Please come to NEXT in two weeks! (https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com). Most of the registration becomes credits :).

Sounds like an upcoming Postgres announcement at NEXT :)

Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?

Spending on GCP is more predictable than on AWS. Also the general behavior is more predictable. For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources.

I believe that whatever GCP does, does better. Faster network, faster spinning and turning off servers, simpler quotas, etc. GCP doesn't offer that many services as AWS and most of those are not very compatible with Apache tools (although they're doing their best, e.g. BigTable looks like Hbase from outside).

In our case, we're running ~28,000 servers on GCE and utilizing many services, especially PubSub, BigQuery, etc. The price we're paying for our setup is roughly 1/4 of a similar setup on AWS.

> For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources.

Uhh, Google will terminate preemptible instances whenever they need the resources as well. Hence the name, "preemptible."

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible

True. What I meant is that the servers are going to be terminated in 24 hours, even if they don't need the resources atm. AWS doesn't terminate them up until they don't need them.

Also I personally find much easier to understand is the pricing. It's very consistent and simple. Preemptible servers are discounted by 80% from the regular ones. On AWS the price changes, also they only offer older generations while GCE offers any type at the same discount.

Holy cow, 28 000 servers, can you give us a clue to what you need so many servers for?

We're processing videos, a lot of them. Roughly 34PB worth of data every month.

Additionally we're running our search engine at top of it with couple of other services.

You can check what we're up to here https://pex.com

That landing page is a whopping 9MB [1]. Please optimize it for users with slow internet like me. [1] https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170225_RN_1K80/

I apologize. We need to pay more attention to the actual website

Cool, thanks for the info!

It's cheaper for many workloads, the products work together a lot more seamlessly, instance start times are faster, and the orchestration UI is way, way, way more intuitive and user-friendly (to this user, at least). There are definitely more knobs to turn in AWS, but Google is almost at feature parity with them, and most workloads won't see a difference between the services in terms of features.

Wow, that's persuasive... is the only reason people are choosing AWS the sheer number of products they provide? (eg; Postgres RDS & Aurora)

FWIW, that's not the only good stuff on GCE: * Instances have sustained use discounts - you don't need to pay in advance and reserve them and the discounts are applied very, very fairly. * Pre-emptable instances are cheap as all hell, and they are perfect for batchwork, celery workers, etc (anything disposable). You don't have to bid for them so automation is easier. * Up to 2 Gbits/second/core, depending on your workload type * CUSTOMIZABLE instances. * live migrations.

The only thing I really miss from AWS is RDS's postgres.

I don't even want to talk about Azure.

Why do people use AWS? 1. Free tier. 2. Plethora of PaaS as you mentioned. 3. AWS was there first, has brand recognition and is a safe choice for management.

Heh, I know you don't want to talk about Azure, but perhaps others can share -- what's so bad about it?

It's superior for running Windows at least, right?

> "Heh, I know you don't want to talk about Azure, but perhaps others can share -- what's so bad about it?" This is what I will say:

I'm working on a migration to it, so I'm not very experienced with it, but so far, it's been very painful compared to GCE or AWS, in which I've run production stacks. I'd rather not comment further, simply due to my relative new-ness to the service and the chance that it's just lack of experience. The customer service is, at best, run at a glacial pace.

> "It's superior for running Windows at least, right?"

I'm a Linux guy running a platform agnostic Linux stack, but I'd assume so. I get the feeling so far that it's really good if you want to run MS-SQL and .net, and garbage otherwise.

The only reason we're migrating from GCE to Azure is because our GCE credits are expiring, and Microsoft gave us the YC Credits offer for Azure. We'd rather stay on GCE if we could. Also, postgres RDS/CloudSQL is the one thing we miss from AWS

Actually, Azure takes a very strong platform agnostic approach. Over a third of all VMs on Azure are running Linux https://fossbytes.com/33-microsoft-azure-vms-now-run-linux-o..., (supported distributions include Ubuntu, Redhat, Centos, SUSE, Debian, and CoreOS), the Azure Container Service supports 3 open-source orchestrators (Swarm, Kubernetes, DC/OS), and the Azure WebApp PaaS service has Linux support in preview.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft; opinions are mine.

That's fair and you won't get any arguments from me there. It's very easy to run singleton Linux machines on Azure and I have no complaints there.

I wasn't going to lay it out here, but, as I have your ear:

I'm not saying it's impossible to run a Linux stack on Azure - but man, trying to image the machine, for example, is a whole rigamarole.

Want to run your own image on a scale set? Oh, well, you need to craft a JSON template, by hand. There also appear to be limits on how many machines can run off an image.

ARM is a a mess (IMHO), and it's impossible to select a custom image when creating a new resource group. It also seems (correct me if I'm wrong) impossible to change the vnet of a VM/ARM after it's created. it also seems like ARMs can't share an existing vnet. Again, please, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm new to this service.

I may have to drop to running a bootstrap script to get my stuff working, but the idea of doing a curl | sh is pretty horrific to me, from a security perspective.

Non MS-SQL as a service? Nope.

The new managed disks are very nice. I like those a lot :)

Also, Azure times out my ssh sessions :(

For you ssh sessions, have you tried to use ssh keepalive ? (ex: ServerAliveInterval option on an openssh client)

I've added it to my config yesterday, I hope it helps :) Thanks for the tip!

Your GCE startup credits [1] or something else? Have you been in contact with our PMs about Pgsql?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

Yep, our GCE startup credits. We've only burned through about half of em (from the billing page, it looks like ~45k), and they expire in late march. So if we had an extra year to use 'em, that would be amazing.

When I last chatted with our Account Manager I mentioned Postgres, yeah. We're currently running our own on GCE, but it would be awesome to have it aaS, with replicas and automated backups that I don't have to keep an eye on all the time :).

I don't want to fork the thread to discuss other providers (take a look at GitLab's experience on Azure if you'd like), but I will say that we support Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, and Powershell throughout GCP [1].

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (so I want to sell you our services).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/windows/

AWS has a better compliance story.

Compare

https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/

to

https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance

I know security is not compliance, and I'm not here to compare the two, but Google goes to great lengths to protect security. [0]

TL;DR:

- Google's global SDN is ultra-secure, and Google carries your packets on its network rather than dumping them onto public web. Google's undersea cables are shark bite-proof! [1]

- Google Data Centers are mostly homogeneous and rely on Google-build hardware rather than vendors. This greatly helps with securing infra - only one vendor (Google) to trust, only one set of best practices to follow, lower risk of misconfiguration, and exposure risk is minimal.

- > 600 security engineers.

- Encryption-at-rest and in-transit is ubiquitous.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/security/whitepaper

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMxkRh7sx84

(work on Google Cloud, not in marketing :) )

I can't find "ultra-secure" in any of our security certification docs. Is that better or worse than "super-duper secure"?

For security, I don't care whether my traffic as routed over a private network or public web as long as the data is encrypted, because a "private network" is only as private as thousands of miles of fiber and every single network facility it traverses can be. Which means 'not very'.

Does Google build it's own hard drives/SSD's and CPU's? If not, then that's at least 2 other vendors to trust since both CPU's and hard drives are related to hardware security.

Ha.ha. Did I mention I'm not in marketing? I do appreciate your passion!

On your first point. There is a very strong risk of inadvertent misconfiguration or your employees not following best practices.. Or even poor documentation. Google cloud by default gives you a global secure vpc that never traverses public internet, so there's less risk because the baseline of security is high. Sure, you can run VPN tunnels between data centers. Point is, with Google cloud you don't need to.

On the latter point, of course you cannot eradicate every vendor, especially within the obvious context of this specific Intel announcement... But, again, not having three dozen flavors of configs and four network router vendors does make a difference. I would encourage you to read the paper I linked to above (discussed this topic in great detail), and also perhaps [0].

Also security folks at Google, who are much more qualified to discuss this topic than I am, frequently post on hn. [1]

[0] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Google-seeks-ne...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13388941

AWS did a lot of work to improve how they share compliance information over the past year. It wasn't much better than Google's reference before that. Azure beats both of them in my opinion, as you can access many of the raw compliance reports without an NDA.

It's also important to pay attention to which services you consume, as not all of them are certified to the same degree.

As far as HIPAA compliance goes, though, AWS EC2 requires dedicated tenancy, whereas GCE allows HIPAA workloads on any VM, including preemptible VMs.

This is true, however Amazon's standard BAA is a bit more robust than Google's. This didn't stop my HIPAA-compliant company from choosing Google, but it does make it more difficult to compare the two clouds on HIPAA-friendliness.

Can you say more about what you found less robust? And (hopefully) were you unable to get the legal agreement up to snuff by the end?

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not compliance).

There's been a lot of talk in the compliance gcp slack on this, seems like a lot of products are being audited and announcements will be made at Next.

Let's hope they are building the managed Postgres product from the ground up with an eye toward compliance!

Well, since mysql compatible Cloud SQL is, I would imagine pg would be too.

AWS launched Postgres RDS in November 2013. They covered MySQL and Oracle RDS under BAA in August 2015. But AWS didn't add Postgres RDS to the BAA until November 2016. We're hoping GCP doesn't delay covering Postgres Cloud SQL under BAA like AWS did with their managed Postgres.

In organizations I've worked for, we use AWS because it's politically correct to do so; non-technical leadership has heard how "Cloud" is an alternative to "IT" and have golf buddies that buy "Cloud" from Amazon.

Technical management can sometimes be persuaded, given overwhelming evidence, that competing products/services are superior or more cost-effective but ultimately conclude "we'll never sell this solution to leadership".

Managed Kubernetes.

Agreed. I'm on GCP whenever I get to pick.

For anyone else who is on AWS (maybe because of rds postgres, or because it's client work that needs to be on AWS), you can go outside of vanilla AWS to get a similarly great dev UX. I've used Convox + the Weave ECS AMI on a project, and it was pleasant.

What's the difference between using Kubernetes on GCP and running Kubernetes on a node on AWS EC2? By "managed" do you just mean I don't need to manage the lead node?

Just getting into Kubernetes :)

That's correct. The master nodes are managed by GCP and upgrades to the kubernetes system are trivial.

How much of a boon is that, though? Isn't Kubernetes built to be self-managing on any platform?

Kubernetes manages containers, but what manages Kubernetes? GKE just makes the experience very painless, updates, etc.

It's better than fully self-managing it, but GKE is still less managed than I'd personally like. I just want to submit containers as jobs to be executed in "the cloud", with the cloud provider figuring out the details of where they get executed. On GKE, have to create a cluster in the cloud, then submit your jobs to your cluster, and set up logic to manage provisioning/resizing/etc., rather than just being able to submit your jobs to a giant abstracted cluster managed by Google. Joyent's Triton container service basically does that, so it's possible.

Have you tried Appengine flexible environment?

GCP is generally cheaper than AWS.

Killer network.