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What Amazon Web Services (AWS) can learn from Google Compute Engine (GCE)?
GCE is now publically available after 18 months of its launch and as an AWS lover, I thought of logging into GCE console and explore things. After playing around GCE console for an hour, I found few interesting things which AWS can learn from GCE. I’m not talking about performance, hardware, optimization etc. comparison between AWS and GCE. I’ll leave those discussion to experts. I was just looking at the things which will improve the AWS user experience and provide more options to users.
Few pointers which AWS can learn from GCE:
Resource Limits
I witnessed all GCE resource limits are mentioned at one place and that too in their management console. This helps user to quickly identify his resource limits unlike AWS where we come to know about our limits after we are fully ready to launch our resources - “Limits reached or exceeded”. It would be great, if AWS can mention all limits at one place rather than user having bad experience or search through the documentation. In fact, AWS can mention limits of each service dashboard page along with the limits utilization level.
Price
Whenever we plan to launch an instance in GCE, it also shows price along with the name and computation power of that instance. My suggestion to AWS: why don’t you place the final cost of the instance on the summary page? This will help user to understand pricing of an instance in a better way. Also, if the user is making a mistake of selecting higher cost instance – this will alert him.
Asynchronous Replication
GCE Cloud SQL database instance provide option of choosing asynchronous and synchronous replication between master and standby database instance. AWS RDS Multi-AZ instances only provide synchronous replication between master and standby. To achieve asynchronous replication in AWS, we need to use the combination of RDS Master and Read Replica. Asynchronous replication between master and standby database instances will increase the performance of the database. This will help those users who have high write application, require better performance and can handle few minutes of database loss in case the master RDS instance goes down.
Automatic Migration of VM
The automatic migration of VM during maintenance is a nice feature introduced by GCE. This will prevent the downtime of the application. In AWS, we don’t have this feature available.
Persistant Disks
GCE provides persistant disks upto 10TB and it also allows to mount those disks to another instances in read-only mode. On another side, AWS provides EBS volumes upto 1TB and it does not allow us to mount same disks on multiple instances.
There might be a question: what GCE can learn from AWS? I’ll leave this question for now. GCE is new into IaaS market. Let’s give that sometime and we might automatically get all our questions answered.
I’ll keep on updating this blog with more pointers.
