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by doxcf434 3750 days ago
We've been doing tests in GCE in the 60-80k core range:

What we like:

- slightly lower latency to end users in USA and Europe than AWS

- faster image builds and deployment times than AWS

- fast machines, live migrations blackouts are getting better too

- per min billing (after 10mins), and lower rates for continued uses vs. AWS RIs where you need to figure out your usage up front

- project make it easy to track costs w/o having to write scripts to tag everything like in AWS, down side is project discovery is hard since there's no master account

What we don't like:

- basic lack of maturity, AWS is far a head here e.g. we've had 100s of VMs get rebooted w/o explanation, the op log ui forces you to page through results, log search is slow enough to be unsuable, billing costs don't match our records for the number of core hours and they simply can't explain them, quota limit increases take nearly week, support takes close to an hour to get on the phone and they make you hunt down a PIN to call them

- until you buy primare support (aka a TAM), they limit the number of ppl who can open support cases, caused us terrible friction since it's so unexpected esp. when it's their bugs you're trying to report and they can mature from fixing them

3 comments

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Are you running with onHostMaintenance set to terminate or are you losing "regular" VMs. If you want to ping me with your project id (my username at google), I'd like to investigate. 100s of VM failures is well outside of our acceptable range.

Also, if it's been a while since your last quota request, we've drastically improved the turnaround time. All I can say is, your complaints were heard and we've tried to fix it. Keep yelling if something is busted! (And yes, I see the irony of the support ticket statement; out of curiosity which support are you on?)

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

Maybe there is something special for the member of GCE startup program, but for us the quotas requests take between 1min and 1 hour, where the same requests over aws took a few days, and endless discussions.

Our all experience with the folks over at Google has been amazing compared to the poor level we had with AWS.

Granted we are on a range way lower than yours.

Ditto -- we've had about five quota requests handled within an hour or two. AWS took about a week for each of two requests.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Its really helpful!