[jttam]

You are probably right for big, cheap SSDs and fast networking GCE likely is the place to be. It's a newer stack. But this article fails to prove that, and it provides a lot of FUD.

"Local SSD storage is only available via the i2 instances family which are the most expensive instances on AWS" - He didn't say BIG. And gp2 is actually pretty good in my opinion. (Also, you missed the now legacy hi1 instance in your list.)

Just for completeness I give you other problems in this article. I run a moderately large AWS workload, and there are definitely problems with AWS, but this article missed many of them and feels like a rant more than something with veracity.

1. "Add 10% for dedicated instances" - but he never brings up a competing product on GCE. There is another simple way to getting a dedicated instance: launch the largest instance type in a class, and you have dedicated hardware.

2. "Add 10% on top of everything for Premium Support (mandatory)" - Simply wrong.

3. "We are forced to pay for Provisioned-IOPS whenever we need dependable IO." - This was true 5 years ago. I'm sorry, gp2 is a fine service which runs great.

4. "Local SSD storage is only available via the i2 instances family which are the most expensive instances on AWS" - Wrong as stated above which you didn't even refute. You just put parameters on a use case.

5. "An unplanned event is a guaranteed 5 minutes of unreachable site with 503 errors." - This is certainly hyperbolic. I've sat down with the ELB team, and we've hashed through this. We had an ELB that ramped up to 600,000 rps everyday with massive spikes in that ELB's performance. They offer pre-warming as a convenience, but it's hardly necessary. The worst case scenario would be some number of 503s for some amount of time up to a maximum of 5 minutes. How does GCE perform? No answers given.

6. "All resources are artificially limited by a hardcoded quota, which is very low by default. Limits can only be increased manually, one by one, by sending a ticket to the support." - This isn't true in GCE? Of course it is. There isn't infinite infrastructure. The AWS limits are published, and they are kept low so, for instance, it would be difficult for a developer or a malicious user to run up a giant bill for you. Learn to plan.

7. "There is NO log and NO indication of what’s going on in the infrastructure. The support is required whenever something wrong happens." - Cloudwatch anyone? It gives pretty decent instrumentation of, for instance, your ELB. What does GCE give him? Not mentioned.

8. "We have to comply to a few regulations so we have a few dedicated options here and there. It’s 10% on top of the instance price (plus a $1500 fixed monthly fee per region)." - Amazon was a first mover in this space. I think this is a shoehorning of something that is complicated and manual on their side. What does google offer, I repeat?

9. "A reservation is attached to a specific region, an availability zone, an instance type, a tenancy, and more." - This is garbage. You can change reserves between availability zone and instance type (within a family of instances.) Moreover, you can sell your reserves. I agree vaguely this is effort, but it's minor effort that's generally solvable with a mild amount of planning.

10. "The discount is small." - It's like 40-70%, he quotes 30% on GCE.

11. "AWS Networking is sub-par" - I actually agree with this, it feels like an aging infrastructure, but I imagine it's something they will address.

[0xmohit]

I didn't read all the points carefully, but regarding #9 one needs to see https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/

You can modify existing Reserved Instances via the Amazon EC2 Console or by using the ModifyReservedInstances API call.

In both cases, the reservation must match the following attributes of the running instance you want to cover:

    Availability Zone (e.g., us-east-1a)
    Instance type (e.g., m3.large)
    Platform (e.g., Linux/UNIX (Amazon VPC))
    Tenancy (e.g., default)

[phonon]

>You are probably right for big, cheap SSDs and fast networking GCE likely is the place to be. It's a newer stack. But this article fails to prove that, and it provides a lot of FUD. "Local SSD storage is only available via the i2 instances family which are the most expensive instances on AWS" - He didn't say BIG. And gp2 is actually pretty good in my opinion. (Also, you missed the now legacy hi1 instance in your list.)

Not sure what you mean by "prove"...for instances with "large" (say over 250 GB) local SSD you have I2 and X1 on AWS, both very expensive (and I don't see H1 on https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ any more). He specifically gave what SSD sizes he uses (800 and 375 GB) so the implication is that's what he needs. It is a bit sad that to get the equivalent storage performance of a $200 Samsung 850 Pro SSD you need to spend thousands a year on AWS, and for the equivalent of a higher end PCI-e enterprise SSD, I think only the X1 is competitive (which appears to be only available at a $3.970 3-Year Partial Upfront RI Price per Hour..wow!)

[jttam]

As for prove, I mean you can't just make crap up and pretend it's true. Your points are more logical than his for your use cases.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/previous-generation/ -- you have to use a different page. I guess in SSD-land commodity drives versus normal drives don't change much since you're trapped by the number of writes. -- My point about disk sizes is he says something unequivocally: that only i2s have SSDs. He doesn't qualify it. And that's bad netizenship and wrong or whatever. :)

[phonon]

Not that AWS isn't great overall--just that compared to https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/02/Compute-Engine-... they are not competive for low cost and high performance storage. (And their internal networking isn't so great either for smaller instances)

[jttam]

I don't disagree for those use cases that's very impressive. I just don't require a lot of local disk space.

[hamax]

> 10. "The discount is small." - It's like 40-70%, he quotes 30% on GCE.

It's 26% if you don't pay upfront. So yes, less than 30% that google gives you.