Google Shows How To Scale Apps From Zero To One Million RPS, For $10

I only skimmed the gist with the instructions for reproducing the test [1], but in that skimming I could not figure out what the request and response were in this simulation. Were these responses 100 bytes, 1k, 10k, 100k? I guess small responses, but I&#x27;m not certain.<p>I know the goal of the test is to demonstrate how capacity can be scaled upward in <i>very little time</i> and with comparatively little effort. And for that this demonstration is impressive!<p>That said, the requests per second number is not especially impressive given that a modest single server can easily saturate gigabit Ethernet with 100-byte responses (and it&#x27;s even easier to do so with larger responses) [2]. I am left wondering, does the $10 cost cover the cost of server instances <i>and</i> bandwidth? If so, that is a very good deal. The bandwidth charges for exceeding the capacity of a gigabit Ethernet connection (1M RPS with even the most trivial requests requires more than 1 gigabit) would be substantial with many hosting providers.<p>[1] <a href="https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;voellm&#x2F;1370e09f7f394e3be724</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&amp;hw=i7&amp;test=plaintext" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techempower.com&#x2F;benchmarks&#x2F;#section=data-r7&amp;hw=i7...</a>

$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&#x27;t include load-balancing, bandwidth, or any additional charges there may be. The price shouldn&#x27;t be mentioned anywhere in the article.<p>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&#x27;s much easier on AWS. It would also be interesting to see if you can scale your pool of webservers from 1 -&gt; 200 faster on AWS or GCE.<p>The article does quote @cloudpundit, who hits on the true point of the exercise: <i>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> I would also guess that Amazon is working to improve ELB to behave similarly, especially now that Google&#x27;s product has less restrictions than theirs.

I am pretty excited and yet shocked to see what Compute Engine has evolved into. The original Compute Engine was about scaling (as cluster) in scientific experiment and yet this news makes me think Compute Engine is becoming the new App Engine but with full control of the VM (plus the amazing autoscaling feature). I always like to control my own VM because I can do much more with a VM than a sandbox (to me an App Engine is just a sandbox loaded with X framework and X database). I have always wanted to work on Compute Engine :(<p>This is an interesting marketing stragery. People who wish to launch a VM can choose CE and people who just want a sandbox quickly they can use App Engine? Though I am really skeptical about the future of App Engine if the CE became cheaper. I am sure if that happens, Google will do everything it can to migrate things over to CE. This is probably many years down the road...<p>I still think CE is really good for computations.

Original post <a href="http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engine-load-balancing-hits-1-million-requests-per-second.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;compute-engin...</a>

Having beta tested the Google Compute Engine while working at Google, I have only good things to say about it. They&#x27;ve come along way in an extremely short space of time and knowing what they have internally, this is just the beginning. They&#x27;ll far surpass AWS for performance, ease of use and cost.

The only reason I can see for this being this high on the front-page [18 points and only one comment(from a googler)] is the google employee block vote (apparently tech-savvy isn&#x27;t a prerequisite in the google upvote marketing department):<p><i>1 million requests per second is 20 times greater than the throughput in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which served 125 million users in Europe</i> No, r&#x2F;s != Gb&#x2F;s.*<p>(Cue the down vote from the google up voters)

I keep checking to see whether or not I can run my own images yet but Google Compute Engine so far supports less things than even Digital Ocean.<p>What if I don&#x27;t want to run your version(s) of CentOS&#x2F;Debian, guys? Hmm? (I hope somebody from there reads this) :)<p>Still, its a very very interesting offering and something to keep an eye on. I bet nobody here is using it yet because its still early days and the thread devolves into such old classics like &quot;you&#x27;ll never be able to reach a human at Google&quot; and &quot;they changed up their pricing with Google App Engine that one time and my app was no longer free to run all of a sudden!&quot;. Sigh.<p>I personally think it would be great if you could spin up the same instances on either cloud and load-balance&#x2F;fail-over as needed&#x2F;cheapest. Docker makes it doubly exciting.

AWS has a really interesting feature in their auto-scaling groups, coupled with their ELB (elastic load balancer). You can configure an auto-scaling group with a variable number of instances that ads or removes instances automatically, based on the ELB&#x27;s measured latency or the number of requests coming in or many other such metrics.<p>This works out great and results in cost savings, as it can survive spikes, plus during the night the traffic is at most half or even less than the traffic you get during the day. I had a setup that was handling over 30,000 reqs&#x2F;sec and during the night it kept about 6 h1.medium instances active, while during the day it could go upward to 20 instances, but was usually stable at around 14 instances.<p>This article mentions ELB, but I don&#x27;t understand - does Google&#x27;s Cloud Compute offer something similar? Can one vary the number of instances based on the incoming traffic or other metrics?

RPS and $ are not interconvertible units, unless that 1M RPS is financed by the interest on a $10 investment.

This is the reason that our site. <a href="http://plexisearch.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;plexisearch.com</a> uses Google App Engine.<p>Google has allowed us to run &quot;Code&quot; rather than worry about infrastructure. Because it is an &quot;Engine&quot; we don&#x27;t have to configure much, and the autoscaling is fantastic.<p>Google Edge Cache means we get Better than CDN performance on static assets.<p>There are limitation to AppEngine, but because we can also leverage virtual servers we can create a hybrid environments that let us do things AppEngine won&#x27;t like install C Libraries, or run Windows (we aren&#x27;t doing that, but we could).<p>We have been very happy with Google App Engine and since we are running millions of pages a day through our Natural Language Engine it has worked out really well for us.<p>-Brandon Wirtz CTO Stremor.com

This is the original post <a href="http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca/2013/11/compute-engine-load-balancing-hits-1-million-requests-per-second.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;googlecloudplatform.blogspot.ca&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;compute-engin...</a>

The gist describing how to reproduce the test yourself: <a href="https://gist.github.com/voellm/1370e09f7f394e3be724" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;voellm&#x2F;1370e09f7f394e3be724</a>

The big thing they&#x27;re crowing about is because you can spin something like this up quickly on demand in the G cloud.<p>Most sites aren&#x27;t remotely close to this artificial traffic pattern (1 packet request, 1 packet response).<p>It&#x27;s kinda cool from an L4 load balancing perspective that it&#x27;s only one fault tolerant IP address. In terms of L4 LB throughput though, a single box with IPVS will happily do 1M pps.

BTW, the Gartner analyst (Lydia Leong[1]) who&#x27;s tweet was quoted is worth following. She tells it like it is, with no bullshit (read some of her stuff about the various OpenStack debacles for example).<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/cloudpundit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;cloudpundit</a>

The cake is a lie, they don&#x27;t teach howto scale yourself. They teach howto use THEIR infrastructure to scale. I mean it&#x27;s still really useful to know and all, but the headline makes the impression that Google teaches you howto scale your own company&#x27;s App from Zero to 1Million RPS.

This is misleading, $10 is just for the duration of the test. Roughly $58k&#x2F;mo if $1.33&#x2F;min.

you do need context... a million things a second is not a great metric. these are small numbers compared to a lot of things. e.g. how many pixels your graphics card is pushing right now.