Review: Google Compute Engine

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Review: Google Compute Engine

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 23, 2012 @02:11PM from the silver-lining dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes an in-depth look at Google Compute Engine, the search giant's response to Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. 'If you want to build your own collection of Linux boxes, Google Compute Engine offers a nice, generic way to buy servers at what — depending on the size of compute instance you need — can be a great price. The most attractive feature will probably be the proximity to the other parts of the Google infrastructure,' Wayner writes, adding that Google Compute Engine is just one part of the Google APIs portal, a grand collection of 46 services. 'I suspect many developers will be most interested in using Google Compute Engine when they want to poll these Google databases fairly often. While I don't think you're guaranteed to be in the same zone as the service you want, you're still closer than when traveling across the generic Web.'"

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How easy is it to leave? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 14:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

You know, for when they shut it down?
1. Re:How easy is it to leave? by MobileTatsu-NJG · 2012-08-23 14:41 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Isn't that entirely up to you?
  
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2. Re:How easy is it to leave? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 16:16 · Score: 0
  
  agreed. they shut down everything. all of the time.
3. Re:How easy is it to leave? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 22:09 · Score: 1
  
  1) Google has always been early and very helpful at letting you get your data
  2) Do you seriously think they are going to shut this down?
  This is a full-on Google-wide product that has been in-dev for many many years now. This isn't a silly Labs project.
  This is a direct attack against other competitors services since they had absolutely nothing like it, besides a broken-window of services with varying storage caps and uses.
4. Re:How easy is it to leave? by olau · 2012-08-23 22:27 · Score: 1
  
  Good point, but for once they're actually just offering VPSes it seems, so you can just rsync your stuff out. Of course, if you have some custom scripting set up for starting instances, you'll have to rewrite that since the APIs will be different. But that's probably only a small hassle.
5. Re:How easy is it to leave? by Hadlock · 2012-08-24 01:59 · Score: 1
  
  Google Wave, Google Health, Google Gears... I'm sure I'm missing plenty of other "big" projects. What is with the sudden wave of ACs here? Is there a mass migration from Reddit recently?
  
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6. Re:How easy is it to leave? by hobarrera · 2012-08-24 03:44 · Score: 1
  
  It's basically a sort-of-VPS tailored a bit differently and sold with a new label. You still need to maintain and backup important stuff yourself.
7. Re:How easy is it to leave? by swillden · 2012-08-24 04:16 · Score: 1
  
  You know, for when they shut it down?
  What paid service has Google ever shut down?
  
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8. Re:How easy is it to leave? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-24 05:14 · Score: 0
  
  How about Google Answers? Picnik had premium features.
  Or more recently Google Message Filtering? Postini Small Business Edition? Both are being phased-out with non-renewal notices. They are not being migrated to their Apps for Business platform.
9. Re:How easy is it to leave? by swillden · 2012-08-24 07:49 · Score: 1
  
  How about Google Answers?
  That's a valid point, although it wasn't the sort of service that anyone really relied upon.
  
  Picnik had premium features.
  Which were all rolled into the Google+ image editor, AFAICT. Picnik premium users also got additional storage space, but since 100% of their premium fees were refunded to them they could easily use that money to buy more space on Google+/Drive.
  
  Or more recently Google Message Filtering?
  Hasn't been shut down. And the same filtering is present in Gmail so Apps users get it.
  
  Postini Small Business Edition?
  I'm not sure if that's actually been shut down. However, all of the same features are present in Gmail, so Apps users get them.
  
  They are not being migrated to their Apps for Business platform.
  Which features are not present in Apps?
  
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10. Re:How easy is it to leave? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-24 13:11 · Score: 0
  
  Google is phasing out Message Filtering and Small Business Edition, with no migration to Apps for Business. They also killed Google Message Continuity for Exchange in favor of pushing Apps. That may work for some people, but others are only going to use an Exchange focused solution. That was $13 per user per month.
11. Re:How easy is it to leave? by swillden · 2012-08-24 14:55 · Score: 1
  
  Read the page you linked. Exchange is supported, and users of those services are being migrated.
  
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TFA doesn't give comparison by Taco+Cowboy · 2012-08-23 14:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

What we truly need is a comparison chart of some kind, to show us what Google's offering is different from the others

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1. Re:TFA doesn't give comparison by Lennie · 2012-08-24 09:54 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, this was on the first page of the article:
  [ Move over, Amazon -- IaaS providers are elbowing into the cloud. [0] See how they compare in InfoWorld's slideshow. | Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in the InfoWorld editors' "Cloud computing in 2012" PDF special report. [1] | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing Report newsletter. [2] ]
  [0] http://infoworld.com/slideshow/57435/amazons-cloud-feels-the-heat-google-hp-microsoft-198319
  [1] http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/cloud-computing-in-2012-infoworld-special-report-187077 (free registration required)
  [2] http://www.infoworld.com/newsletters/subscribe?showlist=infoworld_cloud_computing (free registration required)
  
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Reads like a slavert with a lot of speculation by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 14:44 · Score: 0

n/t
I dunno... by Tastecicles · 2012-08-23 14:50 · Score: 2

...speaking for myself, and I don't know how many others reading might feel the same way, but $175 per machine per month (or however it's calculated, I only skimmed TFA) seems a little steep.
Right this very minute I can fire up eight cores with combined RAM of something like 14.5GB - notwithstanding the fact that we're talking six machines (four laptops (two dual core - one Atom, the other AMD E350, and two P4/2.0 and 1.6GHz), two desktops (one P4/2.66, the other an AMD Athlon64/2.4GHz), it's very scalable depending on what I'm doing and how fast I want it.
OK the Pentiums are *old* but they're still functional in a practical sense. I have older machines tasked for different things (a Thinkpad 760C running as a print server, for example) but I tend not to count or include them in my total computing power - they would suck up more in overhead than they would produce. Long gone are the days when a Pentium 120 made any sort of significant show in one of my clusters!
About my only limitation is the number of available power sockets. Cue the arguments for cloud utility with the cost of domestic electricity supply. The key word here is domestic - I have complete control on how much power is used. My AMD laptop at full draw drinks 3.5kWh per week if I leave it on crunching 24/7. That's equivalent to £1.78 per month - or around 1/100 the cost of a single core on a cloud node.

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1. Re:I dunno... by viperidaenz · 2012-08-23 15:06 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  But if you had nothing sitting around gathering dust, how much would it cost you to buy an equivalent amount of hardware? Keeping in mind depreciation, power , network access and infrastructure, and physical space. You also pay per hour, so if you don't need it one week, shut it all down and pay nothing. If you need something done very quick, pay for 100 cores for 1 hour instead of 1 core for 100 hours.
  
  It's not comparable to old laptops sitting in your attic.
2. Re:I dunno... by c0lo · 2012-08-23 16:30 · Score: 1
  
  But if you had nothing sitting around gathering dust, how much would it cost you to buy an equivalent amount of hardware? Keeping in mind depreciation, power , network access and infrastructure, and physical space. You also pay per hour, so if you don't need it one week, shut it all down and pay nothing. If you need something done very quick, pay for 100 cores for 1 hour instead of 1 core for 100 hours.
  At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space.
  $1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
  
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3. Re:I dunno... by RicktheBrick · 2012-08-23 16:32 · Score: 2
  
  IBM's Sequoia supercomputer has recently been declared the world's fastest supercomputer. It also seems to be energy efficient. The article stated it does 2 giga flops per watt. I would think that is better that any home or business computer. IBM is the main backer of World Community Grid and its computers are generating over 50,000 results a day. I would think that the cost of electricity for those results would be much greater than the cost if the results were generated on the Sequoia supercomputer. This is especially true since the results must be verified which means they are compared to another computer's results. This means each result is usually done by at least two computers doubling the cost for each result. Yet there are three members of wcg that produce over 20,000 results each day. If cloud computing is so great, I would think that one of the first things to end would be distributed computing because that seem to me to be the exact opposite of cloud computing.
4. Re:I dunno... by jsdcnet · 2012-08-23 16:58 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  But if you had nothing sitting around gathering dust, how much would it cost you to buy an equivalent amount of hardware? Keeping in mind depreciation, power , network access and infrastructure, and physical space. You also pay per hour, so if you don't need it one week, shut it all down and pay nothing. If you need something done very quick, pay for 100 cores for 1 hour instead of 1 core for 100 hours.
  At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space. $1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
  What about bandwidth? What about support? What about being able to be up and running on a new box in a few minutes when the old one takes a dump? You are totally missing the point of cloud services like this. It's not supposed to compete with your desktop machine.
  
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5. Re:I dunno... by c0lo · 2012-08-23 17:59 · Score: 1
  
  But if you had nothing sitting around gathering dust, how much would it cost you to buy an equivalent amount of hardware? Keeping in mind depreciation, power , network access and infrastructure, and physical space. You also pay per hour, so if you don't need it one week, shut it all down and pay nothing. If you need something done very quick, pay for 100 cores for 1 hour instead of 1 core for 100 hours.
  At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space. $1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
  What about bandwidth? What about support? What about being able to be up and running on a new box in a few minutes when the old one takes a dump? You are totally missing the point of cloud services like this.
  Read again the thread above. Start with the "I dunno" message on top.
  
  It's not supposed to compete with your desktop machine.
  Ah, that is the quux of the matter. Except that, as I suggested, your reply is better directed to the OP.
  
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6. Re:I dunno... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 20:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  If your business needs move slow enough that pulling a physical box out of a cabinet somewhere, hooking it up, including peripherals, because you know you're going to need to at least configure it by hand far enough to get at least an automated installer kicked off, setting up remote access, is worth your time, six times, whenever you want to rebuild your utterly non-uniform cluster, then these services are not for you.
  For my time, I'd rather pay the TEN CENTS it costs to have Amazon do it for me.
7. Re:I dunno... by olau · 2012-08-23 22:05 · Score: 1
  
  Steep if you need it 24/7. These kind of offerings are mostly a good deal if you either use them for temporary computations, so you spin up a bunch of machines, do your thing and then close them down again (so you may end up paying for 50 machines for 5 hours which is definitely cheap), or if you are in a web startup that has venture funding with lots of cash to burn and potential day-to-day scaling problems.
  Otherwise there are better options, for instance Hetzner that'll offer better hardware for ~50 USD/month (42 EUR ex VAT for a non-virtualized i7 with 16 GB RAM and 3 TB RAID1).
8. Re:I dunno... by DragonWriter · 2012-08-24 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  Right this very minute I can fire up eight cores with combined RAM of something like 14.5GB - notwithstanding the fact that we're talking six machines (four laptops (two dual core - one Atom, the other AMD E350, and two P4/2.0 and 1.6GHz), two desktops (one P4/2.66, the other an AMD Athlon64/2.4GHz), it's very scalable depending on what I'm doing and how fast I want it.
  Can you scale up to 1,000 cores to meet a spike in demand and then back to 1 core when the demand drops, and how much does it cost -- not just operating costs, but hardware costs -- for the ability to scale up to that 1,000 cores.
  That's what on-demand compute capacity like EC2 and Compute Engine is for. If you are using it to provide a fairly flat, consistent day-in-day-out processing capacity and don't have any need to do significant demand-based scaling, its probably less cost effective that just paying for fixed server capacity (whether on premise or remotely hosted).
  That's fairly common when you are paying for things and not using them at all.
9. Re:I dunno... by DragonWriter · 2012-08-24 04:57 · Score: 2
  
  At the personal level (not speaking of businesses here): AMD x8 FX-8150 3.6/4.2 GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD - DYI from all-new parts, no monitor - approx $750. Let's make it a full $1750 to allow for power delivered by "gilded electrons", "diamond optical fiber" supported internet access and a bouquet of flowers once a month for the "better half" to make it for the physical storage space.
  $1750 vs $175/month...10 month worth of VPS in Google's "compute" cloud (with 1 core with 4GB RAM).
  If you are paying the premium that comes with a service that supports dynamic server provisioning and using it like you were just buying a VPS, you are doing it wrong.
  You should be paying for a VPS, which is different. You'll note that VPS's tend to quote there server prices per month. Compute Engine's are charged per hour. If you are using them flat across the month without variation, you aren't really understanding what they are for.
10. Re:I dunno... by rev0lt · 2012-08-24 10:23 · Score: 1
  
  Been a client of them for >2 years (2 machines), and can only say good stuff. Good support, very attractive hardware packages, plenty of bandwidth, and for a little extra, you get "enterprise features" such as IP failover.
11. Re:I dunno... by rev0lt · 2012-08-24 10:33 · Score: 0
  
  Can you scale up to 1,000 cores to meet a spike in demand and then back to 1 core when the demand drops
  If you need realtime input data, you're screwed either way. Most applications don't scale well to 2 cores, let alone 1000. If I have a pretty popular website, I'd probably saturate my available network pipes long before the cpu power is a problem. Even good, fast and reliable storage is cheap, when compared to network connectivity.
  
  any need to do significant demand-based scaling,
  Let's say you are an somewhat obscure blog. You upload a video to your server that goes viral. How will Amazon solution scale so much better than the competition, if suddenly went viral (lets say 500k viewers)?
12. Re:I dunno... by jon3k · 2012-08-25 01:48 · Score: 1
  
  Scalability, availability, management, power, cooling, etc. I don't disagree that $175 seems steep, but you're comparing apples and oranges.
13. Re:I dunno... by viperidaenz · 2012-08-25 21:18 · Score: 1
  
  "cloud computing" is distributed computing. It's just a new buzz word.
14. Re:I dunno... by jschroeder · 2012-08-26 09:56 · Score: 1
  
  Actually, $175 is for the equivalent instance on rackspace. the smallest google compute instance is $104.40 per month (30 days). That seems more in the ballpark, and google appears to be planning smaller options that would presumably be even less expensive.
In-depth? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 15:06 · Score: 1

Corporate speak and technobabble buzzphrases pass as 'in depth' on Slashdot now? Wow.
Azure? by elabs · 2012-08-23 15:19 · Score: 2

I can't belive Azure wasn't even mentioned. By some estimates it now holds more objects than Amazon (since iCloud and iTunes are hosted there).
1. Re:Azure? by nzac · 2012-08-23 15:43 · Score: 1
  
  Is anyone else using it? Apple are currently not getting along well with Amazon or Google and as far as I know have yet to officially acknowledge the existence of Linux. Saying the "Android kernel" is the best software for hosting their services is probably worse than using Azure.
  Out of curiosity what do you mean by objects?
2. Re:Azure? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 15:47 · Score: 0
  
  S3, Azure, and Openstack Swift store information as named 'objects' with some metadata in a mostly flat space, but usually with some kind of partitioning (buckets, etc..), as opposed to using an RDBMS or storing files directly.
3. Re:Azure? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 15:50 · Score: 0
  
  That is, they provide the object storage service separate from their primary 'cloud compute' type services.
4. Re:Azure? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 16:39 · Score: 0
  
  Apple are currently not getting along well with Amazon or Google and as far as I know have yet to officially acknowledge the existence of Linux.
  http://web.archive.org/web/19990427014529/http://www.mklinux.apple.com/
  https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ipad/#documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingUnix/intro/intro.html
5. Re:Azure? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 17:28 · Score: 0
  
  I find it unlikely that iTunes has significantly more objects (songs) than Amazon. Most songs are available on both. Does Apple also host things like product images on Azure? Amazon hosts its product images on S3 (although it doesn't serve them to end users direct from S3). If Azure has more objects than S3, I doubt that iTunes drives that. At best, iTunes would allow Microsoft to catch up with Amazon.
  Another issue seems to be that Azure allows the storage of database tables and queue messages as well as blobs. To get the equivalent numbers from Amazon, you'd have to add other services as well. At least SimpleDB and SNS. Possibly CloudFront, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, RDS, SQS, and SES.
Azure... by Darkling-MHCN · 2012-08-23 16:10 · Score: 1

Comparisons to Amazon EC2: 9
Comparisons to MS Azure: 0
1. Re:Azure... by CadentOrange · 2012-08-24 00:44 · Score: 2
  
  Because nobody gives two cents about Azure. Amazon dominate the cloud market and hence any new service will be compared against it.
Re:Google is more evil than Microsoft ever was by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 16:55 · Score: 0

Microsoft is more evil than Google ever was
Google search dying by oldhack · 2012-08-23 17:07 · Score: 1

If you actually try to find some info by googling, chances are you're shown only pages of spam sites like fixya, livestrong, about, and other bullshit-seo sites.
Time is ripe for somebody else to step up in search business.

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1. Re:Google search dying by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-23 17:39 · Score: 0
  
  Duck Dick Go
May work? by tanveer1979 · 2012-08-23 17:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

This one may work.
I was checking out the storage pricing, for example. Its 0.12/GB instead of 0.125 of amazon. If google does not do the "API fiasco", it will work. But as we all know, google and API is like chalk and cheese. Amazon is the king when it comes to accessibility.
But I am glad, because this means more competition. So finally I can start using cloud storage, in conjunction with cloud server for hosting my blog etc., Heck, I can set up a machine in US, and get US specific content using VPN. No more looking for ssh services

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no way by Blymie · 2012-08-23 17:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

Google will fail utterly and completely at this.
Why?
Customer service. They have a horrible, HORRIBLE customer service record. They just simply are unable to do customer service.... and this product needs it.
1. Re:no way by Kotoku · 2012-08-23 20:57 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  You may have a point. Amazon is hard to top on that front. I had a billing question on EC2 at 2 a.m. and got an immediate response from a Seattle based employee and a service credit while I was doing adjustments to get my instances right. If their load balancers had a few more features I'd call it perfect.
  
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2. Re:no way by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-24 02:25 · Score: 0
  
  IPv6 on instances would be nice too...
3. Re:no way by swillden · 2012-08-24 04:25 · Score: 1
  
  They have a horrible, HORRIBLE customer service record.
  In the past, yes, certainly. Actually, I'd characterize it differently: for much of Google's history, their customer service has simply been nonexistent, except for their big advertising customers (where it's been fairly good). Google's perspective has been that their target market was simply so huge that personal service was impossible. Recently, however, Google has been getting into areas of business that require customer service. It has taken them a while to figure out how to do it and to ramp up. But I recently had cause to call the customer service for Google Wallet and it was excellent. No wait and the person I spoke with handled my problem quickly and efficiently.
  I happen to know that Google has also been putting a lot of effort into ramping up customer service in other areas as well, notably Google Fiber, where the goal is to provide an enjoyable customer service experience, in marked contrast with what most big ISPs provide.
  So it's possible that you're correct, that Google Compute Engine support will be terrible, but I think there's good reason to expect it to be otherwise.
  (Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee. I'm just honestly reporting my observations, though, and the Google Wallet rep I talked with had no idea I was an employee.)
  
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Google has Local Hard Drives or NAS Hard Drives? by robertcollier4 · 2012-08-24 00:40 · Score: 1

Rackspace uses local hard drives on each machine - while Google use NAS network attached storage. So Rackspace your hard-drive accesses (database accesses) are going through a SATA controller or such - and with Google your accesses are going through a network controller which is much slower. Makes a big difference especially for database driven apps such as all websites are these days. Are Google's hard drives accessed locally over a SATA interface or over a Network NAS interface? I would think that local storage is always better? See here for stats: http://blog.cfelde.com/2011/05/performance-rackspace-cloud-vs-amazon-web-services/ >>> "And this is where the first big difference shows. From my understanding, Rackspace uses RAID 10 with locally located hard drives... EBS on the other hand is network attached storage. So the first test is raw write speed. Using the dd command as shown below, running it three times in a row on each server gave the following results: Rackspace having an average write speed of 290 MB/s and Amazon only 81 MB/s. "
Re:Google has Local Hard Drives or NAS Hard Drives by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-24 02:50 · Score: 0

Amazon AWS also offers 'ephemeral' storage, which is a local disk. However, it gets deleted when the instance goes down. Also, might need to check the speeds on the newer EBS "optimized" instances (same rack or something w/ less latency).
I worry about price comparisons with RackSpace as well, as they used LXC for virtualization last time I checked, this allows for far more over-allocation of resources than Amazon's AWS and could lead to less *predictable* performance (and predictability can be valuable).
Re:Google has Local Hard Drives or NAS Hard Drives by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-24 02:53 · Score: 0

This is because AWS uses Xen underneath (and that doesn't allow for over-allocation of resources like RAM)
Compute Engine vs. AWS/Rackspace by DragonWriter · 2012-08-24 03:44 · Score: 1

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes an in-depth look at Google Compute Engine, the search giant's response to Amazon Web Services and Rackspace
Google Compute Engine isn't a "response to AWS and Rackspace".
Google Compute Engine is a the IaaS offering in Google's cloud services, which is a direct competitor (and arguably "response") to Amazon's EC2 (not AWS as a whole) and RackSpace's Cloud Servers offerings.
The closest Google has to an competitor to AWS as a whole (which is the umbrella under which Amazon offers EC2, SQS, SNS, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, etc.) is the Google Cloud Platform (which is the umbrella under which Google offers Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and some other services.)
Rackspace's list of services is a bit different, and while Google has offerings which compete with most of them on some level, there's no one Google umbrella (other than just plain "Google") that takes in the offerings that compete with Rackspace.
Re:Google has Local Hard Drives or NAS Hard Drives by DragonWriter · 2012-08-24 04:38 · Score: 1

Rackspace uses local hard drives on each machine - while Google use NAS network attached storage.
I'm pretty sure that the "local disk" (lifespan scoped to the instance) for each machine level on Compute Engine is, indeed, local disk; the optional "persistent disk" is probably NAS.
Different tools for different jobs by DragonWriter · 2012-09-06 01:52 · Score: 1

Most applications don't scale well to 2 cores, let alone 1000.

Most applications are not ideal for Compute Engine and similar services which charge a premium for enabling dynamic server provisioning where you can rapidly change the number of servers available and are charged by the hour.

If I have a pretty popular website, I'd probably saturate my available network pipes long before the cpu power is a problem.

I'd be surprised if that's true on either Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine, which don't have fixed (either overall or per-instance) bandwidth caps, though its conceivably possible that the either the local network resources available to an instance or the total network resources available to the Amazon or Google server farm involved could become saturated. But, in any case, applications that aren't concerned about CPU scaling aren't really the motivating use case for these services. So assuming this statement is true with respect to sites hosted on EC2 or Compute Engine, all it means is that, if you are just looking for web hosting, you probably want to use a web hosting service, not EC2 or Compute Engine.

Let's say you are an somewhat obscure blog. You upload a video to your server that goes viral. How will Amazon solution scale so much better than the competition, if suddenly went viral (lets say 500k viewers)?
Neither EC2 nor Compute Engine is necessarily ideal for this. That's not the point of these services. There for scenarios where you need to spin-up/spin-down processing capacity in respect to demand, which is typical in apps that don't merely host content for consumption but do some heavy duty processing on data that they receive. You might also host the web servers providing the UI on the same service, but if all you are doing is boring hosting of web content without heavy processing, you probably want a service that is optimized for that kind of workload (or, at least, not one that is optimized for a very different kind of workload.)
You seem to complaining that a jackhammer makes a bad screwdriver. While this is true, the purpose of a jackhammer isn't driving screws, so its pretty much irrelevant to what a jackhammer is for.