
Google not Amazon. Make fantastic savings in a server-less world - vgt
https://in.3wks.com.au/google-not-amazon-make-fantastic-savings-in-a-serverless-world-b6d37710839c
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aclsid
Excuse me for being so stubborn, but this article reads like a paid for piece
by Google. There is not enough information about who Andrew Walker is, and
last time I checked, you needed to have some real professional help to create
those kind of infographics.

Oh, and I have just checked, and I really hate when people do this without a
disclaimer: "3wks has been a Google Cloud Services Partner since 2012,
building digital solutions for enterprise customers and public sector
organisations specialising in web and mobile solutions on GCP."

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ariwilson
Sorry, why do you need professional help from Google to create infographics?

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aclsid
I did not say the help needed to come from Google, but that it had to be paid
for, and not exactly with pocket change.

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toomuchtodo
> Why is IT ignoring Google’s server-less cloud infrastructure? They’re
> playing with their toys on Amazon and it’s costing tens of millions in
> missed business automation opportunities.

Because serverless at scale is phenomenally expensive compared to instances +
ops. Solid for prototyping or where you just need to fire off some functions
though.

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eropple
Another devops thread, another time I end up agreeing with 'toomuchtodo.
"Serverless" is sneaky-expensive. It's not a particularly practical model once
you've gone past trivial stuff; maybe that'll change, but operations for
instances and even your more involved boondoggles like container-fleets-on-
cloud-compute are pretty well-understood at this point in ways that serverless
stuff still isn't.

But yeah, they're "toys". Risk and cost? Who cares. Let's blog.

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sillysaurus3
Could anyone give a breakdown on why it's more expensive (and where the money
goes)? Interesting stuff.

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eropple
Both Google and Amazon charge based on compute heft per second (Amazon in GB-
seconds, Google in a mix of GB-seconds and GHz-seconds). When you multiply
that out, it overtakes EC2 pricing at a point; I've done the math out for
different types of sites before, and it obviously varies by stack, but you hit
those breakpoints a lot sooner than you might otherwise expect. One project's
workload was something like 10 req/sec and the Lambda costs were more than
three load-balanced m4.larges (edit: load-balanced for fault tolerance more
than load) due to RAM usage that was per-request in Lambda but amortized
across all requests on instances.

Serverless stuff can make a lot of sense for low-utilization tasks under this
model, but for applications with nontrivial load you may be paying for a lot
of GB-seconds on an ongoing basis. Couple that with the additional latency
inherent to spin-up times when putting Lambda behind an HTTP endpoint, and it
also runs the risk of being a kinda-janky experience for the user, too (though
this can be mitigated), and I'm very not-a-fan past toy/proof-of-concept
problems.

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toomuchtodo
Perfect explanation as usual.

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brad0
I'd love to see this backed up with actual cost comparison breakdown on google
vs Amazon.

Also, I'm not sure the article 100% clarifies what it means by serverless.
Does it mean "functions as a service", or something else? The term serverless
is overloaded these days.

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IshKebab
I think it means anything that doesn't require you to know or even decide how
many servers you are using. It automatically scales by default.

It would include App Engine and Elastic Beanstalk, but also 'functions as a
service' like AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions.

The author is clearly talking about App Engine, but comparing it to EC2 which
is definitely not serverless, and very disingenuous. Even Google has an
'normal' non-serverless EC2-like option now.

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sheeshkebab
Aws has plenty of serverless - s3,dynamo,cloudfront,lamda,sqs, I could say rds
and beanstalk are also kind of serverless, in loose way.

And aws is cheap...until it becomes not cheap (usually after you hit some
numbers, or start dealing with "compliance").

On google side, Gcp app engine is kinda bleh... kubernetes is probably the
best thing they have, but it's useful up to a point. And once you cross the
"point" you start spending shit tons of money - and unless you are
snapchat/YouTube it's hard to swallow it too.

Bottom line - aws might be marginally more expensive at first, but it has
plenty of ways to keep things cheap if you are so inclined and flexible enough
to meet all kinds of it needs (at a price of course).

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yellowapple
I stopped reading at the first subheader, since it immediately betrayed the
author's own ignorance regarding AWS' support for both automation and
"serverless" software. Lambda is by no means obscure, nor is CloudFormation.

Calling one's target audience "ignorant" does not make for a good argument,
while we're at it.

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Mizza
Surely, this person works for Google. Anybody who has actually dealt with any
of this stuff in production knows that Amazon is the industry leader for a
reason and that Google is way, way back in third place.

As with all things: you get what you pay for.

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Veratyr
> Anybody who has actually dealt with any of this stuff in production knows
> that Amazon is the industry leader for a reason and that Google is way, way
> back in third place.

Though I haven't worked with either cloud extensively (I mainly play with them
for pet projects), I think that's an overly strong and awfully generalized
assertion. There are a number of other, less Google-press-release, experiences
around that show a preference for Google.

Instead of saying "anybody knows", could you offer some actual reasons you
believe AWS to be superior? That would be much more constructive and
appreciated.

I'll start by saying that I find AWS' control panel infuriating to use but
complete in functionality while Google's is much nicer to use but often lacks
features, annoyingly forcing you to use their command line tools. I also find
Google's built in quotas to be too low to actually do much with it and I hate
that I had to "apply" for an increase. On the other hand, I like Google's
billing much more than AWS; their sustained use discounts are easy to figure
out and don't require an upfront commitment, which as an individual I'm not
likely to want to pay for.

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gkanapathy
There is a deeper level of vendor lock-in for serverless vs servers as well.

