How we saved on VM cost by switching from Rackspace to GCE
June 13, 2017

How we saved on VM cost by switching from Rackspace to GCE

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is Google's answer to AWS. We use GCE as a low-cost virtual host solution, and we purposefully migrated off AWS and Rackspace to GCE. We made the decision mostly based on cost, but also the flexibility of the toolkit and deployment. GCE is a one-stop shop for hosting virtual and scalable environments in the cloud.
  • GCE is an excellent tool for quick deployment of on demand servers.
  • GCE offers the ability to snapshot servers, create host clusters, and auto-scale based on demand.
  • GCE is the most cost effective virtual hosting environment we've used. They give up front pricing which is a major plus for us.
  • I can't think of any immediate areas GCE could improve on.
  • GCE has had a positive impact on our ROI. We made the switch from Rackspace and saved something like 40% off our monthly VM costs.
I've used Rackspace, AWS, and Digital Ocean to host virtual environments. In my opinion, GCE has a robust feature set on par with any other mainstream virtual hosting company. I would say AWS and Digital Ocean are comparable, and Rackspace would be slightly less robust than GCE.

All in all, GCE is a standard tool that every engineer should have in their toolbox.
GCE is well suited for building scalable tools in the cloud. If you have an on demand service, GCE is a great tool for spinning up and down servers quickly. GCE can get expensive for full time applications using high network throughput. If you have a lot of data moving between servers, make sure you understand the cost associated with how information will be flowing over the network.

Google Compute Engine Feature Ratings

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
10
Dynamic scaling
10
Elastic load balancing
10
Pre-configured templates
10
Monitoring tools
8
Pre-defined machine images
10
Operating system support
10
Security controls
8