GCE: An Easy Choice for Hosting Web Software at Scale
May 04, 2018
GCE: An Easy Choice for Hosting Web Software at Scale
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Google Compute Engine
We use Google Compute Engine to host our cloud-based web application. We manage a multi-node, shared instance of our application for thousands of monthly users, as well as individual, dedicated instances for a few of our larger clients. We are a fairly small organization and GCE manages all of our hosting needs.
GCE is very straightforward to use, most of our engineers interact with it on a daily basis. Using GCE means that we can forget about the pains of maintaining computing hardware and just focus on making great software. As a Google Apps user, we also benefit from GCE's rich integration with the rest of the Google product line. Picking GCE over competitors was an easy choice for us.
GCE is very straightforward to use, most of our engineers interact with it on a daily basis. Using GCE means that we can forget about the pains of maintaining computing hardware and just focus on making great software. As a Google Apps user, we also benefit from GCE's rich integration with the rest of the Google product line. Picking GCE over competitors was an easy choice for us.
Pros
- A simple web-based interface that is a breeze to train new engineers to use. Our experienced engineers never have trouble finding or doing anything on GCE.
- Sustained use and Committed use discounts mean we get top-tier VMs for an incredibly competitive price.
- Wonderful identity and access management that gives us peace-of-mind when granting access to machines to contractors and other 3rd parties.
- Fast VMs, lastest in hardware, and enough RAM to power even the hungriest of our services.
Cons
- 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.
- We don't need to hire server admins or infrastructure engineers and instead our web engineers are more than capable of maintaining all of our services.
- Fast-boot VMs and top-tier SLA mean that GCE keeps up with our fast release cycle.
- We use instance templates to quickly launch dedicated services for our clients. They are often amazed at our less than a 24-hour turnaround.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), DigitalOcean and Heroku
GCE was an easy choice for us after evaluating our options. We needed something that was dynamic enough to handle our specialized stack, but easy enough that our engineers weren't spending too much time configuring and launching. We found AWS's offering to be similar but confusing in use resulting in misconfigured services and bloat. We used DigitalOcean for a time but outgrew them once our service required more than a few dozen nodes. Heroku was easy to use but ultimately could not handle our unique set of services. Finally, GCE's rich integration with the rest of the Google product line made it easy for our engineers to begin using it with their existing Google Apps accounts.
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