Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2: Video Transcoding

http://blog.zencoder.com/2012/07/23/first-look-at-google-compute-engine-for-video-transcoding/

by Heff • 14 years ago

169 30 14 years ago

blog.zencoder.com

sp3323• 14 years ago

How could transfers from Google to Amazon be so much faster than from Google to Google?

jbeda5• 14 years ago

I'm the TL for Google Compute Engine.

This isn't the performance we expect here and we will be looking in to see what is going on.

sp3323• 14 years ago

Oh I'm sure it's not normal. Let us know if you find out what happened :)

rdl2• 14 years ago

How do people get beta access? I'd love to look at moving workloads over to GCE.

boomzilla• 14 years ago

bummer :) don't you guys run perf. test with your biggest competitor before launch?

jcdavis• 14 years ago

Its not a fair comparison, but shouldn't they also be trying/using EC2 GPU instances? I would think a large transcoding service such as zencoder has at least looked into it at some point

sp3323• 14 years ago

They've looked into it, but they said GPU encoders don't compress as well, and don't look as good. https://www.quora.com/Does-Zencoder-use-regular-EC2-or-GPU-E...

salem2• 14 years ago

Much of the SFX film industry is not using GPUs, at least not for final renders because differences floating point precision.

dpe822• 14 years ago

Floating point precision isn't the problem - when your output is 8 or 10 bit resolution, floating point differences aren't a big deal.

The biggest blocking factor is amount of code that needs to be ported to make it work. High end SFX companies spend virtually all their man hours implementing new stuff. They don't have the time to go back and reimplement everything, and their customers aren't so cost sensitive that they demand it.

wmf3• 14 years ago

Does 8 cores mean 8 cores or 4 cores/8 threads? The documentation is confusing.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Not to worry it is confusing for everyone. My experience when drilling down on these things are that generally in marketing advertising literature a 'core' is what most people would call a 'thread.' Engineering documentation is usually more precise but when its perceived value, perception take priority over precision.

jbeda5• 14 years ago

I'd love to hear what people think the standard nomenclature here is. I've been arguing with our PM as to call these things virtual cores or virtual CPUs. Our API uses guestCpus.

This stuff is very confusing and I'd love to find the right way to communicate it clearly.

ezran• 14 years ago

In this case it means 8 cores/16 threads. Logging into a cc2.8xlarge instance shows 32 threads.

wmf3• 14 years ago

It sounds like EC2 and GCE are using different terminology here, so Google is giving you half as many cores as you think but thanks to Sandy Bridge they're crazy fast.

jbeda5• 14 years ago

I'd love to make our docs more clear on this. If you have a pointer to what is confusing we'll fix it up.

To be clear, for every machine type, we are offering a HT per virtual CPU. So that means that an n1-standard-8 instance gets 4 physical cores and 8 hyperthreads. (We are also offering 3.75GB of RAM and ~440G of ephemeral disk per vCPU).

wmf3• 14 years ago

I assume GCE is based on a space-shared design (1:1 pinned vCPUs); if that's not correct then this becomes harder. On https://developers.google.com/compute/docs/instances#overvie... I see the term "Virtual Cores", but I don't want to hear about virtual cores. I want to know how many physical cores are backing the VM. (I don't find the term "logical core" further down the page helpful either.)

So I would say:

n1-standard-1: 1/2 physical core

n1-standard-2: 1 physical core

...

n1-standard-8: 4 physical cores

dpe822• 14 years ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Heff• 14 years ago

The actual page should be performing better now.

dmv• 14 years ago

This is nice, simple experiment design. However, I'm really surprised they only ran this once - or indicate trial counts and indicate range/distribution. I'd be curious if video transcoding is so consistent that a single measurement is enough to draw a conclusion; certainly network/storage transfer is not. Sure, time and bandwidth are not free...

jon_dahl• 14 years ago

Hi DMV - we ran the transcoding tests a few times, but transcoding performance is pretty steady across multiple runs (here and elsewhere).

Network obviously isn't; the numbers here include about a dozen test runs. We should make that more clear. Even a dozen isn't enough to be a scientific test, so hopefully we (or someone else) will do more benchmarking in the future.

ww520• 14 years ago

The comparison on cost is again on the EC2 on-demand pricing. Reserved pricing or spot pricing would cut that down substantially.

radarsat1• 14 years ago

bah, measurements without standard deviations are next to useless...

Google Compute Engine vs. Amazon EC2: Video Transcoding

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