

Google Compute Engine is now Generally Available - aryann
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/12/google-compute-engine-is-now-generally-available.html

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codex
One salient new feature:

Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart

At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software
infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability,
security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that
combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology
to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You
now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without
the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a
failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in
minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to
follow in the coming months.

~~~
tlb
I'm curious about how regular hardware maintenance improves reliability. Are
you just cleaning out dust? Or do you do periodic stress tests to catch
failures early?

~~~
bgoldy
regular maintenance helps with reliability because we do a lot of work
proactively with power, hvac, switches, etc. which reduces likelihood of
failure. Being able to perform maintenance in general is generally good for
the stability of our system.

-Brian

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shuzchen
People looking to test this out might want to try apply for the starterpack
([https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/](https://cloud.google.com/developers/starterpack/)
promo code brdo-in). I know a few people with pretty vague ideas that still
got accepted, although I'm not sure if they'll be more selective now that the
service is generally available.

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recuter
Now you can run any out-of-the-box Linux distribution as well as any kernel or
software you like. We’re also announcing support for SUSE and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux (in Limited Preview) and FreeBSD.

====

Finally! I'm going to try and make TinyCore run:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux)

10MB images, 28MB of RAM, should boot in under 10 seconds.

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trimbo
Before we get into how terrible Google customer support is in general... has
anyone actually _tried_ their phone support for this service and can weigh in
on it?

~~~
rogerbinns
We are having amusing problems with appengine. For example they provide no way
to limit the number of instances they decide to start. If for example you run
out of datastore i/o capacity (it doesn't scale with how much you pay) they
will quite happily start more instances even though they won't help in any
way, and actually make things worse.

We switched to premier which supposedly gets us all sorts of extra stuff, but
for some bizarre reason will no longer show your daily charge breakdowns.

~~~
Strom
There's no way to limit the number of instances that are started, but there is
a way to limit the number of idle instances that you are paying for.

~~~
rogerbinns
It is the former that matters to us. Essentially our code receives an HTTP
request with payload, does sanity checks and formatting, and then a datastore
put. This is not CPU bound - it is idle wait for the datastore to finish.

When you run out of datastore capacity, appengine will start more instances
because it sees the lengthening processing times, but that just makes things
worse. That you cannot stop.

Our load comes from mobile clients and no humans are involved. If they get an
error they try again later. They don't care how long the server side takes to
respond.

It is insane that you can't limit the number of instances. appengine would
create hundreds at some points, which was very lucrative for Google (our daily
fees went from ~$15 to $380 at one point).

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jhgg
I really look forward to a price / performance comparison between GCE and AWS.
Persistent disk performance and no charge for IO looks really nice. It'll be
great to see some real world numbers and benchmarks. Some key metrics I'm
looking for are disk performance, CPU performance (how fast a single core is
rated relative to amazon's ECU) and network performance!

~~~
regecks
There are some initial benchmarks here: [http://serverbear.com/10151/google-
compute-engine](http://serverbear.com/10151/google-compute-engine)

~~~
bgoldy
The guys at Scalr were working on some benchmarking AFAIK. It's not up yet but
I expect it will be soon-ish. [http://blog.scalr.com/](http://blog.scalr.com/)

------
philip1209
This strikes me as an odd time to release the platform. My impression is that
most companies avoid major infrastructure changes during the holiday season to
maintain uptime for the surge in revenue. Even for B2B companies, it is the
final month of the quarter. I would think that early January would be the best
time launch and promote a new service that requires major infrastructure
changes by clients.

~~~
k3n
You'd be surprised, for a lot of industries -- and for select departments of
others -- the holidays are a source of relative slowdown. I've done more than
one migration, roll-out, or refresh over the holidays, since there's usually
less users to concurrently support (and thus downtime is less disruptive).

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albertyw
Amazon EC2 vs Google CE - Fight.

~~~
threeseed
Does anyone just use EC2/CE though ? Surely it is about the entire platform.

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, lots of our customers do deploy to EC2 just to have the VM management
facilities.

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zafirk
Conceptual overview of Compute Engine:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqoXz-W3R80)

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NateDad
No Ubuntu?

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mrwnmonm
now i'm confused between app engine and compute engine :(

