

Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices - valhallarecords
http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2013/04/google-compute-engine-expanded.html

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icey
After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down
services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their
infrastructure.

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declan
When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy
development like GCE and GAE?

They may have, I admit, but I can't think of any. The point is raising the
standard Google Reader/Google Buzz/etc. free examples isn't really apropos.

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gwern
> When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy
> development like GCE and GAE?

As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down
services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an
important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more
advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under
heavy development _and_ was shut down during said development. However, I
think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death
knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its
heyday.

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rattray
This sounds very interesting -- is it public or can you make it public?

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gwern
It's not public yet; I haven't finished it (I need to code 4 variables for
like 100 entries, since I only thought of the variables partway through
assembling the list, and I have 3 or 4 pages to check for additional entries)
and the analysis (logistic regression on the variables, and survival curves).

The idea is to try to predict future shut downs, but it's turned out to be a
lot more work than I expected...

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thomasjames
Does anyone know what the effective bandwidth and latency would be between
machines? They talk about thousands of cores a little too casually. I guess
they mean unrelated independent instances of some task as opposed to actual
parallelism. I am confused as to what market segment they are going for here.

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ldargin
According to this review, their bandwidth is high and latency low, compared to
EC2: <http://bit.ly/Z3Peob>

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andrewem
Non-shortened link: [http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-
compu...](http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-
engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/)

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outside1234
Is anyone actually using compute engine here? Would be interested in your
experiences. The scalr reference point sounds like payola to me.

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icco
I'm using it (and I have seen similar results consistently to scalr's), but I
also work for Google (and my load is a minecraft server, not a business), so I
guess my opinion is biased.

Here's another review though: <http://www.stackdriver.com/gce-cassandra/>

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t0
$93/month seems a bit outrageous. What do they offer that makes it worth this
much?

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tonfa
The fastest (at least in term of terasort) hadoop platform?

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IheartApplesDix
Is that a question or a statement?

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espeed
MapR breaks the Hadoop TeraSort world record using Google Compute Engine
(<https://plus.google.com/+GoogleDevelopers/posts/NURRXZ985XV>)

Video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iQzMoy41_k>

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veesahni
4% seems underwhelming given regular double digit reductions from amazon

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bhangi
Did I read correctly that you have to sign up for a Gold Support Package @
$400 / month before you have access to GCE?

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wmf
At this point, yes.

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donretag
Still waiting for naked domains...

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dagw
I'm seeing lots of numbers here of throughput, latency and IO, all of which
are great, but does anyone have any experience with cpu performance. Will a
GCE High CPU machine beat an EC2 high CPU machine in straight flops?

~~~
wmf
It's KVM on Sandy Bridge; effectively the same as EC2 cluster compute.
[http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-
com...](http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-compute-
engine-for-video-transcoding/)

~~~
icco
Where in that article does it say anything about KVM or sandy bridge?

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kalgen
Under Raw Transcoding Speed: "Intel Xeon (Sandy Bridge – probably E5-2670) – 8
cores @ 2.60GHz" Also KVM: <https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/faq>
and 2.6Ghz Sandy Bridge:
[https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resourc...](https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/available_resources)

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OGinparadise
These are paid services but before I'd jump in, Google would have to guarantee
this service for say 5 years, with updates and no catch (like increasing the
price by 5000% to force you out.) Microsoft is a lot of things, but one they
do good is guaranteed, long term, support for their products. At least for the
core ones. For example they are still supporting Windows XP, so when Coca Cola
signs at the dotted line they know that the hundreds of millions they spend on
developing their specific apps, they will serve them for at least 10 years.
That's worth extra to me and apparently to many others.

Going all in in Google an then Google deciding that their latest experiment is
not worth their time is painful. It will most likely ruin the start-up. This
may seem as an emotional knee-jerk reaction to Reader, but it's the reality.
You cannot throw 100 things against the wall, ask people to invest time and
money on them and then drop all but a few of them. Trust is gone, fool me once
and all...

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ccorda
As part of their pricing switch a few years ago, Google committed to a 3 year
depcreation period for App Engine:
[http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-
for-g...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/year-ahead-for-google-
app-engine.html)

"For App Engine, leaving Preview will include providing all paid users a
99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support,
billing via invoice, a new Terms of Service agreement geared towards
businesses, and a new, easier to understand usage-based pricing structure for
App Engine that is in line with the value App Engine provides. It will also
reaffirm our deprecation policy whereby we will support deprecated versions of
product APIs for 3 years, allowing applications written to prior API
specifications to continue to function."

A quick comparison of the TOS shows that Compute Engine doesn't have the same
policy, but IANAL, so I could be missing something.

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magicalist
it looks like you get one year from announcement of deprecation:
<https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/terms> (see 7.3)

Compute Engine also isn't really in the same realm of worry as App Engine, for
some, at least. Most of what you're getting is immediately migrateable if it's
going to be shut down, as opposed to app engine, where there are _some_
migration paths to similar stacks, but no flip-a-switch path to converting
existing code and data to a "standard" stack (at least from my understanding.
I haven't tried compute engine).

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jsnk
Does anyone have experience in deploying Rails app to both Amazon EC2 and
Google App Engine? How was your experience in terms of price, speed and
easiness of deploying/maintaining?

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ww520
I haven't looked at AppEngine lately but I believe you cannot run Rails on it.
It has its own proprietary service and API that you have to write against.
It's not like EC2 where you pretty much can install anything and do whatever.

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ldargin
You should be able to run Rails apps on AppEngine through JRuby.

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ww520
Is there an ActiveRecord binding to AppEngine Datastore?

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ldargin
I don't think so, but you should be able to use a "Google Cloud SQL" db, which
is MySQL.

