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Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.

Which services are you comparing? We (sadly) make our pricing table for Compute Engine (GCE) look a lot like EC2. Just looking at rates misses the advantage of per-minute billing for certain workloads (e.g. Batch compute or autoscaled anything) and our "sustained use discount" which gives you roughly the same discount as EC2 reserved instances but without having to do anything. As I said to someone recently, our model isn't super simple to "understand" but it's way easier: we always give you the best price.

The same thing goes for GCS vs S3, general network pricing, etc.

Have you tried our pricing calculator (https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/)?

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Just curious, do you have anything to do with whatever infrastructure the Apps Script scripts run on? I normally like the Google Sheets app and find it really handy to collaborate with, but just a few days ago, I wrote an utterly trivial script for the first time in Apps Script to do some formatting changes on a small sheet automatically. This is like a 20 line script with one loop that runs through like 5 times, the kind of thing you'd expect should run in under 1ms on pretty much anything. I didn't time it when I ran it, but I'm pretty sure it took over a minute to run, certainly much more than a few seconds. What's the deal with that?

Can you tell me why your disk latency and throughput is so horrible, even compared to AWS? I've seen ioping spikes in the 7-8 ms range and it has far worse throughput than AWS.

Also any idea if your folks are ever going to let people set RDNS records for their IPs? It has been requested but no one at GCE seems to communicate.

Oh wow... I didn't know Google lacks the ability for customers to specify reverse DNS. I had assumed any full-service cloud provider would offer this feature.

If Google doesn't have configurable RDNS, they're not a "one-stop shop" for all hosting needs. For example, a customer wouldn't send transactional e-mails from a server at Google because the lack of RDNS would affect deliverability.

We are most definitely not a one-stop shop yet. We don't even have IPv6 on GCE (I recommend Linode for low traffic IPv6 to IPv4 bridges).

Moreover, (sadly) your example doesn't hold anyway: sending email is actually something all cloud providers try to avoid (SoftLayer in Brazil lately is the notable exception). So getting anyone to whitelist your smtp and other ports is usually an unpleasant experience.

Oh, this actually works great at AWS, yeah! We've been sending transactional e-mails from our servers at Amazon for a couple of years. They do require you to request the e-mail ports be unblocked, but once we made the request it was approved within 24 hours. As a bonus, the same request form also has a space where you tell them what you want your reverse DNS to be. Very handy.

Last year Microsoft also announced Azure support for reverse DNS entries. So I would anticipate Google getting on this "bandwagon" fairly soon too. Just my guess though!

Which "disk"?

We've got Persistent Disks aka PD (logically similar to EBS / network storage) that come in both a "hard drive" variety and an "ssd" variety, as well as local SSD.

I assume you're talking about one of the PD products, most likely PD-SSD and comparing to one of the EBS offerings (either the new one or a piops one)?

If so, unlike traditional EBS, PD scales throughput according to disk size [1]. You get 30 IOPS/GB up to 15k or so. As far as latency goes, what instance were you testing on? Your VM's I/O competes for cycles with your vCPU (this is true of all KVM-based virtualization), so if you spike up your CPU you can easily "starve" your I/O threads or vice versa.

As to your DNS question, I'll have to look into that. But where are you trying to communicate? (I mean clearly you found me, but I mean where else)

Sure I use SSD Persistent disk and the latency is pretty horrible with the throughput being worse, it is much slower than a similar AWS EBS volume.

--- /dev/sda1 (device 20.0 GiB) ioping statistics --- 13 requests completed in 12.5 s, 161 iops, 647.9 KiB/s min/avg/max/mdev = 213 us / 6.2 ms / 18.2 ms / 6.0 ms

This is pretty bad, everything on AWS is under a millisecond.

I submit feedback through the feedback links in the panel and on the product forums. Since you folks don't offer any other way of communicating.

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