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By the Numbers: How Google Compute Engine Stacks Up To Amazon EC2

Posted by samzenpus on from the head-to-head dept.

vu1986 writes "Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil's team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found. A note about our data: The benchmarks run to collect the data presented here were taken twice a day, over four days, then averaged. When a high variance was observed, we took note of it and present it here as intervals for which 80 percent of observed data points fall into."

76 comments

  1. A non techy benefit of Amazon by ethicalcannibal · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just when you start relying on it, Amazon won't shut it down.

    1. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by mybecq · · Score: 5, Funny

      Just when you start relying on it, Amazon won't shut it down.

      Not intentionally, anyway.

    2. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by udachny · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The question to Google is: what is the long term perspective here? Will this shut down if it doesn't generate some level of revenue/profit? What is that level?

      Is it possible to have a dynamically generated graph somewhere on Google that would show how far away is the break even point for this service, when will it become profitable (and this graph should be updated once in a while, every week or month to get a feel as to its long term prospect)? If it's a profit center on its own, at least there is a good chance it will stay in business.

      --
      MY OTHER COMMENTS
    3. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Necroman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sure it's fun to knock Google for shutting down services, but I believe most (if not all) of their shutdowns have always been free services they provide to consumers. I'm not aware of any paid Google service that has been shutdown. Though, Google has been known to drastically increase the cost of their services where it drives people away (mapping and AppEngine are 2 more recent examples, though they lowered the price of maps after a lot of people left).

      Google is trying to find services to hook people with, so they fund a lot of startup type projects to see what will hook people. When those projects don't produce the results they want, they just shut them down. But from what I've seen, those have mainly been free services.

      Now, taking away open standard support, like CalDAV from calendar, is a much more troublesome issue.

      --
      Its not what it is, its something else.
    4. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by poetmatt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      paid service shutdown?

      how about picasa.

      google is not trying to hook people, but I still fail to understand why they shut down reader. It added a lot of value.

    5. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Junta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      google is a company. Companies don't really intrinsicaly about value provided to users as a rule. They care about the revenue they can get from their user activity. Reader porvides value, but Google seemingly doesn't see it as a revenue stream.

      Google isn't doing things out of the goodness of their hearts. A lot of companies give that impression as they ramp up, but inevitably a company will show it's capitalist nature, fail as a business, or both.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    6. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Jason+Earl · · Score: 1, Informative

      Clearly you are not a Postini customer.

    7. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The cost of Google maps drove us away. $10000/year minimum for doing some tests (a few prototypes) was just too much.

      But amazon isn't much better. They used to have an API you could use to search for books by ISBN numbers and similar. Not only there were several changes (like the complex authentication they added at some point), but now it's been retired, and you do have to subscribe to their new API which requires a lot of information and a credit card on file. Meanwhile, I can use a similar service by Google without even registering (getting the results back as JSON from a simple REST web service).

      Both suck in their own ways but at least it's not Azure.

    8. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Companies don't really intrinsicaly about value provided to users as a rule.

      You accidentally the whole

    9. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by thrillseeker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you think AWS will continue if it's eventually found to be nonprofitable?

    10. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by udachny · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, but Amazon is trying hard to apply its resources, they have all the equipment, personnel to run this as part of their store and they are probably eating their own dog food here. So for Amazon AWS is probably central to their actual business model, because they are using the platform to run their business.

      For Google this computational platform is really a side business, they can run it and stop it and run it and stop it and it has nothing to do with their main business.

      --
      MY OTHER COMMENTS
    11. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not to worry, if they do they will give you 90 months notice.

    12. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course Google isn't doing things out of the goodness of their heart, but when you get a reputation for being as unreliable in your non-core products as they've gotten, I would suggest that they consider loss of reputation in their calculations when it comes to profitability of a particular product. I think the reliability of the existence of your products is similar to a car manufacturer's reliability in that it's a valuable attribute that is difficult to regain after you've let it go to sod in order to save a few bucks. For most software, the cost not to cancel the product are going to be negligible.

    13. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 1

      I've read somewhere that seemed reliable that Amazon is not using AWS for most of their internal services. Unfortunately, a quick search did not find me the reference for that again. I also assume that this gets less true over time, as some of their services would certainly fit.

      --
      Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
    14. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by whydna · · Score: 4, Informative

      They spoke at re:Invent and mentioned that Amazon.com has been hosted on EC2 for a number of years: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f45Uo5rw6YY

    15. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by poetmatt · · Score: 1

      google has certainly started to slip, but they were one of the few companies that at least at first, did do things to benefit the users and not to benefit themselves. It was mutual. I don't think that's about some kind of capitalist nature/failing as a business. Those are not alternatives for any company, nor are they automatically how things occur.

    16. Re:A non techy benefit of Amazon by Eivind+Eklund · · Score: 1

      Thanks for this - that means that my information at the very least was out of date.

      --
      Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
  2. Good for competition by Qwavel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I look forward to seeing Amazon and Google battle each other in providing Linux infrastructure. I know there are many excellent small providers, but no one has really come close to Amazon so far.

    1. Re:Good for competition by houghi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So having Amazon and Google is good for competition, because they drown out the excellent small providers and thus having LESS options?

      Look at politics. Having only 2 things to select from is not competition. It is an illusion of competition.

      Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    2. Re:Good for competition by udachny · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.

      - only if they exist in the market that is free of regulations, that help one business to get a leg up against another. If it's the free market that provides competition, then yes. If it's done the way it was done in (for example) case of Standard Oil, then no. Standard Oil had plenty of competition and it was pushing prices down for 40 years before it was broken up. In these 40 years the company made very good profits, helping to make Rockefeller one of the richest people in the entire history of the world (10 times as wealthy as the wealthiest dollar top billionaires of today). But in the process that company created so many efficiencies to push the prices down, that once it was broken down, the artificial "competition" promoted by the government could never match their scale again, the prices for oil products never went down again, they only went up since then.

      You are mistaking competition for the sake of competition with the best choice that market can provide to the customers. In fact it doesn't matter if you are getting your product from a market with 10 players in it or with only 3 or 2 or 1 if you are getting the best deal.

      However you know that you are not getting the best deal when the "competition" is artificially created by government, what you end up with is inefficiency and higher prices and lower quality. At that point the choices are non-existing, you have no price competition, that's something that really hurts the clients and the market in general by sucking money out of it into something that shouldn't be there.

      --
      MY OTHER COMMENTS
    3. Re:Good for competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You seem confused. The point was that none of the smaller options were real competition either. They were never even close. At least now there will be something in the same arena that is near the same scale. Also, it's a market myth that MORE competition is better. Markets are healthiest when there are a few established companies competing aggressively with each other and fresh companies coming and going. Having a simply over saturated market with no major players essentially gives you nothing but a mess because no matter how much better one product is than another, it's simply lose in the noise. This leads to very sluggish innovations, limited investment, and typically a race to the bottom theory.... all of which typically only happens to products with very low overhead/production value.

    4. Re:Good for competition by Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Currently, EC2 pretty well dominates and stifle the small providers without any help at all.

      In fact, Google, Azure, VMware, IBM, HP and any other large providers coming into prominence may help the small providers. Currently, a lot of people beileve that hosting==EC2. If large competitors change the mindset to have customers realize there is a choice, that realization may have benefits. E.g. if a CIO directs a team to 'take everything to EC2', that's pretty much a guaranteed loss for the small provider. If CIO directs instead 'take everything to a hosting provider', that team then is empowered to allow more providers to compete for the business, even if the CIO mindset was changed only because of the big players.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    5. Re:Good for competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      3 parties are better than 2, but 20 is recipe for disaster. In Poland We had that kind of situation 20 years ago when almost every candidate to Sejm was elected and there was no strong leader. Alliances were created ad hoc and every law proposal was seperate battle. More is better, but not always.

    6. Re:Good for competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      20 is not better than 2, because when you have an alliance of 20 parties to govern a country, you have to give each one of them a piece of the power. see http://noticias.r7.com/blogs/ricardo-kotscho/2013/03/16/com-30-partidos-e-39-ministerios-pais-e-ingovernavel/ (Portuguese)

    7. Re:Good for competition by Teckla · · Score: 1

      Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.

      At a glance, that sounds insightful, but . . . what about the paradox of choice?

      For example, a lot of people think that having too many options is one of the reasons Linux on the desktop has not been much of a success.

    8. Re:Good for competition by gmanterry · · Score: 0

      So having Amazon and Google is good for competition, because they drown out the excellent small providers and thus having LESS options?

      Look at politics. Having only 2 things to select from is not competition. It is an illusion of competition.

      Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.

      This remark is so very true. I'm so tired of having to choose political candidates based on one of two bases, welfare state or Christian Taliban. I wish I had a real choice that didn't include either.

      --
      Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
    9. Re:Good for competition by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1

      Lots of people feel having a large choice of car manufacturers is the reason why motor cars have been a failure. Fortunately they are no longer in power in the USSR.

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    10. Re:Good for competition by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      I'm so tired of having to choose political candidates based on one of two bases, welfare state or Christian Taliban. I wish I had a real choice that didn't include either.

      Have you considered voting for one of the other political parties? If not, have you considered that maybe people like you are the root of the problem?

    11. Re:Good for competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Alliances were created ad hoc and every law proposal was seperate battle.

      And what's so bad about that? If most of them can't agree on the law perhaps you shouldn't have that law?

      Isn't that better than one dominant party passing almost any law it wants just because it has majority and because the party members are brainwashed/coerced to toe the party line?

    12. Re:Good for competition by crutchy · · Score: 1

      peter schiff and ron paul... geniuses way ahead of their time

    13. Re:Good for competition by blokkie · · Score: 1

      there is also redhat's OpenShift.

    14. Re:Good for competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      a lot of people think that having too many options is one of the reasons Linux on the desktop has not been much of a success

      linux is succeeding on every platform, including the desktop, because more and more people are using it

      when it's free and there is plenty of choice, and users still aren't happy... hell will freeze over

      the real reasons why more people don't use desktop linux:
      1) they either are or they perceive themselves to be trapped in the windows ecosystem (dependence on autodesk or adobe products, microsoft access, etc)
      2) poor availability of systems with linux preinstalled (due to years of microsoft oem strongarming), which is also the main cause of...
      3) they don't know any better (what the hell is "linux"?)

      more and more people will change to linux; it just takes time.
      fortunately with no shareholders to directly satisfy, the linux and foss juggernauts have all the time in the world

    15. Re:Good for competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What competition? The Google offering is much more expensive than the time-tested and proven Amazon EC2.

    16. Re:Good for competition by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      This is a realm where 20 might not be better than 3. There are real advantages of scale here; if you suddenly need a LARGE ramp-up of facilities (your web site just got Slashdotted or mentioned on American Idol), a big provider can do it for you without breathing hard. A small company might not be able to provide the capacity you need on short notice.

  3. What about privacy? by White+Flame · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd be far less trusting of Google when it comes to running every single analytic it knows of over my data. Amazon's got far less stake in regular data processing, they just want to know about shopping habits.

    1. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Amazon would never try to sell any statistics that isn't shopping habits, since they are not interested in money at all.

    2. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you think that Google would try to (or even be contractually able to) mine data from their customers like this, you're either ridiculously paranoid or an anti-Google shill. Maybe both.

    3. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you think Google (or any company) wouldn't try to monetize every bit of data that they get their hands on, you're ridiculously naive.

    4. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You must be new to this world. Industrial espionage is a term that's not derived from science fiction. It's a real thing and it has been for a long time.

      Now imagine Google seeing a new emerging market they want to have a part of. This has happened before, think web mail and social media. Then imagine one of their future competitors is running their stuff on Googles network. Would you really think they could resist the temptation to peek into their stuff?

      Mind you, I'm not trying to bash Google here. Just about any company would do this if they could, hardly any manager could resist the opportunity. Reality is, it'll be very easy for Google to do and they're into in a whole lot of markets and ever-expanding.

    5. Re:What about privacy? by Zadaz · · Score: 1

      Amazon's got far less stake in regular data processing, they just want to know about shopping habits.

      Yeah. Right. Just like Google only cares about search results.

    6. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When it's a company paying for this service, Google will not be looking at their data.

      First, it's bad practice. Companies won't pay if they think their data is available to be read/hacked/distrod/etc.

      Second, if Google is smart, which I'm sure they are, the data won't even be in a format that google is able to decrypt. They don't want to be knowingly storing potentially illegal things, so they will keep it in a format that they can't access without the client's private keys.

    7. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      From a previous Slashdot article:
      http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/01/1523223/insights-into-google-compute-engine

      > Google offers at-rest encryption for all storage, whether it's local or attached over a network. 'Everything's automatically encrypted,' says Crandell, 'and it's encrypted outside the processing of the VM so there's no degradation of performance to get that feature.'"

    8. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Would you really think they could resist the temptation to peek into their stuff?

      Yes. Both because it would be a firing offense, and because Google is far too arrogant to believe that it can't do a better job of whatever it is anyway.

      (I work for Google.)

    9. Re:What about privacy? by Pallas+Athena · · Score: 1

      Yes. Therefore it makes all the more sense to avoid putting all your data into one basket. Google probably already has a lot of data on you, through their search engine and their countless other products. So in this case, I'd go with the non-Google offer.

    10. Re:What about privacy? by olegalexandrov · · Score: 1

      I don't think they will be liable for the illegal things customers store any more than they are liable for emails in GMaill of folks with criminal intentions.

    11. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also, data in GCE is encrypted at rest, see https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/disks#encryption .

    12. Re:What about privacy? by IndustrialComplex · · Score: 1

      One of the benefits of plausible deniability with regard to customer data, is that it gets you out of the 'responsibility loop' earlier. The longer you remain involved in any legal activity, the more cost you are accumulating in terms of legal representation, lost effort as your staff responds to supoenas, etc. This is something you want to minimize if you can't eliminate it completely.

      Let's consider a basic hypothetical situation in which 'Illegal Data' is discovered on a service provided by Hosting Company 'HC'. The investigation starts by determining the chain of custody and the police will attempt to determine the 'owner' of the data, and the chain of custody of that data. HC responds to the police and provides the details of the customer that uploaded the data (according to HC's logs). Eventually the customer is charged with a crime. However, HC will be drawn into the investigation because the defense lawyer will be challenging the claims of the prosecutor with respect to chain of custody and validity of the logs provided by HC. HC will be compelled to provide data/testimony (not a defendant, offered immunity, etc). HC will have to spend a non-trivial amount of time collecting the information, preparing for testimony, etc. Even if you assume they were perfect with their logs, it's still a big cost to HC. And if they AREN'T perfect? Well they still have all the costs associated with testimony, and they may take a PR hit when that testimony reveals that their internal processes are less than ideal.

      Contrast that with the concept of encrypting the user data in a manner such that only the specific user can access/alter the data. The responsibility for HC to provide testimony is dramatically reduced. All they have to show is that they don't have the ability to mess with the data (other than deletion/copy) without the customer's key. Therefore the complexity of the chain of custody is reduced, and HC is basically 'out of the loop' with respect to the prosecution/defense. The prosecution doesn't need extreme information to prove that the data wasn't modified (since it can't be w/o the key) and the defense can't suggest that the 'illegal data' was placed in the encrypted container by HC. The burdon of proof falls to the defense, and not HC.

      So even in places where safe harbor provisions protect hosting companies, it is still in a company's best interest to minimize their exposure to client data in most circumstances.

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    13. Re:What about privacy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Problem with storage encryption is that you won't even be able to boot the VM (or at least fully) without the key. That creates way too much of a manual process. The hosting company will need to have the keys, absent some sort of automation or meatbag on the customer end.

    14. Re:What about privacy? by atom1c · · Score: 1

      every bit of data

      Of course they are, it is the underlying business objective supporting all of those Big Data research projects.

  4. Everything but CPU by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Benchmarks seemed to include everything but actual CPU (GFLOPS, Linpack, whatever) performance.

    I would hazard a guess that pure number-crunchers use less general-purpose farms (and probably farms of graphic coprocessors).

  5. Limited preview by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean a cloud service in "limited preview" is much faster than a cloud server open to the public and heavily used?

    There much be some fancy engineering behind the scenes to make a lightly used service run faster than a heavily used one.

    I want to see the benchmarks after GCE is open to the public.

  6. 8 samples is hardly useful by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Twice a day over 4 days ... 8 samples ... this is supposed to be useful in some way?

    You should be ashamed of yourself for presenting this data as if it has some sort of meaning at all, let alone a useful one.

    You're going to need a couple orders of magnitude more samples before you even start thinking about being any sort of useful metric.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    1. Re:8 samples is hardly useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why the outright dismissal? You can show with high confidence that elephants are heavier than ants with 8 samples, so 8 samples is certainly sufficient in some situations -- you have to look at the specifics.

    2. Re:8 samples is hardly useful by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 4, Funny

      I am not convinced: what if they were unusually small ants?

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
    3. Re:8 samples is hardly useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Without understanding why ants can't be larger or why elephants would be unlikely to be smaller, 8 samples isn't good enough ("all swans are white").

  7. Re:Limited preview by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    There much be proofreading before hitting submit.

  8. Misleading numbers, methodology errors. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    At least for the latency calculation, if they were comparable DC locations, the claimed latency number for google would be lower than the round trip speed of light time. The real answer is the google DCs being compared are adjacent whereas the amazon DCs are on opposite sides of the country.

  9. Fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is fast because nobody is using it.

    1. Re:Fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is fast because nobody is using it.

      Amen.

      Google virts probably boot fast because no other fucker is present on the same hardware. Inter-region copies are fast because no-one else is using it. Virtual disk i/o is fast because you have it all to yourself.

      Apples to Oranges.

      Let's move along until GCE has a signitifcant customer based that actually create load.

    2. Re:Fast by swillden · · Score: 1

      It is fast because nobody is using it.

      Google is. GCE runs on the same infrastructure that runs all of Google's services.

      --
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    3. Re:Fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just like Amazon retail runs on the same infrastructure as EC2..

      I'm sorry but there's no way a web crawler is running on the same hardware as your GCE virt.

      Perhaps same infrastructure but it will be partitioned resource.

    4. Re:Fast by swillden · · Score: 1

      Just like Amazon retail runs on the same infrastructure as EC2..

      Which is a tiny fraction of the load Google manages.

      I'm sorry but there's no way a web crawler is running on the same hardware as your GCE virt.

      Perhaps same infrastructure but it will be partitioned resource.

      I can't really go into detail but... it's the same.

      --
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    5. Re:Fast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's also about 5x more expensive - compared to both EC2 and Azure.

  10. Re:Limited preview by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

    I find it somewhat ironic that Microsoft will support Linux on its IaaS platform before Google will support Windows on theirs.

  11. Too many questions! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was in the middle of signing up for the preview but got tired after the third page of questions. We already have a working setup on Rackspace and it would be nice to compare, but having to "describe the team that will be evaluating GCE" is just too much. If their goal is to prevent casual evaluation, they're doing a great job!

  12. Re:Limited preview by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, no, no. They mean that Amazon stacks up higher. Maybe because they have more books? Can we rate them in library of congresses?

  13. Re:Limited preview by swillden · · Score: 1

    You mean a cloud service in "limited preview" is much faster than a cloud server open to the public and heavily used?

    There much be some fancy engineering behind the scenes to make a lightly used service run faster than a heavily used one.

    I want to see the benchmarks after GCE is open to the public.

    They'll be the same -- or maybe better, as the service continues to improve.

    GCE may be lightly used at present, but it has a massive competitor for compute resources: Google's own products. Even when GCE becomes very widely-used, it will still be small potatoes compared to Google's own compute load.

    --
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  14. Huh? by Thrill+Science · · Score: 0

    That article /. linked to was 99% gist free. There was almost no information in it. C'mon /. You can do better.

  15. Re:Limited preview by styrotech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I find it somewhat ironic that Microsoft will support Linux on its IaaS platform before Google will support Windows on theirs.

    Why is that ironic? The difficulty/pain for each of them to support the "other" OS isn't the same.

    Linux is easier for cloud providers. eg no license tracking, billing or activation type stuff (for most distros at least) to worry about, small Linux server instances require less resources than Windows, just a bunch of files to deploy - no installation processes, instance specific UUIDs etc

    Windows is harder (for everyone but MS) for the opposite reasons.

  16. Re:Limited preview by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I find it somewhat ironic that Microsoft will support Linux on its IaaS platform before Google will support Windows on theirs.

    Google would have to agree to whatever terms Microsoft would come up with, before they can support Windows on their platform. Microsoft can put Linux on their platform without having to get any sort of approval from Google.

  17. Support? by gtirloni · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has anyone had to interact with Google support for this? Is it anything like the other services?

    --
    none
    1. Re:Support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Haha, Support? clearly you have never dealt with google.

  18. The 1 metric they left out by Vrtigo1 · · Score: 1

    How many users is each service supporting? I'd be willing to bet AWS is supporting 20x the user count GCE has, so if GCE is only 4x faster on some things, put an AWS-equivalent load on them and watch how quickly they fall over.