Re: [tlug] hosting in Japan

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2017-02-10 08:53 +0000 (Fri), Darren Cook wrote:

> How hard has it been to do that move [from AWS to Google Cloud
> Platfrom]? How many of the various AWS services do you use, and how
> scripted was all your setup?

There's a bunch of work just to understand the slightly
different structure and UIs, but it supports a web-based console, a
command line client and HTTP REST, just like AWS, so once you're
through that initial learning curve there's no problem there. It helps
that in general Google's provisioning model seems simpler.

Amazon gives you a free year of some very minimal stuff; Google gives
you $300 and three months to play with anything you like. Google will
give you a lot, lot more free credit for those three months (many
thousands of dollars) and assign you a dedicated sales engineer if
you're a large prospect, so it's actually reasonable to build
something huge and see how much it would really cost you.

We didn't script much stuff, as far as I know (I mostly work on the
"real metal" side of things), so I don't think that was a big deal. If
you are heavily scripted, you're probably using higher-level tools as
well and for that it's going to be a matter of library support from
them I guess.

Amazon definitely offers a far wider pallete of services than GCP
does, but GCP has all the basics and they're adding stuff all the
time. That said, Google seems to focus a bit more on services that are
"core" or generic services on which you can run other things whereas
Amazon appears to offer more specific services.

One example of this may be the logging; Stackdriver is still in the
process of being integrated with GCP, but the intent appears to have
all logging going to one place, be it from the management fabric, a VM
or a Docker container. AWS, on the other hand, seems to have a
separate application (CloudTrail) for handling the logs from the
management fabric.

Obviously if you're using some heavily custom Amazon service you're
not likely to easily be able to switch over even if Google offers a
similar service, which is probably part of the point, really, and
something you should be thinking about if you're worried about being
too dependent on one provider.

That said, Google may spend the next five years rolling out zillions
more services and end up catching up to Amazon in that area.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch