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back to article Google's new cloud CRUSHES Amazon in RAM battle

If Amazon is an arms dealer, then Google is an army that happens to also sell guns. For this reason, Google's general-availability release of its IaaS cloud is a key moment in the evolution of as-a-service IT, as it represents the arrival of a truly competitive market for rentable compute and storage. With Monday's launch, …

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  1. Nate Amsden

    how is google more stable?

    they will be just as unstable as any other public cloud provider.

    They may seem more stable now because there aren't as many users.

    At least they provide VM fail over (haven't looked into the details). still far too many missing things in all of these clouds to make them worth using for any serious work.

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    1. LosD
      Reply Icon

      Re: how is google more stable?

      Public cloud providers are not unstable, unless you try to use it as a normal hosting facility, but then you are doing it wrong (and wasting money, at least price/performance-wise). While any computing instance could die at any time (without warning), if you use it correctly, it is much more stable than normal hosting:

      The idea is that you have small instances with a load balancer in front. If any of them die, it's no problem, besides a few customers losing a single request, and their next request will probably go through fine.

      If you suddenly have a million requests from Slashdot, an auto scaler can start extra instances for you.

      Amazon has had two major outages in the last few years, and both were limited to a single facility.

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  2. jnffarrell1

    Even UC Berkeley and LBL will be using Google Compute

    Advantage of big computers on campus is over. Researchers proposing projects to the US government can cost in Google Compute. Ripon or Middlebury could become tech hubs if they have tech innovators on their faculty.

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    1. jswinterburn
      Reply Icon

      Re: Even UC Berkeley and LBL will be using Google Compute

      I doubt it, universities wont want to lose their control over them and they are paid from top slicing grants anyway, so who cares if Google is cheaper.

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  3. Javapapa

    Bootnote

    Reg readers: if you find this type of analysis useful, then let us know, and if there's other data you'd like us to delve into, please make your voices heard in the comments.

    I would like to know about use cases other than the e-commerce web site scale out for SuperBowl commercial effect. You know, the type of things AWS customers describe at annual re:Invent keynotes.

    For example, is anyone doing serious ERP work in the generic clouds, such as intensive incident based billing, like a telco? Or are those workloads too critical and too predictable for cloud based processing? I used to do ERP work, but have lost touch with the brick and mortar enterprise community.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "If Amazon is an arms dealer, then Google is an army that happens to also sell guns. For this reason,"

    Does that make Eric Schmit Destro?

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Useful

    Reg readers: if you find this type of analysis useful, then let us know.

    I definitely find this type of analysis useful.

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  6. chris lively

    Yes, I find articles like this useful.

    However, leave the hyperbole out. Google employs the most capable people? Not so sure about that. They seem to screw up as often as everyone else; while either over complicating basic things or simply leaving basic features out of product releases. Even the quality of google search results, their bread and butter, has been declining over the past couple of years.

    Also, the big three provide very different services. Yes, they are all "cloudy" and what not but at their heart each takes a very different approach. Differences that don't necessarily allow for easy migration.

    I am happy that the price/service wars continue. When we first got on Amazon for MS servers, MS's solution would have been about 3 times the price. So we so prepaid for a year. When it came time to reup, we went month to month and have seen our TCO drop. I expect it will continue to do so for quite awhile.

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  7. Tom 64

    Useful, yes

    I'd love to read a piece on how the control panels compare between the big three. I'm currently an AWS user and their web based interfaces can be frustrating.

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    1. disk iops
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      Re: Useful, yes

      @Tom, you do realize the WEBUI is for not for serious users, right? It was written so the riff-raff would quit their bitching and moaning about having to use a CLI or write *gasp* some code. If you have ~dozen hosts, sure go ahead. But if you use cloud you are EXPECTED to use the API in a programmatic fashion.

      Cloud is NOT designed to be user-friendly. It's designed for people who do massive scale (and transient) computing. Yes, sure 98% of the accounts are using AWS as "cheap" (HA!) colocation alternative but that's not the design target. EBS is a sop to the clueless who couldn't wrap their minds around the fact that cloud computing is DISPOSABLE computing. You were never supposed to have persistent data except in S3. You spin up a volatile instance, fetch what you need out of S3, do some work, save your results back to S3, and die in a sudden flash of light.

      And yes you can launch a zillion instances all at once. There are customers that do precisely that. Spawn a few thousand and do a CPUID check and terminate those they don't like.

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