
Viewing Sizing Recommendations for Instances - vgt
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/viewing-sizing-recommendations-for-instances
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ken47
Google Cloud gets a +1 for this. When a big corp does the right thing for its
customers, they take notice.

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vasco
"Trusted Advisor" on the AWS Console has been doing this for a long time, for
several types of under-utilized, not only instances. Not only this but it also
notifies you when you're reaching default limits so you can put in a support
request for limit increase before you hit them.

~~~
user5994461
You gotta pay 10% on top of your bill to have Trusted Advisor. (that's part of
the pro support plan).

Last I checked there was no advice on instance size. I've seen one or two,
nothing meaningful.

There are lots of advice for reserving instances though, and they are
extremely poor. Listening to them would be a good way for us to waste
$10k/month :D

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snambi
Eventually google is going to disrupt the cloud industry, just like how they
disrupted the Ad industry by having analytics and providing users with right
price and catering to their exact needs.

~~~
balls187
That seems very doubtful.

Google started with a dominant search platform. They don't have that luxury
with Cloud.

Google used to have a near monopoly on solving hard CS problems, with an army
of very very very smart CS grads. They could produce software that no other
company could.

These days, many other companies have invested in growing their army of top
tier CS devs, and so they are able to make software equally as impressive.

~~~
vgt
While advantage Google has enjoyed is slimmer, I think it's a fallacy to think
that technology has been commoditized.

Slight oversimplification, but Google's had basically S3/GCS and Hadoop since
early 2000s, and basically Docker + Kubernetes for the past 10. This
translates into real-world edge.

For example, how many big data tools have any one of the 15 characteristics of
BigQuery that I described at [0]? Or how many companies have inter-data center
networking that gives you a Petabit of bisectional bandwidth, described at
[1], or how many cloud providers have live migration, custom VMs, or insane
RAM-like local SSD? Or how many PaaS offerings can sustain a behemoth like
Snapchat? Or a NoSQL that scales to 56 million qps with just a handful of
engineers [2] ??

Edit: To add more color. In days past, Google would release papers (GFS,
MapReduce, Bigtable, etc). With Google Cloud Platform we can just externalize
these services (with a bit of customer-friendly bits like isolation, pricing,
etc). Bigtable, BigQuery (Dremel), PubSub to name a few.

(clearly biased, since I work at Google)

[0][https://medium.com/p/6654841fa2dc](https://medium.com/p/6654841fa2dc)

[1][https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/06/A-Look-
Inside-G...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2015/06/A-Look-Inside-
Googles-Data-Center-Networks.html)

[2][https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-
servi...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/financial-services-
firm-processes-25-billion-stock-market-events-per-hour-with-Google-Cloud-
Bigtable.html)

~~~
valarauca1
These are good points. Google does offer services that nobody else has. Some
that are very easy to use, and competitively advantageous.

Except... Customer service for cloud platforms is terrible. Not only is there
an image problem. The fact that there is almost a blog post about Google Cloud
Service screwing over a customer and just flat not communicating happens every
2-3 months.

~~~
tscanausa
If you have an case ids, where you had terrible service with Google Cloud
Platform Support, please send them to me (tsg@google.com) and I will
investigate them.

Best, Terrance

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dasmoth
This makes me a little nervous. The linked page admits that sometimes there
are good reasons for machines to look "underused", but how much luck am I
going to have explaining that to a bean counter who thinks he's seen a way to
save some money.

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Johnny555
If the bean counter is making hardware decisions for the Operations team, then
the company deserves what it gets.

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amelius
Why not automatically give me my money back when my VMs are underutilized? :)

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hueving
Because the reserved resources were not available for other customers.

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amelius
That needs fixing then :)

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_wmd
> During Beta, sizing recommendations are available free of charge. However,
> Google might charge for this feature in future releases

Heh. "We've established enough foothold to compete with EC2 therefore we're
preparing to pull an App Engine

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thesandlord
This is the standard banner for alpha/beta services. Some become permanently
free once they go GA (i.e Cloud Shell) while others become paid (i.e Cloud
Vision API)

I work for Google Cloud.

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user5994461
Google Cloud 1 - Amazon AWS 0

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triplebit
Bandwidth pricing for small operations, bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing.

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markwaldron
Does GCE have the ability to automatically resize based on the
recommendations?

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dvcrn
not automatically because the machine needs to get restarted. Can't do that
with a production app

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homerguy69
If your production services are properly balanced it should be possible. Not
sure if the functionality is available.

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brianwawok
It is not. Not sure this is the right way to do it anyway.

