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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

Google Cloud Platform is a cluster, in the http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cluster&defid... sense.

Amazon eats their own dogfood with AWS services, while Google does not, and no amount of marketing is going to make up for that. Every time I give it a try, I find random bugs everywhere, and I know there are not enough internal engineers feeling the pain to get those bugs fixed.

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AWS had its own share of massive outage. I had a look at AWS and GCE incidents history and it looks the frequency and magnitude of incidents is quite similar. Do you have any factual information that contradicts this?

Perhaps the fact that the GCE outage affected multiple regions around the world. EC2 outages were all localized to a single region (and in most cases limited to a single AZ within that region).

AWS asks you to design your architecture for failure and work across multiple availability zones. Its complicated and expensive but you can avoid that. With google from the other end you can't. and that's the price you pay when you choose PaaS over IaaS

Google Compute Engine is also an IaaS. You can also design your architecture for failure and work across multiple availability zones by using GCE. GCE is not GAE.

GCE had a multi region outage so multi zone within a region wouldn't have helped in this case.

I agree. This is the reason why this outage is more serious than others.

My mistake, mixed GCE with GAE

The difference is really just in maturity. AWS started years earlier and has had time to work out the kinks. GCE will get there, but it'll need time and experience.

Yep, exactly. This GCE outage comes at a great time to help me answer the question, should I use GCE over AWS? Probably not yet.

Whoa, what makes you think Amazon retail runs on AWS? That's a core founding myth...

I have spoken to multiple Amazon engineers who build their production services on AWS. (Hint: I never claimed that all of Amazon retail already runs on AWS, nor is that required for my argument.) Zero Google services are built on Google Cloud Platform, and that is not likely to change. The difference shows up in the bugginess of the services. When you annoy internal customers, things get fixed. Meanwhile, there are known issues with Google Cloud Platform that are several years old with no workarounds.

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