Google Compute Engine vs. LightEdge

Google Compute Engine is so easy to implement and run. It doesn't require much knowledge to build an app since they provide multiple options to choose from with their prebuilt sample list. We can easily make customization on any website app we built for our client according to their needs and make changes if required.

Incentivized

OnRamp is great for medium or large size companies that need to organize information in a way that is easily accessible. It is not great for small companies who don't have a lot of customers.

Incentivized

• Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts
• Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy
• Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs

Incentivized

• OnRamp does a great job at pulling up specific contact information about our donors
• OnRamp allows for us to find detailed payment information regarding postings to our general ledger
• It is very easy to run various reports with OnRamp

Incentivized

• Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides.
• Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount.
• Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services.

Incentivized

• I hear complaints from our donations department on how extractions can be difficult at times when pulling multiple years information
• OnRamp can make room for improvement by allowing us to make changes from an admin standpoint on how we pull up certain reports

Incentivized

Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.

Incentivized

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

There were some very few cases where we had an outage but mostly it did not last more than 10 minutes. And if there were any maintenance, we were notified beforehand. So did not have any major problem with Google Compute Engine's availability.

GCE is a performant infrastructure. The GCE usage reports are readily available and the reports load time is insignificant. GCE exposes various REST API which allows the third part system to integrate with GCE. Many observability software like newRelic integrates with the GCE to offer monitoring of GCE

Incentivized

• The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.

Incentivized

OnRamp is much easier to use then Financial Edge with its user-friendly interface. Financial Edge seems dated and is much more complicated when running reports.

Incentivized

• With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems.
• As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster.

Incentivized

• OnRamp saves us time on retrieving data
• OnRamp helps us organize payment information and makes it easily accessible for users
• The security of using OnRamp is the best investment a company can make.

Incentivized