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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."

15 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.
  2. 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: 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.

    2. 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.

  3. 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).

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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

    It is fast because nobody is using it.

  8. 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.
  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: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.