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Comment by mpdehaan2 | Hacker News Reader

Does GCE still require that you name (vs simply tag) instances via their APIs in order to create new guests?

That and the slightly weird authentication/setup process (rough memory of that, really) were the obvious downsides for me.

Obvious upsides to GCE would be fractional hourly billing and allegedly no-need to prewarm loadbalancers. And probably there aren't mystery settings that require you to email someone to ask them to be set, and there probably aren't features that you can only access through the GUI with API support coming later -- though that is just a guess :)

A downside to GCE would be if you wanted any of the various other services that AWS provides, since they provide a ton more. AWS also has really good service -- Google may also, but I haven't had direct experience.

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Can you explain the name/tag requirement?

Yeah, the authentication/setup process is weird. OK for individuals but very confusing for team permissions and the permissions are very basic

But despite this I still prefer GCE over AWS.

* GCE documentation is much better. Understanding things from AWS docs can be an exercise in frustration.

* The console is easier to understand and more responsive. Command line tools have good UX.

* Instances boot up faster and seems to perform better and have more predictable performance

* Automatic discounts without reserving instances. (It's awesome!)

Maybe this is preference or something changed since I used GCE daily, but I disagree on almost all these points.

* Documentation - On the surface, GCE docs always looked better to me until I realized how many mistakes there were and things out-of-date. Not to mention there was too much of the obvious documentation and not anything regarding subjects where I'd actually want detailed docs. Although Amazon's docs are trash, they have the benefit of everyone and their mother writing about how to do x, y, or z. Whether that's a benefit or not, it depends on the author.

* Console - The console was sometimes more responsive depending on the action, but for some things was worse. Overall I'd give this one to GCE as well, but I think the GUI was a mess in places. Perhaps that's more based on my total usage of Google Services, which are a superset of GCE. Regarding command line tools though, I felt these were awful, slow, poorly documented, and buggy. Again, maybe an update fixed some of this. Google has a really bad history with consoles. Amazon's GUI is 90sish at times, but it's been pretty good to me and the API just works.

* The answer to this one is really it depends on the machines, location, etc. GCE has some advantages here that are well documented, but performance of a running machine was never really a problem I faced on Amazon provided you select a good instance type.

* Can't argue here. Amazon does like to give out its share of freebies though if you are a big enough customer or paying attention to the community.

* There are a lot of blog posts about the problem is that these can be outdated and may not be using best practises.

* I mainly use the GCE console and I found it fantastic. Showing all VMs from across regions is itself a big improvement from AWS console. The project dashboard was a mess. The new beta console is better. I found Google's command line tools much more intuitive and very easy to keep up to date. They have consolidated some previously separate tools into a single gcloud utility.

Sorry for late reply.

When using the python bindings, you could not simply request N instances using image ID X. You had to come up with an (account) unique name for each one, like webserver-01 and webserver-02.

It is somewhat fundamentally anti "cattles not pets", which led to some weird code in libraries to try to pick IDs that were not used.

My experience here is approximately 1 year old.

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