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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."

28 of 76 comments (clear)

  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.

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      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.

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      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.

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      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    6. 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?

    7. 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.

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      MY OTHER COMMENTS
    8. 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

  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.

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      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.

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      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    3. 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?

  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: 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

  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?

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      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  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.

  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. 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.

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

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

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    none