I was involved in a mid-sized software company migrating from AWS to GCP. My experience was that the GCP team was very hands on, and that enterprise support was very responsive.
The support isn't perfect, nor is the product -- but I would say the level of customer service for GCP can't be compared to other Google products.
Not the original poster but we migrated to GCP because:
1) AWS was extremely expensive
2) Our GCP bill is about 1/3 of what AWS was
3) The Kubernetes offering is top notch
4) Google giving us credits and offering us consulting were the triggers that started us talking.
Seems like k8s is a big seller for a lot of companies. We don't use it currently on our team and the larger company is whole-sale in on AWS I'm not sure they'd ever be able to make the switch.
Always like to see why people make these big changes though, thanks!
I spent over a year doing a full migration from AWS EC2 + ECS instances to GCP + docker + kubernetes. It was a huge task that has paid off very well.
1) Costs per customer are lower because you can fit more containers per VM due to kubernetes doing the scheduling for you. Customers also include developer environments.
2) The number of deploys is way up because there is a simple and established pattern that everyone follows.
3) The speed of creating new services has increased because of the established patterns with containers, kubernetes resources, and deploys. Thinks days vs weeks to get something running.
4) The number of Ops issues are lower because kubernetes handles so many things for you. For example, if a deploy is incorrect for some reason, the old service is sitting there running. No outage = no escalation = everyone sleeps at night.
Even if I was a tiny startup, I would still recommend using Kubernetes. The patterns, tooling and insight that Kubernetes gives you will save you TIME. The time saved is worth more than the tiny cost of a 3 node Kubernetes cluster. That is time you can use to develop your product and sell it vs time spent ftp'ing binaries to your Digital Ocean instance. :)
I know you're only picking on Digital Ocean incidentally here, but their managed Kubernetes offering is Pretty Okay. I use it for my personal stuff and it's pretty much everything I expect from a managed Kubernetes offering.
Just don't use EKS. That is managed Kubernetes in the checkbox marketing sense only.
- Google has a lot of experience running containerized services because of Borg. Google Research says that they have been running these workloads since 2005.
- The above gives them insight into how to do this well. They would have the internal infrastructure, logging and monitoring already setup.
- They are the creator and still a major contributor to Kubernetes itself which means they can insert their influence on it.
To be fair, my only experience running Kubernetes is on GCP so maybe they are all this easy to use and run. The internet tells me that other offerings are not as good. Compared to running workloads on EC2 instances and ECS, using GKE is amazing and pain free.
Note: I am responsible for 5 clusters, 300+ nodes total and several thousand running services. Not huge by any means.
Amazon also has been running internally on containers for years before ECS. But workloads for massive FAANG companies designed by FAANG engineers turn out to be quite different than most AWS/GCP customers.
Just like EC2 wasn't Amazon selling its "spare capacity during off-peak" but always a purpose built service with completely isolated data centers and network fabric from day 1, the connection between Borg and Kubernetes is tenuous at best.
Honestly, I would encourage you to evaluate ECS and Fargate. Forget Kubernetes and direct instance management. Try a construct like https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/@aws-cdk_aws... and see how much simpler it is than all the K8S overhead.
Source: I'm at Amazon but I work on none of these services and opinions are my own. I played with K8S and am eternally confused how it's as popular as it is. I guess it gives you the illusion of not having lock in?
I only have one thing to point out about Borg and that is large numbers of Borg developers started working on Kubernetes. They got rid of Borg mistakes and replaced them with all new mistakes. :)
I don't see K8S being about lock-in at all. Using a cloud provider gives you some sort of lock-in and you should be utilizing that providers strengths.
Using Kubernetes is all about the patterns that it provides and how it removes a certain class of problems for you. Deployments, scaling, logging, etc are some of the patterns it provides and the consistency matters. How many of us have worked at companies where deploying two services have been completely different? One team runs the jenkins pipeline while another ftps the files over. Now multiply that by several services and several tasks (logging, scaling, etc).
1. Is instance management on ECS really annoying enough to justify the higher fargate price?
2. Does ECS have something similar to pods, i.e. colocated containers which can communicate over localhost, share filesystems, etc? A quick search didn't turn anything up.
That's fair. As I pointed out in another reply, most of my experience is with GKE so I may be spoiled in how painless it is. All I can say is that GKE is treating me well. Node upgrades are seemless, defaults are decent, it was very easy to create clusters through the console or terraform. I only run 5 clusters and that is not that huge compared to others.
I've used ECS more than fargate. My biggest problem comes from reliability and having to manage things. We still run things on ECS and we get about 30x as many maintenance things we need to do, like retiring instances or instances just dying on us and we have to move things off of it manually.
I have a little bit of experience in Fargate from a previous job but not enough to make a real conclusion about it.
I've never used EKS but I do have friends that would rather roll their own version of Kubernetes on EC2 instance instead of using EKS.
The support isn't perfect, nor is the product -- but I would say the level of customer service for GCP can't be compared to other Google products.