[danhoc01]

$10 for a 10 minute test, okay. A month of 200 US-hosted n1-standard-1 machines would cost 200 * $.115 * 30 (days) * 24 (hours)... over $16,000. That doesn't include load-balancing, bandwidth, or any additional charges there may be. The price shouldn't be mentioned anywhere in the article.

Demand is elastic of course, and if you really want to scale in a cost-effective manner you also need to do auto-scaling. As far as I can tell (I have no direct experience with GAE), it's much easier on AWS. It would also be interesting to see if you can scale your pool of webservers from 1 -> 200 faster on AWS or GCE.

The article does quote @cloudpundit, who hits on the true point of the exercise: Relevance of GCE LB load test: With AWS ELB, if you expect a big spike load, must contact AWS support to have ELB pre-warmed to handle load. I would also guess that Amazon is working to improve ELB to behave similarly, especially now that Google's product has less restrictions than theirs.

[espeed]

GCE instances are charged in 1 min increments (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), not 1 hour increments like AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/).

1 min increment billing enables you to spin up massive Web clusters to handle spikes or Hadoop clusters so big that you can process the entire dataset it a few minutes, while paying less than you would for a smaller AWS cluster that's billed by the hour.

[_delirium]

It's definitely finer-grained, but there's still a 10-minute minimum per instance: billing is only per-minute above 10 minutes. So if you run a massively parallel 2-minute Hadoop job, you pay num_instances x 10min. Admittedly that's still a win, since AWS would bill you for 6x as much instance time. But it's not a 30x differential as you might guess from the headline "hourly" vs. "per-minute" pricing.

[simplemath]

A fair point, but the scaling granularity advantage is a powerful cost win nonetheless

[rartichoke]

I don't think $16,000 a month is really that bad if you factor in what type of money a consistent 1 million reqs/sec would probably give you.

1m req/s is:

60 million+ reqs an hour

1.4 billion+ reqs a day

43 billion+ reqs a month

It would be a weird situation to be serving that much traffic but not being able to afford hosting.

It would be cool if someone could estimate the cost of what it would take to sustain 1m reqs/s with dedicated hardware or maybe an unmanaged VPS cluster.

[tlawrence]

The point here isn't necessarily about the actual elasticity of the instances themselves, but the load balancer in front of them. With ELBs, they can only handle so much traffic so quickly. You literally cannot just point a million requests per second at it, even if you have 200 instances supporting it, and handle them all right off the bat. The ELBs themselves scale with the load, and currently, that scaling is slow during spikes.