, but can burst much higher for cpu bound loads in
practice... though I find that joyent's storage pricing is pretty far out of
line compared to gce, aws and azure and that their pricing all around is a bit
higher. That said, their technology stack for docker is pretty damned cool.

------
cmdli
Somewhat off-topic, but what service do you guys recommend for someone who
just wants a cheap server to play around with (maybe getting something like an
rsync script or BTsync and a website running)?

~~~
TheDong
Some people might say Digital Ocean or Linode or Ramnode or whatev, but I
would go straight to AWS.

The 't2' class of servers are competitive with Digital Ocean in terms of
pricing (roughly the same), especially if you do a 'reserved instance', and
you get a ton of other benefits "for free", like a sane firewall and network,
better monitoring tooling, snapshot tooling, and an easier path forwards if
you do need to expand to other things like databases or s3.

~~~
e12e
How do you figure? The t2.micro is ~10 USD a month with 1GB of transfer. The
comparable ~10USD/month plan at DO includes 2TB of transfer. And Amazon
doesn't have a 5USD/Month plan, which is probably enough?

Apparently 2TB out of a t2.micro comes to an additional charge of 0.09 * 1999
~ 180 USD. What am I missing? That you probably don't want to use bandwith
because no-one will use your hobby projects?

------
anodari
I would use, but still there is no data center in South America.

~~~
milesward
disclaimer: I work for GCP

Would connecting to our network locally scratch the itch?
[https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/](https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/)

