The consumer Skylakes are not even in the same league as what we're announcing today. The easiest analogy is comparing a laptop to a beefy two-socket server.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and of course want you to pay us to use Skylake)

> want you to pay us to use Skylake

I already use a nice E3 Skylake workstation at work, thank you very much. Could be an E5 or a big i7 with more cores (I just rechecked on ark and I guess it's still not available publicly for Skylake, but I also guess this can not held for very long...), but we want it to be close to our product target, which is an E3, so E3 it is.

For tons of practical purposes, lots of reasonable E5 are comparable to what you can get with the biggest i7 -- and during the last gen for tons of practical purposes gen to next gen comparable CPU have only progressed slightly. Of course there are workloads where you want to use the most insane CPU, or some CPU with new features / better perf in some niche workload, and so over, but when you start to have such advanced needs I doubt a little that OTS platform solutions are better for the majority of people with highly advanced needs...

But yeah, on the mass of people, some will remain interested by "your" solution. Meaning mainly Intel solution, given how you advertise Skylake soo much...

Well, we're talking Xeon E5. I frankly don't care if your stuff is 20% faster because I would pay at least 5 times the amount I do now on GCE and the hosts are not under my control. I could get 8 more cores for the price of one of your cores.

Who's your vendor? I'd like to get the same deal you're getting.

online.net. I got my machines off a promotion so you can't get the same setup probably, but they're very cheap anyhow and run other promotions all the time.

As another has said, who is your vendor?

I'm sure they would like some more customers :)

I'm guessing, perhaps unsurprisingly, that we won't find out.

I'm guessing, not surprisingly, that you felt really good typing this comment.

How I felt about the comment?

online.net. They run promotions all the time from which I got my machines from, but they're insanely cheap as is. Uptime has been 100% for the past few months.

That's pretty impressive hardware for under $150

Per month, just to clarify.

renting used servers? any pointers would be helpful - $150/yr sounds cool

How much technical (DevOps-y) do you have to be keep it secure & available?

Almost none. Put CoreOS on both, pull yourself a HA database and install Rancher which creates a ipsec network overlay (both hosts), set up your containers on both hosts, set up HAProxy on both hosts (configuration is done only once), then set up an external DNS service from the library that updates your DNS when a host goes down. I even run a small DNS server in 2 containers on both hosts so I don't need the external stuff, that updates automatically once hosts go down and also does some GeoIP resolution. Not complicated any more.

Using DNS for HA is a lose-lose scenario. I'll take a proper load balancer backed with a cloud provider's superior network any day.

Not if you use a low TTL. And no, I'd rather not have my traffic run or even terminate through every intelligence agency on the planet, even if that means accepting a few drops in the timeframe it takes to propagate.

... hence the lose-lose scenario. Having a low TTL just makes it your client's problem. If you want to be paranoid about the government, you can still use an L4 load balancer such as the one offered by GCP.

Run your infrastructure however you want. This setup would never fly for a real organization.

Just to clarify, 150/month.

Vendor? Sounds too good to be true.