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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

Google has all the exact same offerings as AWS.

The IaaS part is called GCE (Google Compute Engine): https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing

Given all your comments in this thread. You seem to struggle quite a lot to understand the market and you didn't clarify what you want to achieve (how many servers do you have now? how many applications do you run? how many dev? how big is your company?)

So forgive me for thinking you are either a hobbyist or a newcomer, with rather simple needs. If that's the case, GCE and AWS are overkill. You should stick to Digital Ocean or Linode. It's wayyy simpler and cheaper.

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This isn't entirely accurate as far as I'm aware. I lean very heavily on Lambda and Google's alternative - Cloud Functions - isn't even available to the public yet since it's invite only and still in alpha.

While true, that's certainly changing (hint, soon). You could also turn the comparison around: AWS has nothing like Dataflow or BigQuery (Redshift only sort of counts). Or even more amusingly, AWS doesn't have a hosted Kubernetes product ;).

So I think the parent comment applies, for many people Google Cloud has more than enough services to be considered like-for-like, is missing some you may care about deeply (Redis!), but may have others that AWS doesn't.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

PS: I'm assuming you're in the Cloud Functions Alpha, if not, feel free to send along your project number and we'll whitelist you.

I think you guys should really take a look at the scenarios people are using lambda for and show how those map to appengine, cloud functions, and even endpoints, because they all more than make up for lambda's functionality.

Yeah, that was in no way meant to detract from the rest of the Google Cloud offering. I only bring it up because we were just recently looking to migrate some of our serverless tooling (API Gateway/Lambda/Dynamo) and I really wanted to have a crack at the Google stuff (Endpoints/Functions/Datastore), but couldn't since I couldn't get into the alpha.

Is using Digital Ocean and administering your own box simpler than using the off the shelf DB/storage options provide db AWS?

Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security work. Albeit for more money but time = money.

I don't think AWS is really simpler unless you have lots of hosts to manage. Maybe if you have 3 hosts AWS might be simpler, for some workloads. Most workloads, probably more like 10, and only if you're scaling out, not maintaining 10 totally different fiddly low-traffic apps.

> Surely the AWS options save you doing all the DBA / Server admin / security work. Albeit for more money but time = money.

They do, but you need to invest enough to understand AWS's offerings, and how they fit together. Amazon's documentation is very extensive, I'll give it that - but it takes a while to build enough of a mental model to know how to fit everything together.

Generally, managing your own server is closer to the skillset people already have when starting out (unless your training was platform-specific), so starting off with a raw VPS may in fact be quicker, even if in the long term AWS/Google/etc. would save time for someone who's equally experienced in both.

It would be interesting to see how well the AWS/Azure SaaS offerings for db and other storage work from DO/Linode at various locations...

I've thought about running an app or two on DO, but keeping the data in Azure Storage Tables, and possible Azure SQL... or similar AWS services.

You would pay a lot for the egress ($.08/GB or so) and it'd be painfully far away. MySQL ends up caching queries quite well for many web apps, so you quickly get into sub-ms territory for it to just return the cached answer. This all goes out the window, even if you're 5ms away (say DO in San Francisco to AWS in Northern California).

tl;dr: Don't do it.

My opinion on this is that you still learn and deploy on AWS or GCE. The learning curve might be steep at first but it'll save a lot of heartache when your organization scales or you want to set up a complex deployment that one of the smaller players don't necessarily support.

Classic premature optimisation. Those hours spent mastering the 10s of products you need to use to do it the 'right' way would be better spent on marketing, business logic, and 5 minutes installing apache + php on a Digital Ocean droplet which also is the dev environment.

If your company suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune & needs to migrate, you can paid someone who is an expert to help you migrate, because that's their business, and yours is presumably something else.

That is a false dichotomy. The reality should fall in between, learn enough to understand some of the design choices you make, but don't overcook it.

Learn enough to go live. Hire people who know the rest.

Learn enough to do the rest if you want to work for someone else doing the rest.

I don't think it's a false dichotomy: I can only do one thing at a time, and my time is limited.

You don't need to be a cloud expert to start with GCE or EC2 instead of a VPS provider. If you end up just going straight to GCE instead of a droplet that's not a big mental hurdle. Then as the parent said, if you suddenly need to scale up, bolt on other services (like say GCS or Cloud SQL) you're not starting with a migration.

You will spend more than $5/month on either AWS or GCP, but the example here seems focused on a business not a throwaway. So IMO, it is more like premature optimization to have a $5/month droplet instead of a $30/month set of GCE instances.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Okay this is like your 6 or 7th post in this discussion advertising for Google. Can we stop wth the spam now?

Sigh. I didn't want to respond, but someone pointed out to me that you work at Amazon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181599). I think it's fair to say that in a thread asking about alternatives to AWS, I was both factual and disclosed my non-trivial source of potential bias (so my statements didn't constitute spam).

Again, I don't mean this to be an ad hominem response, but I take the disclosure "expectation" seriously, and it's frustrating to see folks (competitor or not) try to squelch discussion.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

> when your organization scales

Case in point: AWS/GCE are intended for organizations. If you're not operating an organization, they're overkill.

Do the Quick test: Is your budget less than $100/month? If yes, use Digital Ocean.

I'm not sure I agree! Yours isn't a bad test, but honestly for many people I route them to App Engine depending on their need ("you just want a simple Python web app with no traffic and no hassle? Yeah, you should use GAE").

Having to deal with any infrastructure at all, even for a few hours per year is certainly going to make a VPS a worse choice for some folks.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Or he can use something like Heroku.

Which is just using AWS and is at least twice as expensive.

And allows to forget about lot of configuration, automation and scaling. Which also has lot of value.

Sure, from a usability point of view, I enjoyed Heroku a lot and it's certainly easier to use than Elastic Beanstalk. If it just wasn't that expensive. Amazon drops their prices around twice a year (AFAIR), but I cannot remember Heroku ever dropping their prices. They did change their pricing structure recently, but I wasn't able to tell if it actually got cheaper or not.

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