Don't forget, GCE VMs also support per-minute pricing while EC2 is still per-hour (don't think that changed in the past few months, happy to be corrected). many users spin up a VM, use it for 20 minutes, then kill it (all the data remains in persistent disk).
@ranman: You could start by disclosing that you work for AWS ;)
I'll stand by my word. I can present the pricing comparison at reinvent 2017 if you'd like.
1) The equivalent instances are cheaper on Google.
2) Automatic discount is significantly superior and more customer friendly that reserved instances.
3) Google is faster or more flexible, usually both. That means that when you have specifications to achieve (IOPS/bandwidth/SSD), AWS has to get severely over-provisioned compared to Google cloud.
I completely agree with this. But, what I found more impressive about Google Cloud is that it requires a far fewer number of people to get things done compared to AWS. AWS believes in providing fundamental building blocks rather than frameworks. It takes a lot of time, money, skills, expertise and people to make it work. Google Cloud provides frameworks which are easy to use, secure by default, does not require tuning or turning knobs, high performance, scale automatically (or automagically) and are ready to use. It is an impressive feat that Snapchat, a 25 Billion dollar company, runs on Google Cloud with 2 part-time DevOps engineers and recently Pokemon Go was able to scale to facebook level user engagement in a mere month time period with 4 backend engineers (and of course with lot of help from Google). Things like these are impossible to achieve with AWS. Bottom line, if you want to get something done, Google Cloud will get you there in a fraction of time compared to AWS and can scale way better than what AWS can, at half of the AWS's price.
>Pokemon Go was able to scale to facebook level user engagement in a mere month time period with 4 backend engineers (and of course with lot of help from Google).
I mean... did they? I was trying to play for weeks and I couldn't even login. I loved the game when I was able to play but I don't think they scaled seamlessly. Maybe that had nothing to do with the cloud provider and had more to do with the application itself (I don't know) -- but I wouldn't personally use Pokemon Go as an example of successful scaling.
>Things like these are impossible to achieve with AWS.
Twilio, Slack, AirBnB, lyft, duolingo, FINRA, yelp, pinterest, foursquare, adroll, shazam, supercell, etc. etc. etc.
I'm curious why you think these things aren't possible on AWS? They really are... and I can think of hundreds of examples.
Regardless, it's important to recognize that the cloud provider is only ONE piece in your ability to scale. I have examples of failures on GCE and on AWS. Your application architecture is far more important than the cloud provider you choose when it comes to scaling quickly like this. Sometimes it's not worth the dev effort to be prepared for these things.
>"Fraction of the time", "half of the AWS's price"
Nope. As outlined in my linked post above, the comparisons in the article are not accurate.
