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by codecamper 3509 days ago
Has anyone switched to Google cloud & found it cheaper overall? It seems like there was a lot of interest in Google before but not so much as of late.
5 comments

Yeah. Love it. It's way cheaper than AWS because of automatic discounting if you use it for a full month. Performance, boot up time & the dashboard UI/UX is better. (Regarding performance and boot up time, my experience is a bit outdated so things might have changed)

Downside: Some documentation (stackdriver for ex) can be really confusing. Also for opening up port 80 firewall rule wasn't enough, you had to apply the http label (Haven't tested this recently)

I'm very happy with them and believe it is cheaper, although it's hard to compare considering the explosion of services on both platforms. I initially chose them because I/O performance on gce was ahead by about factor 10 (may have been workload-specific, may have changed – this was about a year ago, may only apply to the smaller machine types with SSD I tested).

I've also had a much easier time getting started, but my AWS experience may be out of date now. But both the web UI as well as the cli client are excellent.

I also prefer google because of their excellent contributions to OSS, their advocacy for an open internet, their lack of sweatshop-warehouses, and their investments in hard problems. (and I know altruism may not be the motive, but still...)

  their lack of sweatshop-warehouses
You are now hitting below the belt.
I admit writing that – if I were at Amazon – I'd spend the rest of the week making sure every future package to "that unfair guy on the internet" gets thrown against the wall an extra four times :)

And, more seriously, I didn't want to imply that Amazon deserves any hate – they're probably a net positive for the world. And Google is no saint. Just that, on balance, I'm still more inclined to be loyal to the latter.

To be fair, I'm indifferent which side you take.

[I was perhaps amused to see it mentioned in the first place.]

Yup. No more reserved instance nightmare and you can play with the custom instances a lot to optimize pricing (like low CPU/high mem etc).

Overall it's much easier to predict than AWS. There are some aspects where documentation could be better. And obviously no managed Postgresql.

Actually I don't think that Google Cloud is cheaper, their price model is just superior.
Google is 10 to 60% cheaper last I checked ;)

They're not even playing in the same league.

After an in depth analysis:

Google instances are 50% cheaper in average, your mileage may vary => http://imgur.com/g6Tz7K7