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Comment by richardwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

I find the "do not have an alternative in the market" comment interesting - is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does?

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Come on, HN. How can nobody be mentioning some of the much cooler stuff available on Google Cloud?

https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/

It's a mistake to just compare Google with AWS, thinking in terms of basic storage and computing. That's boring and obviously there are tons of alternatives, including Snap Inc. building it themselves, for the amount of money cited.

When it comes to cutting edge AI and related, Google's offerings clearly stand out among other cloud services.

How is it different from Azure ML and Microsoft Cognitive services?

I'm guessing it's their incredible amount of user data to drive that ML and AI.

Are these sorts of things latency-sensitive enough that they couldn't use them with EC2 and similar? Or are the bandwidth needs so large that bandwidth charges cancel out any compute savings?

Are they charging per single prediction like amazon? If so then it's almost a non-starter unless ML is the product.

Sort of, but not exactly. https://cloud.google.com/ml/pricing

I'll just leave this here... https://www.google.de/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud

Exactly. What's the closest thing to datastore from other providers? DynamoDB? Some kind of hosted Cassandra?

There's a fairly exhaustive comparison between their compute services here: https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws/compute

But without anymore context into what Snapchat is saying, it's too easy to read just about anything into that comment.

If you're already tied into GAE, Google's other offerings in cloud become really easy to tie in, from adding buckets in GCS to adding extra stuff in GCE. With the soonish coming of Google Pub/Sub, it takes a lot of effort to switch to AWS.

> Is there really anything which AWS does not have the GCE does?

Firebase is the killer here. AWS and Azure don't have it or anything comparable for realtime data. If they do, please tell me about it because I'd love to know about it!

I'm particularly interested in this because I'm building a product supported by Firebase and will have the same lock-in described in this filing.

DynamoDB?

Was that intended to be humor? DynamoDB is to Firebase as a CSV file is to a personal computer.

GCE is incapable of doing the most recent cloud setup I've built on AWS, which uses g2 instances extensively (although Azure could).

I need the actual GPU—graphics, OpenGL, etc.—part, not just CUDA, in addition to the hardware H.264 encoders that come with nVidia's GRID CPUs. GCE has no equivalent.

We're also using Amazon's Elastic File System, and I don't think Google has an alternative—though that's something I could handle differently if I had to, at higher cost.

We announced that we'll have AMD's 9300x2s and NVIDIA's P100s at Supercomputing: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs...

I'd be happy to get you early access, Erich ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Interesting, I'll keep any eye out. The main renderer we use (Hydra, part of Pixar's USD[0] project) would need to be ported to run on the AMD GPU, but it's designed to be backend agnostic to a degree so it should be possible.

I'm pretty sure AMD also has the ability to H.264 encode the screen at 60fps (with low latency) which is really important to us—our "workstation" is entirely in the cloud, with a Pi 3 running the display/keyboard/mouse.

[0] http://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html

There isn't an alternative inasmuch as there isn't a drop-in replacement. Thus, there are switching costs, which thus represent financial (and counterparty!) risks.

Compare this situation to Dell v. Lenovo v. HP commodity x86 servers: if one goes out of business, you can go to the others (and proactively use this as leverage when negotiating). EDIT: Or more realistically, you don't need to do much/any work to run your service on a Dell v. an IBM.

Snap runs on Google App Engine, not on GCE (or perhaps they use both).

Maybe the amount of rebates received?

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