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Google Cloud Platform Vs. Amazon Web Services

Bugfender on June 06, 2017

Why We're Moving to Google Cloud Platform We’ve been running Bugfender for around three years now. What started as an internal project within Mobi...
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nsvoid profile image
(Null Static Void)

I'm at the same place with AWS. While I like the diverse array of services, and the ability to build robust apps. The pricing structure is kind of crazy.
I'm not going to know how many servers I can commit to paying for long term until I'm up and running for a while. It is very chicken and the egg.
Also, by the time I've got enough usage data to prognosticate on future usage. We will already be looking at probably moving to a different arch entirely.
Which then brings up my next thing. AWS is more attractive to me because of Lambda and other serverless tech.
I'm still building stuff on AMIs because that is what I know. But I think in the next year or two that will be reduced to a bastion host.

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³

Yes, indeed lambda seems to be very interesting. In our case we can not use such services, because pricings are on a per-request basis and the nature of our service is about handling a high volume of requests/second. But it's looks suitable for lots of use cases!

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kalpeshbdarji profile image
Kalpesh Darji • Edited

Here Simform has done pretty good comparison of regular instance pricing and discounted pricing(simform.com/compute-pricing-compar...).

Simform considered four scenarios standard, highmemory, highcpu and GPU with no SSD and Google Cloud comes with the lowest price for all.

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lewiscowles1986 profile image
Lewis Cowles

I really want to hear more about this migration. One of the people I trained in my business is using GCP for website hosting (I think it's a bit mad); but maybe I'm being a stick in the mud when I shouldn't be.

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³

Hi david,

First of all, sorry for the misunderstanding if that wasn't clear.

  1. About networking, we're referring to private networks between your servers here. Not VPNs, but private networking. It's virtual because you don't have a cable connecting your computers, and here is where the risk lies: data is transmitted over the same cable together with other customers, the only separation is virtual. If an attacker had access to the raw data in the cable, they would be able to see your traffic, given it's not encrypted.

  2. About Redis: Redis stores data on disk on most configurations (including the default configuration in AWS). Actually, the key difference between Redis and other databases is that it defers the writing to disk, so this doesn't block the read/writes. Same applies to database backups.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

With AWS you need to commit in advance to at least 1 year of continued use of your chosen service and machine type.

With GCP, on the other hand, you get the same discount after 1 month of use, and you don’t need to plan in advance since the discount is retroactive.

Damn, that's a pretty brutal policy with AWS.

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manigandham profile image
Mani Gandham • Edited

GCP's "sustained use" discounts are pretty great, but they also offer "committed use" discounts as well that give even lower pricing for 1 and 3 year terms, effectively cheaper than most dedicated hosting providers while getting all the benefits of running in the Google environment.

Another great feature is that discounts are based on cores/ram rather than any specific instance type. This makes it easy to get discounts even with fluid usage of the VMs themselves.

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³

It is especially for startups! One of the great things of cloud computing is the possibility of upgrading/downgrading machines, or deploying more machines in short notice. 1 year planning is totally impossible :(

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hamoungh profile image
hamoun

MySQL looks like the wrong choice of database for your application anyways as it doesn't really scale. And if you use the real cloud services (key-value store, file store, ...) it wouldn't be easy to switch between two clouds.

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Aleix Ventayol

We know that MySQL is a wrong choice for our product, but what started as an experiment is now a real product used by millions of devices. We are moving away from MySQL for the log storage that's what it requires more work on the database storage engine.
But this change requires some time and meanwhile, you need to keep the service running, so having a better SQL server will release stress on the team.

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lewiscowles1986 profile image
Lewis Cowles

Reminds me of this youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

I'm not saying stick with MySQL, but I would say you've probably got a better idea what your app needs and wants, and you should be in control of tech-stack, which it seems you are moving towards enabling you to make changes when as a business you've tested and know it's right.

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³

Correct, we're still keeping MySQL for some things but moving to Elasticsearch for log data. We're using each tool for what they're good at.

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eigends8 profile image
Eigen Data Science

Hi, I just wonder if the migration process was painless and landmines to watch out?

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³ • Edited

We are planning the migration at the moment it will take several weeks, there are landmines to watch out for. One of them is moving data out of Amazon RDS (proprietary) and putting it into Google Cloud SQL (also proprietary!).
Once we have completed the migration we intend to write a follow up post.

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eigends8 profile image
Eigen Data Science

Thanks for your feedback! And looking forward for your successful migration story sharing :)

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go2maga profile image
Madan Ganesh

Great motivations behind migrating to GCP to take advantage cost, MySQL and privacy.
Why would not you chose other dev-friendly players like DigitalOcean, Exoscale? Are there rationale behind not adopting multi-cloud?

I would have suggested (magic.cloudureka.com/#!/compare) to help you measure your ROI from AWS to GCP (and other cloud options), even before the migration.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founder of Cloudureka.

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³

We considered other options, however managed MySQL and encrypted network traffic/data at rest are two things that we value and that are not provided by most of them out of the box.

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anandsoni14 profile image
Anand Soni

So, how is GC is working for you?

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victoria profile image
Victoria Drake

Thank you for the useful breakdown! I'm filing this one away for later.

Btw there's a typo in your bio box. :)

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gimix3 profile image
gimix³

Woops! thank you!