Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

"We deeply understand" - the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things (wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another CloudFront!

View on HN

The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV...

They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.

What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.

Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.

I'd chose Azure before Google Cloud if I look for AWS alternative. I see more fruitful imagination in Microsoft than in Google! I am highly disappointed by Google - they've missed so many opportunities when it comes to Cloud Computing! They started the negative trend with the ridiculous and pricey AppEngine! And now they continue to lag severely behind Amazon!

Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!

Last time I priced out AWS, Azure and GCE, Azure was by far the most expensive - by a long shot - at least for our usage.

I think Microsoft is looking to capture their F500 base that are highly Windows/AD-centric.

Well, I guess, GCE has won the price war. I haven't checked pricing recently, but it looks vastly cheaper than Azure here: https://www.cloudorado.com/cloud_server_comparison.jsp

Am I missing something?

Well Microsoft also started giving $120k (first 12 months) in free credit to startups that went through most accelerators, whereas equivalent AWS credit has been exhausted by most of us.

Note that for YC, the number is $500k.

I've heard about this as well - a friend's startup has a vast free infrastructure on Azure using the same program, but I think though you'll be in troubles having to migrate to AWS/GCE when you run out of the free credits and your startup survives one year and migration is the last thing you wanna deal with at that time. :)

Google's innovation is what they are doing with Kubernetes. Amazon's ECS is meh when you compare it to Kubernetes. I don't think Azure has done anything yet in this area.

True, but you don't need GCE to run Kubernetes. Also, given GCE is more rudimentary, you need Kubernetest with GCE more than you need it with AWS. For example, if you want to run Elasticsearch or a video transcoding service, you need something like Kubernetes on GCE, but you already get a managed service from AWS that does this well.

With Lambda, API Gateway, WAF, and ECS, DynamoDB or RDS, you pretty much can cover 95% of the usage scenarios.

As others have pointed out, Google's CDN does not have as many users and content as other CDN services yet. So, of course it is faster than others.

Edit: retracted, after a closer look at your previous comments.

Aww, he's just excited! He really does work for Monsanto, not Google and if you go back far enough you'll see he's used AWS, GCP, and Open Stack (and seems to enjoy meditation). So he's not some sort of shill, just a happy customer!

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

I'm not sure if it's related to his work at Monsanto and the exposure to GMOs and herbicides, but based on his info, he is an obvious case of illeism [0]. I'm joking, of course. :)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illeism

I did PhD in Cloud and Big Data (Created a Cloud and Big Data platform for crunching large scale images on satellite clusters). I spent about 10 years of my life working on nothing but Cloud and Big Data. And I rarely do comment on anything outside my area of expertise. If you find any of my comments incorrect or interesting, I will be more than happy to engage in a conversation with you. This is also third or fourth time an account has been created to reply to my comments. I find it very interesting!

At least mgnacl's nick is explicit in telling you to take his/her comment with a grain of salt.

Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud.

Any reference for this claim?

rajeevk, I can not reply to your comment, so posting here. Just take a look at my comments on hn. I compared Aws and Google cloud in terms of ease of use, pricing, open source friendliness, scalability, security, performance etc .. You can find a detail answer as to why I came to this conclusion.

Honest question: Have you actually used GCE for any length of time?

Having used both AWS and GCE, and I vastly prefer GCE. It is simply easier to use and offers better price/performance.

Easier to use? If you understand "cloud computing" as "VMs in the cloud" than Digital Ocean is much cheaper and easiest to use. To me, "a cloud" is a few steps beyond just the rudimentary VM hosting - I get a lot of services from AWS that I need to implement and maintain myself with GCE or other cloud vendors. Okay, I agree, Google is catching up, but AWS is still years ahead with things like CloudFormation, OpsWorks, ElastiCache, RDS, Elastic Transcoder, WAS, SQS, and the likes.

I have used both GCE and AWS. Current I have website that is hosted on GCE, but I am using Cloudways managed platform because I am not good with server configuration thing. GCE is definitely better in performance and cheaper in pricing than AWS. Their block storage is more than AWS and they have native load-balancing technology which AWS does not have have. The only downside I have felt with GCE is that they are present in less regions than AWS. Google should also work on expanding their presence to more regions.

Well, there's spot instance pricing and reserved instances with AWS that nobody can touch. What "native load balancing" are you referring to that has no equivalent with AWS? There are many options for EBS - including magnetic storage. I doubt you can beat the speed of EBS with provisioned IO! Maybe you weren't using the right type for your need!

From AWS article on Best Practices in Evaluating Elastic Load Balancing, section Pre-Warming the Load Balancer:

"In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected, or in the case where a load test cannot be configured to gradually increase traffic, we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer "pre-warmed". We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request/response that you will be testing."

Edit: This means ELB could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.

Although we've used to call support and request a higher capacity ELBs (you can't get this automatically), recently we stopped doing it recently and handle spikes from 1,000 to 100,000 concurrent users within a couple of minutes without a sweat. By the way, many people are unaware, but CloudFront distributions also need to be upgrade to handle spikes similarly to ELBs.

We have our own spare capacity product called preemptible VMs (cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms) with a similar discount and no need for bidding (Disclaimer: I worked on it). Also, we don't have reserved instances because our sustained use discounts, per-minute billing and continued year-on-year price drops make more sense than any of the RI combos (1 yr is worse than our pricing with sustained use, 3 years locks you out of price drops).

As to load balancing, I assume the poster is referring to the need to "pre-warm" ELB if you actually want to scale while our Maglev based load balancing goes from 0 to 1M qps within a minute.

Finally, EBS with provisioned IOPS is a good product! But so is PD-SSD, and you don't need to be a storage expert to get the best performance.

As others have pointed out, we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. Give us a closer look!

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

Amazon just released two more EBS options today, which obviously cover more of the application spectrum: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ebs-update-new-cold-...

You're in luck: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/03/announcing-two-... (Oregon and Japan this year, more to come)

That's a great news. The article mentions that more will be added throughout 2017, this means GCE is slowly catching up with AWS.

price isn't true, the cheapest setup in AWS is cheaper than the cheapest setup in GCE. If your on low margin you probably never go to GCE.

CloudFront and what Google has shipped here are completely different things. I don't really understand your anger here TBH. Might be worth playing with GCP again if you haven't in a while. It's much better than AWS and Azure.

Good point. Isn't the Fastly VCL configuration proprietary? What if you need to move to another CDN?

Sorry, I had to clarify: VCL [0] stands for "Varnish Configuration Language", i.e. you can move to another CDN that supports VCL (although I'm not aware of any other) or move to your own Varnish servers.

[0]: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com