Few years ago, I would have chosen AWS over GCE. Now, I am starting new project and need to reexamine which cloud provider to use. If you are starting new project in 2016, which cloud provider do you choose? AWS or GCE? They both seems to provide the services I need such as database, storage, scalability etc.<p>Correction: I meant to say Google Cloud Platform instead of GCE.
If you have to pick one, GCE hands down. AWS has more features but is more expensive and more operationally complex. GCE may have less features, but the ones it has are better thought out and the user experience is in a league of it's own. Also keep in mind that if for some reason you want to take advantage of something like Amazon's video transcoding service, nothing says you have to build 100% of your app on a single provider's services.
I've been using AWS for years, but the recent downtime for GCE got me to take a look at what Google was offering. (Makes no sense right? All publicity is good publicity?)<p>I was blown away by the UX of both the console and the instances themselves. Example: when you add a new user/public key in the console, it propagates to instances automatically. Sure, you could do that yourself, but the default features are just really nice to have.
Google Cloud wins hands down!<p>Places where Google Cloud shines over AWS: Excellent UI, Ease of use, Scalability, Security, Data services, Big Data, Machine Learning, Network, Disks. The only place where Google loses to AWS is Relational Databases.<p>Google Cloud Network and SSDs are about an order of magnitude better (in terms of performance / price) compared to AWS Network and SSDs. Googles Big Data tools (BigQuery, PubSub, Bigtable, Dataflow) can scale to petabyte scale without any problem. AWS can be OK for terabyte scale data workloads, but beyond that, it's hard to scale and manage. Other pieces like Kubernetes, TensorFlow and Dataflow (Opensource, if you want to run in-house) and available as native Cloud services, all services are fully managed makes Google Cloud the best Cloud.
I think it's a complex question.<p>AWS is far ahead in terms of maturity of the service, breadth of services, ecosystem support.<p>On the other hand, Google Compute Platform is "up and coming", and in general it is trying to attract customers by offering lower-than-AWS prices on most comparable services.<p>AWS is also a safer bet. At the same time, Google is big enough that betting on it is not as risky as betting on another "startuppy" provider.
How do HN commenters rank Azure amongst the three? I like the UI/portals quite a bit, but haven't explored any of the 3 major cloud providers in great detail.
I work with 40+ partner companies, and they are all using AWS. Moving big data sets around is cheap and super easy. And, it's not been very expensive to process large data sets on AWS. On average, I crunch through 20 TiB for like $50 a pop.<p>Given that no company that I work with uses Google's cloud, I'm curious who is using it. They're marking hard obviously. Makes me wonder what's an ad and what's not.
It depends on your state and needs. It's a no brainer if the majority of your customers are in a specific region where AWS has a nearby datacenter or when you need some specific service from AWS like DynamoDb, IAM, CloudFormation, ActiveDirectory, Workspaces etc.<p>GCE is preferred for any kind of big data or analytics scenario. It's a cheaper service with way better networking or disk io, fit's very well for an engineering oriented organisation. Per minute pricing or very fast scaling of the services are huge advantages.
We thought a lot about this question to pick a cloud for Quizlet (~200 cloud machines) and ended up going with GCP. Here's a summary of our analysis, hope its helpful: <a href="https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp" rel="nofollow">https://quizlet.com/blog/whats-the-best-cloud-probably-gcp</a>
I'd go for AWS since it has already proven its trustability, stability and usability in the context of daily routine/providing solid solutions for hosting high access-content.<p>GCE is interesting however, I'll definitely keep that in mind for future "testing" but at the moment I'd take AWS as my "out of the box"-solution.
GCP is a non-starter for us due to Region support. No Australia, Singapore or even US west regions means that latency is too high. CDN / caching can make web performance acceptable, but service performance will always suffer. Unfortunately over half of .au traffic routes to Asia via the US west coast (due to lower cost), with the rest route via Japan, Guam or Singapore. This means Taiwan would be a 300ms route for a significant portion of our audience.<p>AWS is what we use for cloud provisioning, with Rackspace still hosting some legacy systems. We are moving our workloads off Rackspace as the cost is higher. Azure is a possibility but unlikely as they are as expensive as AWS and offers nothing that we feel is especially compelling as a Linux shop.<p>If Digital Ocean, Linode or similar offered an Australian hosting option I would be willing to look at it if the cost was under 2x that of a US region, as I could get a similar functionality having SaltStack handle provisioning. However knowing bandwidth and related costs in .au I really doubt many want to go through the cost & effort.<p>Most of the domestic providers are either too expensive ($40-$80 AUD a month for a 1 core / 1gb instance w/ HDD backed storage & 100 GB transfer), and/or aren't run to the scale that you can have confidence that they will be an ongoing competitive business.
I think OP means GCP: Google Cloud Platform. There's GCE, Google Compute Engine, as part of GCP. GCE is also different from another GCP product Container Engine.
How about using <a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/storage/</a> for personal backup (photos, videos, files..)?<p>It seems much less expensive than paying a fee for a big Google Drive. The bandwidth needed for GCStorage would be minimum (just uploading from time to time)
Are you talking just about the VMs ? Because if you're talking about the platform, then just the fact that Amazon has Postgresql RDS to take care of your databases is killer.<p>And if I'm already locked in to AWS for one service...
Use Spinnaker and chose both or decide later. <a href="http://www.spinnaker.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.spinnaker.io/</a>
anyone know where GCE stands in terms of PCI compliance? i know AWS is a level 1 PCI-compliant service provider and makes it a bit easier during the audit process.
Are they even comparable? AWS offers full virtual machines. I was under the impression that GCE offers a more high level platform where you run your code in their proprietery environment?<p>If I am not mistaken, using GCE means you are locked in and cannot migrate away easily. That's why I never looked into it closely. I don't want to be at the mercy of a provider.