Item: Google Compute Engine
Rating: 10
Author: David Long, SPA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We develop software for our clients and lean on Google Compute Engine and Google Container Engine for hosting those applications. These applications are used both across our clients' organizations as well as publicly by customers of these clients. We made the decision to use Google Compute Engine in order to reduce costs while getting solid reliability from a VPS platform. Google has provided us with both of those needs.

Pros and Cons

Spinning up new systems is a breeze. We are able to auto-scale our container engine clusters easily based on CPU usage or resource reservations.
Cost is ~1/2 of AWS in general. Google advertises this and so far they've been true to their word. They provide sustained-use discounts if you run systems that stay online for an entire month.
The command line interface is very easy to use. Setting up new environments is simple since the process can be scripted through the command line.

The L7 load balancer can be difficult to get set up. It's limited in its functionality, especially with the container engine.
It's hard to find certain objects on the web console. Often times the things I need to get to are buried in advanced menus.
Google's decision to only support MySQL on their relational DB service means that I have to manage Postgres instances in Compute on my own, managing everything from storage to backups.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

AWS and Azure

We ultimately chose Google Compute for the price difference as compared to other providers. Google's pricing for Windows servers is even lower than Microsoft's own cloud service, Azure. The terminology used across Google Compute is much easier to understand than the competitors. Rather than S3, Google's file storage service is simply called "Storage". Rather than Lamba, Google's serverless platform is just called "Cloud Functions". It's very easy to get up and running quickly with Google Cloud.

Other Software Used

Slack, Datadog, DigitalOcean, GoDaddy

Likelihood to Recommend

If running a Kubernetes or any container engine environment, Google Compute is simply the best. Given that Kubernetes and containers in general are still fairly new in terms of widespread usage, there are hangups, but those seem to exist in any hosting platform. Google's terminology, as compared to Azure and AWS is also really easy to understand. If you want logging, it's called logging. If you want storage it's called storage. Where Google Compute falls short is the same as where all cloud providers fall short: if you want high resource systems that are always online, it will get expensive really quickly.

Google Compute Engine: The ONLY choice for cloud computing

Overall Satisfaction with Google Compute Engine