
Google Cloud is 50% cheaper than AWS - yarapavan
https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-than-aws/
======
sirn
Slightly unrelated, but since there seems to be some Google Cloud people in
this thread: I see that Google Cloud account is linked to my Google Account.
What happen to my Google Cloud instances if my Google Account got suspended by
Google due to other reasons (e.g. Pixel stuff from the other day, or because
of YouTube, or etc.) and I did not bought support tier?

~~~
timdorr
On GCP, you create a separate Project entity that can have any number of
Google Accounts linked to it. In that way, the actions of your personal
account don't affect the GCP project (and vice versa).

If you're worried about access, you can establish a service account with Owner
level access. Or you can add other Google Accounts to the project. (Here are
the docs on that:
[https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/overview](https://cloud.google.com/iam/docs/overview))

I personally have all my Google stuff separated into 3 accounts (work,
personal email, and personal Google-y things). My work account has access to
the projects on GCP, along with some coworkers. That puts up enough of a
firewall between various services so that if Google throws down the banhammer,
it's not totally game over for me.

~~~
philiphodgen
Logical self-preservation in action.

And it is a telling indictment of the corporate character displayed by Google:

\- Exploitable for minor personal convenience ("Use Gmail! Use Gcal! Simple
and free!")

\- Not to be trusted under any circumstances with important matters ("We can
evaporate your existence from the internet for all practical purposes and
there's not a damn thing you can do about it.")

Some day, it will become important for us to own our own lives again. And I
say this as someone who runs his business on GApps. I'm as guilty as everyone
else.

~~~
btian
Curious what you mean by "own our own lives again".

Are you planning to run your own email servers (or any other service that
Google provides)? Or just switch to another vendor?

~~~
kinkdr
My answer to this problem is less dramatic; I am just hedging my bets.

For search and maps, I use Google, for personal hardware, Apple, for cloud
servers, AWS, for email, Fastmail on my own domain, and so on.

It is slightly more inconvenient than having one Google account to rule
everything, but it helps me at leas feel a bit saner..

~~~
mark_l_watson
That is great advice. I have the same setup, except I use OVH instead of AWS
because the cost is much lower, but still meets my needs (AWS, GCP, and Azure
are all great services that I have used, no criticism intended).

------
jbyers
"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation."

While I agree that Google's pricing model is superior, the author's position
on reserved instances accounts for ~40% of the cost difference.

In a drag race between instances AWS tends to lose. If you value the enormous
feature and service surface-area that AWS provides it's a different story.
Either way we win; both companies will engage in a brutal price and feature
war for many years to come.

~~~
vgt
I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in Google
Cloud. Google's ecosystem of fully managed services is very rich broad and
compelling, and in many ways far ahead of competition. (work on Google Cloud
but don't get paid to post here)

~~~
Fiahil
> I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in
> Google Cloud.

RDS instances with Postgresql.

~~~
vgt
This is the one that comes up. Hit me up offline. Also, you can always use any
number of partners that provide this functionality.

Let me know if there are any others.

~~~
Fiahil
From the top of my head, a managed Elasticsearch a-la-elastic-cloud would be
very interesting. Their offering is expensive and very frustrating if you
don't have a paid support contract. AWS has something similar, but lacking
features (kopf, kibana, marvel, etc)

~~~
notyourwork
AWS Elasticsearch has kibana built in when you spin up your ES instances.

------
lordnacho
I didn't see any mention of Google's preemptible instances.

I've used them, and they're much cheaper than ordinary instances. They happen
to fit my use case, which is a simple copybigfile-simulate-writeresults done
over hundreds of days of market data.

Preemption does happen, but it tends to happen very early on in a simulation.
Also you don't get billed if it's in the first 10 minutes. For some reason GCE
won't let you auto-restart that instance, but you can just write an API call
that accomplishes the same.

There's also the added benefit that your instance will die after 24 hours, so
you won't get billed for leaving something on by accident.

~~~
tener
If you create an instance group of preemptible instances it will automatically
try to fulfill your demand - no need to write a thing!

~~~
brianwawok
And it's amazing. Over 99% uptime for 1/4 the price.

------
xiaoma
Here's a thought: Things often go wrong.

Would you rather have your mission critical apps relying on Google's customer
service or on Amazon's customer service?

~~~
imperialdrive
We pay 10+k/mo for our AWS support, and it has never paid off, even with
multiple phantom errors and failures... the top level support supposedly being
paged out of bed for me doesn't have answers. Always had to simply restore
from backup without a good report to share with mgmt.

~~~
ignoramous
That's deeply concerning. Can you pls share your aws account ID with me? If
you're not comfortavle doing that, pls share email ID where I can contact you.
Thanks.

------
tzaman
I can confirm that first hand; We're just moving our whole stack from AWS to
GC and right now we're running everything in parallel with roughly the same
amount of resources. AWS monthly bill: ~$1000, GC monthly bill: ~$600

~~~
nodesocket
Seriously this is worse than premature optimization, I like to call it
developer frugalness optimization. A $600 savings is not even worth the
effort.

~~~
tzaman
Agreed - primary motivation weren't savings, but much smoother UX with
Kubernetes on Google. We're adopting container-based approach to development
(and DevOps), so we explored alternatives, and chose Google Cloud.

~~~
ignoramous
Thanks for sharing your experience. Why, acc to you, is Kubernetes on AWS a
non-starter? Is it too difficult to setup? Or maintain? Or simply isn't the
first class citizen, like it's on GCP?

Or does it just make sense to stick with GCP since K8s has Google's blessing?

Or...

~~~
tzaman
Two reasons really, the first is that AWS has become this bloated mess of
"stuff", making it increasingly harder to use, because so much time is needed
to either constantly look at it to see what's new/changed or vigilantly
document everything. GKE, based on my experience, uses more "convention over
configuration" approach, so the UI is much less cluttered, easier to
understand, and comes with good defaults out of the box. And yes, K8s is a
first class citizen on GKE and it overall fits nicely in the google compute
engine environment.

The only downside is that Google Cloud doesn't have a hosted DB offering for
PostgreSQL, like AWS RDS, so it took me a while to set up everything properly.

Finally, from a purely subjective point of view, Google's Material design is
easy on the eyes.

This is roughly what we ended up with for our stack:
[https://cl.ly/1z141g0e1w38](https://cl.ly/1z141g0e1w38) (The top three
instances are K8S, then two GlusterFS instances which hold persistent volumes
for pods and finally three PSQL instances that also run Redis Sentinels with a
quorum of 2 - Redis itself is on Kubernetes as a DaemonSet)

~~~
ignoramous
Thanks a lot for taking time to respond. I've a couple of clarifying
questions:

> Two reasons really, the first is that AWS has become this bloated mess of
> "stuff", making it increasingly harder to use

Are you referring to any specific offerings: CodeDeploy/Beanstalk/EC2? Or
generally the entirety of AWS catalog? I agree that the sheer amount of
configurations and the breath of offerings might appear bloated and there are
parts where AWS looks its age, not necessarily a bad thing, though.

> because so much time is needed to either constantly look at it to see what's
> new/changed or vigilantly document everything

I am not able to relate to this. AWS is pretty serious abt backwards
compatibility and making transitions smooth unless there's a serious security
risk.

Re: Console: This complaint comes up often on HN. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Convention over configuration: K8s seems to be a great piece of software
from what I keep reading abt it. I can understand why anyone would choose to
use it. I am left wondering why it isn't as easily usable on AWS
infrastructure... I guess I must try it out myself, someday.

~~~
tzaman
I'm not referring to any specific offering, but just the sheer amount of ways
to accomplish things on AWS - and the docs don't help, I urge you to compare
(or even time) the process of following the docs in setting up AWS versus GKE
clusters. You'll notice the process is much faster with GKE, especially
because the docs include at least some real-world examples, compared to AWS
where the documentation is almost completely abstract.

And as a "very" curious developer, I always get pulled into analysis
paralysis. Not so with GKE. There's one way to accomplish a particular thing,
the only choice is UI versus CLI - and since most of us have Google accounts
anyway, gettings started with GKE is maybe a couple of commands and you have a
cluster up and running.

Try googling how to set up Jenkins/WordPress on AWS/GKE. A VERY real world
examples and Google provides docs, AWS does not - I'm not interested in high-
level overviews, I want to solve a particular problem.

What AWS needs first and foremost is a competent UX team.

~~~
ranman
Is something like this useful for you? [https://aws.amazon.com/getting-
started/tutorials/](https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/)

~~~
tzaman
Nope, but it illustrates my points perfectly. A company like Amazon should
have hundreds of those, with real use cases that developers (or DevOps) care
about. For instance, I have a Rails/Node/Go/whatever app. How do I deploy it
using any of the available services? Which one is preferred? Why? What about
the connecting services, like Postgres+Redis? (I know there's an offering for
everything, I'd like to know how it all fits together, best practices, etc)

------
benjojo12
Now, If only _I_ could use it in the UK.

Seriously. Every time I sign up, I have no option to sign up as a individual,
only company.

Friends in other regions of the world can sign up as individual, but it
appears google ( in the UK/EU ? ) as decided for whatever reason ( I assume
VAT calculation ) they won't offer it.

I can sign up to and use AWS ( as much as I really don't really want to ) as
myself. Yet there are all of these really nice things coming out of GCP that I
can't use because I simply can't enable billing. (that being said, I do use
google app engine for my blog, and it's fantastic)

------
StreamBright
If any cloud project was a single dimension problem. For me it does not matter
how much cheaper I could run an instance in GCP simply because we rely on
services from AWS that do not exist in GCP yet. Another issue for me with
Google is how they handle account problems. I do not want to find out the hard
way that I should have done some extra safety measures just to keep our entire
production environment safe. With AWS I do not need to worry, their customer
first approach proved to be extremely useful over the years, and they were
very patient with us even when we did something that was against their policy.
My customer trust is not something that is up for sale and I have been
disappointed with Google's customer support several times, this is simple
cannot happen in a cloud infrastructure situation. I like GCP and Azure
because they make sure that I get a good deal on AWS.

------
plandis
This guy has some other really great articles. My favorite is: "GCE vs AWS in
2016: Why you should never use AWS" [1].

[1] [https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-
in-201...](https://thehftguy.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/gce-vs-aws-in-2016-why-
you-should-never-use-amazon/)

------
thevivekpandey
Does someone know _why_ Google Cloud can afford to be so much cheaper compared
to AWS? Are the costs to Amazon for AWS so much higher than the costs to
Google for Google Cloud? Why?

~~~
reitanqild
IIRC I think I have seen some people here argue it is because they have close
to no customer support.

From Amazon however I have even heard about them forgive bills where the
customer was really to blame.

All this is hearsay though and I don't think Amazon does this out of the
goodness of Jeffs heart _but_ as long as enough people think this is how it
works it might be part of why people will use AWS even if it is more
expensive.

~~~
vgt
Our support folks can comment here, but I would disagree with that point. Our
support org is massive, there are varying tiers levels of Support
SCE/CRE/SRE/SWE-level of support, all the way up to [0].

I'll also comment that Google's Eng/PM org is very engaged. It's not unusual
for an engineer in charge of a service to help resolve a customer an issue.

[0] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-
a-n...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-a-new-era-of-
customer-support-Google-Customer-Reliability-Engineering.html)

(work on Google Cloud but do not get paid to post here)

~~~
kuschku
> It's not unusual for an engineer in charge of a service to help resolve a
> customer an issue.

This is not related to Google Cloud, but to GSuite: Or, if you get an engineer
on the phone, through the support number, they just insult you, and hang up on
you, as has happened to me once (back when the free tier of GSuite was still a
thing).

~~~
vgt
That's unacceptable anywhere.

I know Google support spends gobs of time quantifying customer success and
happiness, gets measured and rewarded by these numbers. Nature of support
anywhere is that sadly you'll always have some folks with a bad experience,
all you can do is try to make it right by all.

------
jacques_chester
I've worked with both AWS and GCP (my day job is working on Cloud Foundry).

In every area that I've looked, GCP is so much better than AWS that it's
offensive, bordering on obscene.

It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is _actually
comprehensible_. The APIs are consistent. There's a single console, rather
than a fruit salad of conceptually different consoles under a single domain.
The console is, in fact, navigable without invoking curses. Not even a small
one.

AWS has the massive advantage of inertia. If you're deeply woven into the
higher-level AWS services, I'd probably stay put.

But if you aren't, or you're just beginning, then holy moly you owe it to
yourself to look.

~~~
ranman
>It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually
comprehensible.

The docs have more 404s than trumps twitter account... who payed/paid you to
write this?

~~~
vgt
>>It's faster, cheaper, more configurable. The documentation is actually
comprehensible.

>The docs have more 404s than trumps twitter account... who payed/paid you to
write this?

(ranman works at AWS..and talking to an AWS premier partner... the delicious
irony)

~~~
ignoramous
Jacques doesn't speak for all of Pivotal. Its of course his personal opinion
that GCP is way ahead of AWS. And Jacques, personally, is entitled to his
opinion. There might even be merits to his statement here but he hasn't backed
it up at all with data.

Pls do not pass off his statement here as an official stand by Pivotal. Unless
of course that's what Jacques here meant to do (I wouldn't know)...

~~~
jacques_chester
It is correct that unless I explicitly say otherwise, I do not officially
speak for Pivotal. It'd basically be a terrible idea to give me an official
mouthpiece, given how bombastic I am.

And, of course, my opinion of GCP is just, like, my opinion, man.

In my _personal_ projects I have stuff on AWS. In fact I'll be adding more
soon, since Pivotal Web Services is housed on AWS. And there's still a _lot_
that AWS can do that GCP can't. It's just that, for the tiny slice of the
world I've seen, I like GCP a _lot more_.

No matter which platform you prefer, everyone will benefit from the fierce
triangular tug-o-war between Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Especially if they're on a relocatable platform like Cloud Foundry
(disclosure: Pivotal sells a version of this) or OpenShift.

~~~
ignoramous
I like people who are critical and honest with their assessment. I value your
opinion very highly, since you claim to have experience with the tools you are
assessing.

Thanks for clarifying statements and for the feedback.

I would appreciate immensely if you can elaborate your frustrations with AWS
apart from the ones you have mentioned already. You could either do it here or
I could email you, or if you have a comment trail on this topic on
reddit/hn/twitter, I'd appreciate the links. Thanks once again.

~~~
jacques_chester
Remember, I am frequently wrong and fond of bombast.

I feel that AWS has a strength and weakness in the fact that its longevity has
led to a massive feature set. For those who've grown in expertise alongside
it, AWS seems natural and obvious.

I have instead come to this super-featuresome platform and found myself
totally lost. If I was one of the people who'd consumed the new features
piecemeal over the space of a decade, it wouldn't seem so daunting. I guess
the same will happen to GCP.

But even so, I find it much easier to get around in GCP. The console is
obviously built as a unified experience. It still has a CRUDish flavour to it,
insofar as it requires you to have some of the underlying model in your head
to use efficiently.

But it needs _less_ and it tends to be less of a hunt for the foo that uses
the bar that depends on the baz based on the quux which is ten bloody screens
away under an ill-chosen name.

Oh and AWS console seems to have a vendetta against allowing me to open up a
bunch of tabs easily. I _hate_ that. I usually want to look at two things side
by side because weirdly, I find it hard to retain randomly-generated strings
in my short term memory.

As for performance, GCP brings up VMs extremely quickly, the networking is
really fast and the prices are nicer.

Truthfully, I've touched maybe 5% of what AWS or GCP offer. But the 5% I've
seen is compelling. I think Google are going to finally break their total
reliance on advertising revenue.

~~~
ignoramous
Makes sense. Thanks a lot.

Rest assured AWS isn't turning a blind-eye to its shortcomings. Exciting times
ahead for everyone involved.

------
nucleardog
In any comparison on "cheapest way to run a linux box somewhere" I would
expect AWS to lose. AWS is a platform, not a server rental service. You start
to see value when you build to the platform.

~~~
vgt
I would like to hear what platform bits of AWS that you find lacking in Google
Cloud. Google's ecosystem of fully managed services is very rich broad and
compelling, and in many ways far ahead of competition.

(work on Google Cloud but don't get paid to post here)

~~~
luhn
For me the two big things missing from Google Cloud are a PostgreSQL service
and a Redis service. I'd also need an alternative to CodeDeploy, but I think I
could something that wouldn't be too terrible to self-host.

> in many ways far ahead of competition

Yep. In my experience, when Google Cloud does something, they do it right.

~~~
vgt
Thanks for your feedback!

------
didibus
I hate it when the evangelist swarm the hackernews comments.

On another note, I'm not surprised Google cloud is cheaper as its trailing
behind and offer no other advantage but price to catch up. GCE, Azure and AWS
all pretty much match each other technically, so I suspect the one with least
customers to always offer the better value. So if GCE were to ever become
number 1, I'd suspect it's price to rise and others prices to lower.

------
paulddraper
"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation"

Well that's a huge caveat. Anyone intending to be a serious user of AWS will
use reservations. The discount is large, well over 50% off IIRC. And then
there's the spot instances/spot fleets with even steeper discounts.

For better or worse, AWS's pricing is more complicated then its competitors. A
serious comparison would have to include those details.

~~~
fapjacks
Actually, because you've got to pay in advance a certain amount to get the
reserved price, we calculated at my last job that buying on-demand instances
was actually cheaper than paying the reserved instance pricing listed, because
of the rate at which AWS drops the price regularly. Meaning, if you compare
the reserved price with the amount you would pay for on-demand instances and
subtract the amount you save when Amazon drops the price (which they do pretty
regularly, and have in the past), the on-demand price actually ends up being
cheaper in the long run.

~~~
paulddraper
I think you meant "on-demand", not "spot". Spot is hands down cheaper.
Reserved saves you 30-75% depending on instance type and duration. Spot
instances save 85-90%.

As for on-demand, AFAIK the only time a discount came close to 30%/year was in
2014 when Google Cloud slashed their prices. So...yeah, it might be possible,
but I doubt it.

~~~
fapjacks
Hah, I don't know how you were able to see my first edit. It was up for less
than ten seconds and I didn't have your comment for some time after I edited
it!

~~~
paulddraper
Lucky

------
skywhopper
This article is interesting and the author has some good points about the lack
of small non-burstable instances in AWS. There are plenty of things to gripe
about.

But the headline assertion is ultimately unsupported except in terms of simple
comparison graphs of paper numbers about the raw CPU and memory numbers. Are
the CPU units comparable? Is the networking what it's cracked up to be? How
easy is it to autoscale? Is the capacity you need available when you need it?
How long do instances take to start? What are the dynamic storage options? How
does disk IO performance compare?

I'd be really interested to read an article that attempted to break these down
and do a real comparison. But this article doesn't even attempt a real world
comparison.

~~~
user5994461
> Are the CPU units comparable? Is the networking what it's cracked up to be?
> How easy is it to autoscale? Is the capacity you need available when you
> need it? How long do instances take to start? What are the dynamic storage
> options? How does disk IO performance compare?

In order.

Yes. Google networking is superior (cheaper & faster). Variable, depends on
your application/workload, not just the cloud. Yes. < 30 seconds on Google,
1-3 minutes on AWS. lcoal SSD, remote SSD, or remote HDD on Google VS a mess
of many complex & expensive disks on AWS (it would take more than a blog post
to explain their disk offerings). Google disks are 3-10 times IOPS and/or
bandwidth, lower latency.

This article is just on basic pricing. I plan more articles for the future.
Starting with one on disk benchmark and one on network benchmark.

------
iagooar
Does anyone know if there are any plans to support Postgres by the Cloud SQL?
Because currently it's the major deal breaker to me. I have a SaaS business
that works on Postgres and we don't plan to replace it with any major SQL
alternative.

~~~
htn
There's some indications that Google would support Postgres as part of the
CLoudSQL in the future. But there are already multiple DB-as-a-Service
offerings that provide PostgreSQL in Google Cloud. My company, Aiven
([https://aiven.io](https://aiven.io)) is one of the providers and I believe
Compose, DatabaseLabs and ElephantSQL also provide managed PG in Google Cloud.

~~~
iagooar
Thanks for the recommendation, we will give it a look for sure.

------
0xmohit
Lots of discussion here too: Which cloud provider to use in 2016? AWS or GCE?
[0]

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11515505)

------
estefan
I want to like Google Cloud, but it just seriously lags AWS.

Amazon got everything _so_ right with an ID and secret. GC's oauth is just
cumbersome, and the CLI tools are nowhere near as user friendly as aws-cli.

Two other recent examples - the lack of granularity and inflexibility of GC's
IAM perms (you need to faff around with roles which even as an Owner you can't
create - they need to be done at the org level, WTF?), and GC support is miles
behind.

I opened a support ticket for a critical issue recently, and the initial
response I received when someone looked at it fell into the repeating-back-to-
me-what-I'd-told-them-in-the-ticket category. Then they suggested I "check the
permissions are right", which as I told them "I don't know what's wrong or
what needs checking, that's why I opened the ticket". It's just lucky the
issue didn't affect our prod account or we'd have been in real trouble since
they're still investigating even though we're probably one of their top-tier
customers.

AWS support has always been second to none for me. GC support has always for
me been second to, well, Amazon...

~~~
ranman
I actually like the gcloud CLI -- I wish its output was more tunable (CSV,
Table, JSON)... I also think it's weird they use a ~/.boto config.

~~~
jvolkman
Have you tried '\--format'?

~~~
ranman
that was easier than I expected.

------
pascalxus
I recently visited the google cloud pricing page and had a hard time making
any sense of it all. The pricing isn't at all clear. DigitalOcean on the other
hand, you take one glance at their pricing page and know exactly what your
getting. Google can learning something from that.

~~~
spangry
Thank god I'm not the only one. I keep hearing about how opaque AWS pricing is
compared to GCP, yet I personally cannot make any sense of google's pricing.
It's difficult to explain, but I struggle ti figure out how much I'll be
paying over, say, a month for a GCE instance. It seems like there are too many
variables to keep in my head.

But I'm just a tinkerer/hobbyist. So maybe the reason is because I don't have
a clear idea of what my monthly utilisation is going to look like, or whether
it's going to be consistent. I imagine this would be much clearer for those
running businesses. I dunno...

~~~
manigandham
GCP pricing is far simpler than AWS - just visit any of the product pages to
see the unit costs.

And they have a calculator:
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/)

If you're talking about Compute Engine utilization for billing discounts, they
just mean how long you have it running continuously over the course of a
month.

------
ed_blackburn
How much do google use their own cloud internally? I'm curious and would
better appreciate Google Cloud if I could see it being dogfooded with
something substantial.

~~~
gkop
My understanding is GKE on GCP is kinda sorta a rewrite of the Borg system
Google has used internally for years. Internal services at Google are
encouraged to use GKE, but there's little incentive to migrate from the Borg
infrastructure that has a long track record for reliability. So currently only
a marginal amount of Google services use GKE, but as old services are retired
and new ones developed, the share of services on GKE should grow steadily over
time.

------
ggregoire
A bit off-topic, but

\- AWS has a 12 months free tier [1]

\- Google Cloud has a 2 months free trial [2]

That will make a huge difference when I'll have to choose.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/free](https://aws.amazon.com/free)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/free-trial](https://cloud.google.com/free-trial)

~~~
vgt
Great point. I think it's a matter of different philosophies, and both are
great for customers!

\- AWS gives you specific usage allotments per-month for specific services.

\- Google gives you $300 cash for 2 months to use however you please. just
don't mine bitcoins or generate email spam :)

\- Some folks did the math on AWS free tier to total $247.20 [0]. That is, if
you 100% utilize all the allotments.

\- Google BigQuery, Firebase, and AppEngine also have perpetual free tiers.

[0] [http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/How-much-
are-...](http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/How-much-are-free-
cloud-computing-services-worth)

(work on Google Cloud)

~~~
ggregoire
Thank you for the clarification. :)

------
joaoqalves
Comparing only instance prices is not fair, imho. Amazon charges that because
all of the services/ecosystem they have. Google Cloud is stepping up their
game though, leading to cheaper prices in AWS.

~~~
vgt
Amazon has a very broad offering of great fully managed services, but Google's
no slouch. In fact, many of Google's offerings can be very compelling -
BigQuery, Bigtable, CloudML, PubSub, GKE to name a few.

Just in the "only instances" space you mention Google has a different
strategy. A couple things to mention:

\- Google doesn't have a broad spectrum of instance types. No storage-
optimized or networking optimized. Instead, any instance can just get great
storage attached to it, and any instance gets best-in-class networking.

\- Google's Preemptible VMs are like Spot instances but fixed 75-80% off.
Again, with less fragmentation against instance types + fixed cost, much
easier to rely on Preemptible VMs imo.

\- Google's Load Balancer is global, scalable, anycast IP driven, and backed
by Google Network. If your packets originate in, say, New Zealand, they'll be
talking to a "GCLB instance in our pop in Sydney", which will carry packets on
Google's backbone to the VMs.

\- Custom VM sizes - you can set your own VM/RAM combination for instances.

\- Live Migration. Google manages instance health and maintenance for you,
without forcing restarts.

(Work at Google but not on GCE.. and I don't get paid to post here)

~~~
novembermike
I'm not sure I'd agree that Google has a broad spectrum of instance types. You
can boost up individual components, but for example if I wanted an EC2
instance with as much local SSD space as I can get I could have 6.4 terabytes,
while on GCE I could have 3 TB. If I want memory, Google's willing to give me
200GB, Amazon offers 10x as much.

My impression is that Google has a first class general purpose instance but
you don't really get the breadth of options that EC2 will give you.

~~~
vgt
You bring up a good point. Amazon does give you a better "vertical scaling"
story. I'll still challenge you on the "breadth" when it comes to EC2 - the
philosophy is just very different. Why do you need a "IO optimized instance"
if you want just fast disk - that notion just seems very foreign and
arbitrarily-constrained on Google Cloud.

You bring up Local SSD. Google's Local SSD is just badass by comparison:

\- 680,000 Read and 360,000 Write IOPS included in the cost [0]

\- $0.218 per GB per month. Instance cost is separate.

\- Again, you can attach these to any instance type (hence the point on
fragmentation of instances on EC2)

\- AWS goes up to 365,000 Read and 315,000 "First Write" IOPS. Only if you buy
an i2.8xlarge [2]

\- An i2.8xlarge is $6.82 per hour.

You do the math :)

And someone else did more comparisons here [1]

[0]
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance)

[1] [https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-
have-a...](https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-amazing-
price-to-performance-2a58e7d9b433#.r131j8yfe)

[2]
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instan...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instances.html#i2-instances-
diskperf)

~~~
inframouse
The real problem I have is the low network performance. Yes, yes, before
everyone jumps all over me and points to Jupiter etc.. I understand the
problems in Pb/s bisection bandwidth for the large datacenters. That doesn't
change the fact that I don't need an entire datacenter worth of stuff.. but I
do need an Amdahl-balanced cluster. So big machines with wimpy (20Gb non-RDMA)
networks prevent me doing my HPCish workloads on GCE.

Followed by waiting on GPUs and other user accessible accelerators of course.

~~~
vgt
hit me up, i'll connect you with some folks

------
malloryerik
Does anyone know how much of Google Cloud works inside of China? So, would my
webapp be accessible from the PRC? And what about services that come from a
Google API such as voice-to-text or translation, managed database and so on?

~~~
codesnik
ah, I almost forgot! My gce instances weren't accessible from Hainan. They
aren't accessible from Crymea, also.

------
codesnik
I've used GCE for production servers in the past and was really pleased with
almost every aspect. I have really little "serious" experience with AWS, and
I'd say it's much more.. um, arcane?

I'm genuinly curious, what kind of project/situation would be to actually
prefer AWS to GCE (aside from "we're already on AWS" or "I know AWS and don't
know GCE")?

------
daemonk
Is there a spot instance-like mechanism with google cloud? I regularly request
high memory spot instances (r3.8xlarge) on AWS for 1-2 days processes (genomic
analysis). With spot-pricing it can be pretty cheap.

~~~
dgacmu
Yes. Google calls them "preemptible instances". Unlike the AWS spot instances,
they're fixed price at a discount.

~~~
phonon
Preemptible Instances only can be used for a max of 24 hours, so would not fit
the above usage pattern...though I don't know if AWS spot instances are really
meant to be used for that long either. Of course both allow you to use the
regular non-preemptible on-demand pricing.

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible)

------
jakozaur
Good article though I would disagree about AWS Reserved Instances. Though they
are way more complicated, they can give 40%+ discount and in many use cases
you can run quite a lot of them.

~~~
0xmohit
Isn't it true that those require a 1-yr or 3-yr commitment? You can't move a
reserved instance to another region. IIRC, its tied both to a region and AZ.

OTOH, spot instances can be cheaper but then you should be prepared for those
to vanish anytime.

~~~
needcaffeine
As of September 2016, you can buy a convertible reservation that allows you to
move a reserved instance to a different AZ within a region. Your greater point
still stands but I just wanted to correct one piece of it.

Source: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-
updat...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-update-
convertible-ris-and-regional-benefit/)

~~~
0xmohit
Thanks for the update. The change appears to be relatively recent, and I'm not
surprised being unaware :)

------
nhumrich
Once GC has a RDS like service for postgres, I will switch right away.

------
cdevs
In response to Reserve pricing is bs..

We are moving to aws before the end of the year and it will be a 50% price cut
from the dedicated providers we have been using. Our dedicated servers are
just about out of space and their bs cloud environment is about 350$ for what
you get for 70-80$ on linode. When we need 10-50 processing servers quickly
cloned up we go to linode do our work and try to sling the data back ...it's
all too annoying now. We're moving to aws, reserving some instances for our
client front ends and and booting up what we have to when we need it for
mapreduce jobs. For us reserve pricing isn't so bs.

~~~
gtaylor
It gets a lot more challenging once you outgrow your initial reservations. Or
maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes. As you add more
reservations, it will become something that you are dealing with constantly.

It's terrible.

~~~
cthalupa
>Or maybe you find that you reserved the wrong sizes

You can resize RIs within the same family (ie 1 m4.xlarge to 2 m4.large)

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-
modify...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-
modifying.html)

~~~
gtaylor
Yes, you can. But doing this is not "free", in that you are spending time
doing this (potentially often) instead of an infinite number of other more
productive things.

This alone isn't going to kill your productivity, but it's one of many of the
annoyances of managing a large fleet using RIs. It's a cumulative burden,
between figuring out reservations per-region, consider your baseline vs
spot/on-demand levels, potentially put some other stuff you don't need on the
RI market, and audit how many RIs in your inventory are _actually_ in use.

This is an annoyance when you have a small fleet, but it quickly becomes an
expensive nightmare when you start talking 100+ VMs. You start having to pay
for expensive external tools to manage your expenses because this stuff sucks
so much. Or write a ton of your own tooling (which is not free at all). Or
just have someone who does this manually all the time (also really sucks).

------
avtar
Does anyone know if either Google or Amazon provide credits for non-profits
like Microsoft does [1] for Azure? I haven't been able to find any details but
also not sure if it's something they do offline on a case by case basis.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/philanthropies/product-
donat...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/philanthropies/product-
donations/products/azure)

~~~
13498RtgbDwl
It looks like AWS has a credit program for non-profits[0].

GCP has one for education[1], and a program to use GCP to protect
journalists[2], but I'm not seeing anything for non-profits. You may be able
to get credits by asking them, however.

\--

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/government-
education/nonprofits/](https://aws.amazon.com/government-
education/nonprofits/)

[1] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/06/new-Google-
Clou...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/06/new-Google-Cloud-
Platform-Education-Grants-offer-free-credits-to-students.html)

[2]
[https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/](https://projectshield.withgoogle.com/public/)

~~~
avtar
Thanks! Not sure how I missed that Amazon page. I'll get in touch with them
since having access to Postgres via RDS is very appealing.

------
desireco42
While most will still use AWS, it is great that there are alternatives and
competition. A lot of good points raised here about Amazon as ecosystem.

------
tscanausa
The author of this article mentioned running a database server on raid 10
local ssds. I would whole heatedly recommend against this. There is no
replication on locally ssd ( at all ). If there is a massive hardware failure
there are still situations were all the the data on the local ssds can be
lost.

( Disclosure: I would for Google Cloud Platform Support and have seen this
happen on rare occasions.)

------
jread
GCE is a great platform with many competitive advantages including networking,
flexible configurations and sustained use discounting. However, I'd argue that
using different data points and comparison criteria the opposite hypothesis
could be made in favor of EC2 - e.g. burst instance/storage, spot and reserve
pricing, local SSD and magnetic storage, and others.

~~~
vgt
I agree, you can go into higher granularity a-la-carte on both fronts.. but I
don't think "spot pricing" is that, and neither are local SSD + magnetic
storage (take a look at my local SSD post in this thread).

------
BonoboIO
I would use Google Cloud Storage or S3 Storage but their Traffic charges are
HUGE.

500 GB Storage (Google Cloud Storage Nearline) Storage Fee= $0.01 x 500 = 5
Dollar Retrieval $0.01 x 500 = 5 Dollar Bandwith Charges $0.12 x 500 = 60
DOLLAR

I mean SIXTY DOLLAR just for downloading my backups, they are crazy. Both
companys.

Would use rClone for my backups but OVH OpenStack is kind of buggy and could
not get it to work.

~~~
user5994461
The traffic is free if it's coming from an instance in the same region.

This is really intended for business. Definitely not a good fit for a personal
backup solution.

~~~
BonoboIO
Well i would use it as server backup but in this moment i got rclone woth OVH
running :D

[https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/storage/object-
storage.xml](https://www.ovh.com/us/cloud/storage/object-storage.xml)

10 times cheaper than GC oder AWS

------
nikon
How could I apply for startup credits if I am bootstrapping?

"To Apply, contact your VC, Accelerator, or Incubator and ask about GCP for
Startups application details." [0]

[0]
[https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/](https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/)

------
rmykhajliw
GAE has serious problems: 1\. security, everything accessible for everyone 2\.
billing, it stoped accepting my card an your ago without any notice, hover the
same corporate card works for all other services 3\. support it's 100% per
cent useless. They cannot even fix anything, only claiming they have the same
issue for the last 3 years (that's from my real conversation).

That's why I highly not recommend to have nay relationships with Google Cloud.
It's unpredictable, you just cannot build your business around it. Now it
exists, in 5 minutes they may decided to close the service, change the billing
to unbillable, whatever. And the most scary, NONE, just NONE helps you. It
will be your issue.

------
meow_mix
This is good news for GCS but they will need to compete on more than price if
they want to gain market share.

Saving 500$ / month is minuscule compared to the time it will cost engineers
to migrate from AWS to GCS and get used to the new service.

~~~
movedx
Look at Terraform. With the right infrastructure tooling, it's not hard to
move at all.

Look at Ansible (or Puppet, Chef, Salt, etc.) With the right configuration
management tooling, it's much, much easier to migrate services.

------
coredog64
Is there another source for the 220Mbit/s limit for m4 class instances? I was
under the impression that you could get enhanced networking with those, and
double the speed when paired with placement groups.

~~~
user5994461
The 220Mbits/s is for the m4.large instance, not all the m4 family. The bigger
instances get more.

It is with HVM and enhanced networking. You can "wget
[http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip"](http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip")
and see what speed you get.

------
sebringj
This is why Werner Vogels sweats so much.

------
joe563323
Both AWS and Google Cloud does not support Ipv6. Suprise Surprise

------
homosaphien
I use both clouds extensively while google cloud is cheaper in most cases. But
DynamoDb in AWS is still cheaper than Cloud datastore or big table

------
novaleaf
sorry, but parts of this article are a bit.... dumb.

for example, "minimum production instance", it's comparing a 2cpu aws instance
vs a 1cpu gce. no wonder its "50% cheaper".

I use GCE over AWS, and run aprox 50 vm's. GCE _is_ cheaper, but not nearly as
much as the article claims. the savings is for hardware. data egress cost is
basically the same.

------
snissn
i recently moved a database off of RDS onto a "bare metal" VPS and my queries
are > 10x faster

------
ranman
The author references this post:
[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

But quite obviously only read the headline.

------
Arbinv
Personally I just turn things off when they are not being used and that alone
saves me 60% off my AWS bill. Obviously, it only works for non-prod instances
but that is the bulk of what we use. see www.parkmycloud.com

------
ojr
last time I explored my options, setting environment variables (ENV) were hard
to secure in Google Cloud, I had to push a config.json file that sits on the
server? Whats the point of a cheaper price if I can't even figure out how to
secure the app. There might be cost gains in larger apps but for the small app
I am working on, I'm a big believer of using tools that make you productive
and iterate over parts that makes sense. You shouldn't choose a technology
like Go lang because its cheaper to run than Node.js if you don't know how to
Go

------
ranman
I work at AWS and I have questions for the author about this post:

TL;DR -- I urge all readers to take this post with a grain/boulder of salt:
The author is anonymous, prone to hyperbole and error, and makes multiple
unverified claims. I'm sure he's a nice guy/girl and if we met in real life
I'd be happy to converse over a beer -- but I find the language and
misinformation in the post overly polemic and disingenuous. If this stuff
interests you guys tune into the reinvent livestream next week:
[https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-
streaming/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/)

All numbers are from EU-WEST-1 (Does anyone know why GCE doesn't have a eu-
west-1a? only b,c,d? I'd be curious to know the story there... not trolling --
just curious.)

Graph 2: c4.large has 2 CPUs... n1-standard-1 has 1... comparison on price is
strange? Your point below about optimizing for manageability doesn't really
make sense to me as manageability would stem from config/deploy/etc. -- not
from instance type? Perhaps your language isn't clear. You're anonymous but
I'm guessing english is a second language for you (judging from sentences in
post) so it's possible we're missing your point there. Could you clarify
please?

>"an ancient virtualization technology" source? details? KVM came out in 2007.
Xen came out in 2003. I don't consider either of those dates particularly
ancient but whatever it's your post, use the language you want.

Graph 3: A c4.4xlarge has 16 CPUs, and 30 gigs of RAM. An n1-highcpu-4 has 4
CPUs and <4 gigs of RAM. Comparing the two on price is disingenuous. Your
claims that these are the "production instances" don't make sense to me.

>Network Heavy: So this is a test between two t2.micros in different AZs:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/ranman-
code/2016-11-20+00.58.23.gif](https://s3.amazonaws.com/ranman-
code/2016-11-20+00.58.23.gif)

It shows 1gbps... I ran it literally a minute ago...

So that's 1gbit... Do you mean inbound from public internet or outbound to
public internet? I created an n1-highcpu-4 and had it talk to a c4.xlarge at
1gpbs in (both in eu-west) so your claim that you need a c4.4xlarge for 1gbps
seems dubious.

Test Complete. Summary Results: [ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr [ 4]
0.00-60.00 sec 7.40 GBytes 1.06 Gbits/sec 1297597 sender [ 4] 0.00-60.00 sec
7.40 GBytes 1.06 Gbits/sec receiver

It actually seems like Google's network was the limiting factor there because
when I ran a similar test on a 10gpbs instance I couldn't get faster than
1gpbs. Which is fine because that's what's advertised -- just pointing out
that the need for a c4.4xlarge is wrong. On a c4.large I got 900mbps.

>C4/m4/r3 have a hard cap at 220 mbits

This one is just false. What am I missing here? Where did you get this info?
From eu-west-1 to us-east-1 I get faster than that using public routes and
t2.micros. Internally across availability zones I get __much __faster than
that.

Local SSD #s: Use PIOPS volumes, tunable size, lower cost, can attach to any
instance type. Also consider the numerous other instance types that offer
ephemeral SSDs.

>It is quite flexible. For instance, we could recreate any instance from AWS
on Google Cloud. I don't think you mean _any_ instance... but ok sure!

>Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right, A message by
an employee from Amazon than Google, not directly relevant but still a good
read.

^ I don't think you read the above post when listing it as a reference. The
title is ironic. Steve Yegge quit Google. Famously... on stage... He also goes
on to say that Google can't do platforms. I'm sure that's changed in the past
few years though.

In the end I'm super excited about both AWS and GCP they both have awesome
products. I encourage people to continue researching and writing posts around
these topics. It's hard to not take some of the criticisms personally when
you're passionate and invested in your work (at least it is for me). I've got
a google employee DM-ing on twitter calling me "petulant child" among other
things. We don't need that. It's not helpful for our companies and it's not
helpful for our customers.

I'll encourage everyone to tune in to the reinvent livestream on the 29th,
30th, 1st: [https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-
streaming/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/live-streaming/)

~~~
logmeout
Until bandwidth pricing is fixed rather than nickel and dimeing us to death; a
lot of us will choose fixed pricing alternatives to AWS, GCP and Rackspace.

------
locusm
Is there a roadmap for GCP - wondering if they are coming to Australia?

~~~
dmourati
2017:

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-
Pl...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-Cloud-Platform-
sets-a-course-for-new-horizons.html)

------
mixmastamyk
I find AWS annoying in that the east coast is always cheaper and the price
reductions linked mention more reductions on that side.

Who of the cloud companies is treating California as a first class citizen?

~~~
hrez
Oregon region is on par with east coast.

------
aryehof
My problem with Google Cloud is I find their pricing too opaque. Will I find
myself with a huge bill overnight is my worry. Is there some way to get
started with a cap on my monthly bill?

------
logmeout
Bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing, bandwidth pricing for all the big cloud
providers that charge by the bit rather than a fixed price; all of them are
too expensive.

------
StreamBright
The only feature that any company can copy from a competitor without any
effort is price. It is well known in product circles that you can't compete
with price only, you need to put in other features that make your product
attractive compare to the competitors. I am still waiting for something
extraordinary from GCP that would make me consider them over AWS or Azure.
Price - for me - is simply not enough.

------
epicureanideal
The other 50% is subsidized by the NSA in exchange for direct access to your
servers.

------
disposablezero
This PR propaganda is making the rounds. Most of the real use-cases I've seen
point to self-hosting on AWS is cheaper than using GCE and friends.

Pick whichever service has the cheapest TCO, not what some paid blogger says.

------
kristopolous
Azure is even cheaper

~~~
Ducki
Concerning the Virtual Machine pricings on the discussed platforms, I'd like
to mention that – on very small machines – running Windows Server is
significantly more expensive on Google Loud than on AWS or Azure, because
Google charges you the license fee directly whereas Azure or AWS seem to have
a mixed calculation.

Having the smallest Windows VM on AWS is like 6-7$/month, whereas on GCE
you're at at least 14.60$ higher due to the license.

------
baybal2
well, both still loose to budget app hostings if you count only cost

------
usaphp
I wonder how do they compare to digitalocean?

~~~
jlgaddis
That's not a good comparison to make.

------
mrwnmonm
what makes me choose AWS, is i can survive a year using it without paying too
much money, while in GC you got 300$ to spend in 3 months, which would get you
more powerful machine for this period but you should start paying after it so
if you really don't have money to start with, you have to choose AWS

~~~
Buge
I don't understand. Why not just use a normal amount for the first 60 days.

~~~
mrwnmonm
doesn't matter, it still just 60 days

~~~
Buge
Just 60 days for what? You get full functionality before and after. And you
pay less than AWS before and after.

~~~
mrwnmonm
60 days without paying, for free. while on AWS
[https://aws.amazon.com/free/](https://aws.amazon.com/free/) you could not
paying for a year if your usage is low

~~~
frag
what AWS is giving for 1 year is really really minimal for a PoC or testing
stuff. A small website would already get into trouble

------
hankmort
I test and use all 3 main public cloud providers. I keep Azure out in this
conversation for now:

A quick comparison of GCP & AWS :

The services & flexibility of options offered by GCP is not even in par with
AWS. Yes I may be able to spin up a couple of VMs but when it comes to
enterprise GCP can't be an option. It is like buying the new macbook pro and
can't add more than 16gb memory! A designer for sure needs more ram regardless
even if Macbook pro is offered for free.

\- There are about 50+ 3rd party offerings in Google Cloudlauncher compare to
thousands in AWS Marketplace! \- Choice of server/OS! maximum 8vCPU-7.2Mem in
GCP compare to 192 vCPU and 2TB memory in AWS -NoSQL Big table ( max 30 nodes)
- compare to ( virtually unlimited DynamoDB) -SQL (only MySQL in GCP ) compare
to ( Almost all with exception of DB2 in AWS). \- and so forth - Just having
Lambda, F5 support is damn good reason to go for AWS regardless of how much it
costs. Those are the basic needs of SMB that google can't even offer. \- 60
day trial and 300 dollar limit! compare to 1 year

The whole point of moving to the cloud is to have no limits and be able to
have access to resources whenever you want. Google offering is very limited
for now. This is just a lame marketing move by google and I hope they first
fix their offerings and then compare. I can go to godaddy and say I'm cheaper
maybe! Just check the list of services offered by both and see which one
should be considered for a serious customer.

We are all professional and judge products by testing them, open an account in
both and judge by yourself. When I started using GCP it sounded refined for
basic services but when it comes to Bigdata, monitoring I did not find the
console very integrated nor usable.

~~~
thesandlord
I work for Google Cloud. I think a blanket statement claiming the GCP is 50%
cheaper that AWS is a bad for all the reasons you stated, there is a lot more
than just VM pricing you have to take into account! We are definetly working
on a lot of the things you brought up, I hope this time in 2017 your
experience will be very different.

Want to clarify a few things though:

> \- Choice of server/OS! maximum 8vCPU-7.2Mem in GCP compare to 192 vCPU and
> 2TB memory in AWS

The biggest instance on GCP currently is 32vCPU-120GB. Also, with custom
machine types you can tune your machine and pick exactly how many cores /
memory you need; you are not stuck with predefined instance types.

Curious what OSs AWS supports that GCP does not?

AWS definitely has a better vertical scaling story though.

> \- NoSQL Big table ( max 30 nodes) - compare to ( virtually unlimited
> DynamoDB)

BigTable and DynamoDB are not really comparable. BigTable is much lower level.
The apples to apples comparison is DynamoDB and Datastore, and Datastore is
also unlimited.

> \- 60 day trial and 300 dollar limit! compare to 1 year

I'd also like to see a longer trial for GCP, but the AWS trial gives you 1
year access to basic usage. With GCP, you can spend the $300 any way you like.
Personally I'm not sure which model is better or worse, though I lean towards
the AWS model.

