Google Compute Engine vs Packet

Overview

Google Compute Engine

Stacks12.4K

Followers9.2K

Votes423

Equinix Metal

Stacks43

Followers62

Votes8

Google Compute Engine vs Packet: What are the differences?

What is Google Compute Engine? Run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure. Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

What is Packet? The Leading Bare Metal Cloud for Developers. Deploy screaming fast dedicated servers in under 10 minutes via portal, API, or common cloud orchestration tools. No hypervisor, modern IPv6 network, and hourly pricing.

Google Compute Engine and Packet belong to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Google Compute Engine are:

High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.
Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.
(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.

On the other hand, Packet provides the following key features:

Premium configs, always available
Fully dedicated, no hypervisors
Deploy in less than 10 minutes

"Backed by google" is the primary reason why developers consider Google Compute Engine over the competitors, whereas "Great performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Packet.

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Advice on Google Compute Engine, Equinix Metal

Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.

In both cases, the instance much be shut down.

There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.

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Detailed Comparison

Google Compute Engine	Equinix Metal
Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.	As part of Equinix — the world’s digital infrastructure company — we provide automated & interconnected infrastructure. Formerly Packet, now Equinix Metal™.
High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.;Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.;(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.;Load balancing- Native load-balancing technology helps you spread incoming network traffic across a pool of instances, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput and availability at low cost.;Fast and easy provisioning- Quickly deploy large clusters of virtual machines with intuitive tools including a RESTful API, command-line interface and web-based Console. You can also use tools such as RightScale and Scalr to automatically manage your deployment.;Compliance and security- All data written to disk in Compute Engine is encrypted at rest using the AES-128-CBC algorithm. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.	Automated bare metal; Native Equinix Fabric integration; AMD, Arm and Intel Configs; Simple hourly pricing starting at $.50/hr; CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Flatcar Linux, Windows, ESXi, and FreeBSD on demand; Cloud-Init and Cloud-Config compatible; Advanced network with native IPv6; Bring your own IP space.
Statistics
Stacks 12.4K	Stacks 43
Followers 9.2K	Followers 62
Votes 423	Votes 8
Pros & Cons
Pros 87 Backed by google 79 Easy to scale 75 High-performance virtual machines 57 Performance 52 Fast and easy provisioning	Pros 3 Great performance 3 No multi tenancy 2 Fantastic customer support
Integrations
RightScale Qubole Scalr Boundary Red Hat Codeready Workspaces Kinvey New Relic Twilio SendGrid Zencoder	Google Anthos Red Hat OpenShift Mist.io Ansible Terraform VMware vSphere Cloud 66 Docker Machine

What are some alternatives to Google Compute Engine, Equinix Metal?

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Google Compute Engine are:

High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.
Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.
(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.

On the other hand, Packet provides the following key features:

Premium configs, always available
Fully dedicated, no hypervisors
Deploy in less than 10 minutes

"Backed by google" is the primary reason why developers consider Google Compute Engine over the competitors, whereas "Great performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Packet.

Google Compute Engine vs Packet