The big problem for me is trust. I don’t care what the feature set or performance is; I don’t trust Google enough to bet a business on it. And I’m not even worried about Google being malicious; I’m worried about them being mercurial and changing/removing things I need without warning.
We're happy CockroachDB users.
Can't put my finger on why, but this report comes off as almost pure marketing and not very substantive (say compared to the Backblaze reports). Maybe it's because I had to give an email (mailinator) with no option to opt-out of marketing emails to read it. Maybe it's because it seemed to try to paint all three as winners.
We run CRDB on baremetal. I'd love to see how that stacks up - but I guess their managed offering is a major money maker.
It's a shame because there's clearly a lot of effort put into it and I love the work they're doing (and how they do it).
I will say that, as a non-cloud-believer, I'm much happier dealing with Google Cloud than AWS. It's straightforward and doesn't require nearly as much vendor-specific knowledge. The console is more user-friendly, and things are usually cheaper and faster (but still so much more expensive and slower than just using a dedicated host).
GCP is also far easier to use than the others. Everything from the organization/project hierarchy, g-suite user IAM permissions, simple primitives that can be assembled to your specifications, and web-based console access to everything makes it much simpler to deal with.
The performance is a nice bonus.
I don't quite understand why, but much of the tech industry seems to be sleeping on Cloud Spanner. Google quietly completely revolutionized managed+consistent+available+scalable RDBMS and very few people seem to have caught on yet. Maybe it's too much of a threat to job security?
I have done projects on all except Azure (mostly due to a Microsoft aversion). I hate their special names for everything. Reminds me of Starbucks.
Here is my take: GCP tools are better PubSub, CloudSQL. However they don't support email and their docs are not as up to date and helpful as AWS.
I think the main reason to select the big three is a) security (network, instance, user management) b) you don't get fired for selecting the big guys c) some specialized tools (SES, s3, CDNs, github)
I always feel that the time you invest to learn all the details of AWS you could have invested into Ansible, Docker, Wireguard, Iptables, zfs and linux, and deploy a much more cost effective solution on Heztner, (which I prefer over upcloud, do, vultr). But you need to know what you are doing. Many companies prefer to trust a vendor instead of their employees.
The main reason I'm weary of recommending GCP is the support horror stories that keep coming up. I'm using it at work now since our massive Google Ad spend protects us from that. It's got some really good technologies although there's various rough edges.
One thing that really irks me is GCP requiring me to talk to sales people (not support, sales) to have a relatively small quota increase. Why would they make it harder for me to give them money?
As someone who has worked on large-scale deployments on both AWS and GCP, I would always prefer AWS over GCP. While GCP products are IMO superior to similar AWS offerings their support (even premium tier) is total garbage compared to AWS.
GCP wins hands down when it comes to cloud governance and network design.
I think the two biggest weaknesses are:
- IAM - some resources have awkward relationships with IAM; although the GSuite integration is nice - CloudSQL (vs RDS) - for businesses that need relational data stores, but aren’t at the Cloud Spanner scale, RDS blows CloudSQL away in features
CockroachDB was founded by ex-Google employees and is partly funded by Google Ventures, so I'd take this report with a pinch of salt. IMO GCP is good for PoC/personal projects due to their liberal free tier quotas, but I don't know about going big. Anyone with large scale experience on GCP?
There are number of issues with this report. The AWS networking section is particularly problematic and in need of extensive disclaimers or changes to the test methodology.
On the throughput side, all this test does is demonstrate the documented[1] throughput limit for a single TCP connection. 10 Gbps if the two instances are in the same placement group and 5 Gbps otherwise. The reason some of the network-optimized instances were "slower" than the non-optimized ones was because it was simply a random draw of whether both instances in the test were physically close to each other.
If they wanted to do a proper throughput test they would have used placement groups and multiple connections/flows. If they felt like the single flow test case was important they should have mentioned that AWS has a specific limitation around this. Personally I don't think a single flow test case is particularly realistic.
The fact that the obvious discrepancy between their results and the documented (multi-flow) limits didn't cause them to dig deeper is enough to make me very skeptical of the purpose of this paper.
The latency results are also basically a random spread. It is essentially distribution of all the different latencies you might randomly get between two instances if you don't use placement groups. It says absolutely nothing about the networking capabilities of different instances used in each test.
1. "Single TCP flow is limited to 10 Gbps for instances in the same placement group and 5 Gbps between instances anywhere else." https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/ec2-networkin...
Adding 20px of padding on all the slides seems to be the worst idea they got this year. Slides that you can't read is always better than slides you can read /s
Direct access to pdf download : https://content.cdntwrk.com/files/aT0xMzI3NDk4JnY9NCZpc3N1ZU...
The network throughout is eye opening given how close most of the other benchmarks are. GCP's lowest performer is >50% higher than AWS's top performer and more than double Azure's best.
How much of this is affected just by "cloud weather"? It seems like network latency and some of these other measures would be influenced by adjacent workloads that happen to be running in your region, zone, facility, rack, or machine.
Are there any good alternatives to the big three? I'm looking to build out a platform with as little dependence on Google/MSFT/Amazon as possible.
Google, like AWS and Azure, is 'only pay for what you use'. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to put limits in? Or to choose a 20/50/100 dollar per month plan?
This article screams bias, beginning with the title. I don't know how to give this credit.
I'm a bit dubious about the networking results they present. I did some quite extensive network performence testing last winter on those three CSP, and even if single queue TCP+gso performence can behave like this, I find the claim 'GCP is 3x faster than AWS' a bit bold. It's definitely possible to get 50G of TCP traffic in AWS, and a lot of things are in the balance (MTU, number of queues, drivers...) that make this claim a bit weird to me.
>> GCP Outpaces Azure, AWS in the 2021 Cloud Report (cockroachlabs.com)
>> AWS network latencies are unbeatable
Seems weird to see these sentences on the same site.
I think enabling InfiniBand in Azure brings much better Network performances (but not for all kinds of VMs) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/work...
I evaluated AWS and GCP for my startup and found GCP to be more expensive. The horror stories I've read about Google's lack of customer support put me off too.
the website requires providing personal data including an email address to access the full report.
I recommend using an email @cockroachlabs.com so that they can get spammed by their own marketing bs (besides the report).
You will be directed to the download page anyway.
I have substantial concerns running my core infra on Google products: deprecation, inhuman support, the allegations of anticompetitive behaviour in the states’ antitrust lawsuit.
Might be good tech. Business risk seems high.
Wait, didn't HN pronounce GCP as dead in pretty much every content thread about clouds? What's going on?
I've done pretty extensive work in all three major cloud providers. If you were to ask me which one I'd use for a net new project, it would be GCP -- no question. Nearly all of their services I've used have been great with a feeling that they were purposefully engineered (BigQuery, GKE, GCE, Cloud Build, Cloud Run, Firebase, GCR, Dataflow, PubSub, Data Proc, Cloud SQL, goes on and on...). Not to mention almost every service has a Cloud API, which really goes a long way towards eliminating the firewall and helps you embrace the Zero Trust/BeyondCorp model. And BigQuery. I can't express enough how amazing BigQuery is. If you're not using GCP, it's worth going multi-cloud for BigQuery alone.
But there is something to be said of AWS. Their SDKs are complete and predictable, their APIs are very fast and consistent, and AWS IAM, while having a steep learning curve, never leaves you guessing around what your principals have access to. For me, the real challenge with AWS has been introducing multiple AWS accounts. Governance just flat out sucks when you begin to scale past a handful of accounts (but it is getting better).
Azure on the other hand, has terrible consistency issues between their APIs, their SDKs are awful, and it just feels like the entire product is an extension of the MCP System Administrator persona of old, where it's expected that someone's job will be sitting in front of a UI and clicking around to get things done (the whole blade thing with their portal has to be one of the worst user experiences I've ever seen). However, I do like their Logic Apps, and Azure Policy with auto remediation (when it works as advertised -- ref API consistency and how long it takes for things to propagate through their system) has tons of potential. But they still have a ways to go before I'd consider it for my workloads.