Comments on: By the numbers: How Google Compute Engine stacks up to Amazon EC2

By: alex

alex — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:08:16 +0000

Depends on who you are leaning on for multi cloud management capabilities. RightScale was born in 2006 pre EC2 and they have deployed somewhere in the ballpark of 6 million instances. Their Professional Services has a concentration on HA/DR and multi cloud management. Successful deployed multi cloud including DB countless time.
Its feasible and doable just need the right resources to deploy a resilient architecture.

By: sebastianstadil

sebastianstadil — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:11:09 +0000

Quick update–

Following this post, we’ve been working with many parties in coming up with benchmarks that are more representative of real world use cases, and more accurate measurements.

In preliminary results we’ve obtained, it seems like the performance difference is less than we initially measured: AWS turns out faster in many cases.

Stay tuned for some updated results!

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:28:26 +0000

I was under the impression that dark fiber is fiber that was laid and then never used. There was a large build out of fiber at one time and a lot of that went dark.

By: shadowempire

shadowempire — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:10:15 +0000

Is it really fair to compare performance numbers with GCE which is in Beta and had limited customers to AWS which servers hundreds of thousands of customers?

By: Terrance

Terrance — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:18:26 +0000

Since Cassandra is a masterless data store ( nodes know which nodes are responsible for what data ) the node that receives the initial request can proxy the request to the other datacenter. Since any node can accept writes for other nodes and they are based off of time stamps the merging of data based on time stamps and the ability for many nodes to receive a write request allows for better through put. Unlike in mysql which is basically a single thread per a database and a single receiver to process the requests in order, Cassandra allows replication to be processed by many nodes and in parallel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7nHyzFHqMA is a good video about the cassandra partioning and replication.

By: Andrew Marshall

Andrew Marshall — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:07:28 +0000

Interesting stuff. It appears that Google Compute rivals Amazon pretty well. I’ve heard, though, that Interoute’s VDC’s equivalent is three times faster.

See http://www.interoute.com/vdc

By: Sebastian Stadil

Sebastian Stadil — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 03:24:32 +0000

We’ll be providing an update shortly, and the AWS team is being very helpful.

By: dermot

dermot — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:15:51 +0000

Re. “Fast Boot”

We don’t know what sort of sorcery Google does here, but they clearly demonstrate engineering prowess. That’s 4-10x faster.

The speed of light is still the same the Googleverse so no sorcery – just some (currently) secret sauce. I can think of two possibilities:
GCE is taking an already booted VM, reconfiguring network and allocating to you.
Alternatively they could be configuring VM with incredible CPU speed / cores initially which gets throttled back invisibly as boot nears completion.
Either way – nice!

Any Googlers want to comment?

By: Doc Dawning

Doc Dawning — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:48:47 +0000

Gee, I didn’t even realize Google had something like this up and running.. AND I even care about these sorts of things. I’m a long time lover of Google, but it feels like they’re losing something lately? Maybe just a valley, with a fresh peak on the way.. I use EC2 a fair bit. I think it’s overly complicated for my use cases and kind of expensive, though once I decided to commit to a Reserved Instance, I stopped caring about price.

By: itoctopus

itoctopus — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:45:42 +0000

Apparently, Google’s services are not aimed for very advanced system engineers/administrator (whatever you want to call them). Many of our customers use AWS, none so far uses Google Compute. Let’s see if that changes in the next few months…