{"id":99,"date":"2015-11-26T03:08:11","date_gmt":"2015-11-26T03:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.morsello.com\/?p=99"},"modified":"2015-11-27T18:54:45","modified_gmt":"2015-11-27T18:54:45","slug":"experimenting-with-google-compute-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.morsello.com\/index.php\/2015\/11\/26\/experimenting-with-google-compute-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Experimenting with Google Compute Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

I must say I’ve been happy with Amazon Web Services. \u00a0I utilize accounts both for business and personal, and I’ve been very pleased with the progress of their development of additional services, including SQS, SES, and RDS. \u00a0I’ve been aware of some of the holes in the stretched pizza dough, but like many consumers, there’s no reason to evaluate other options until things actually get painful.<\/p>\n

To be clear, there have been points where the pain has come close to inspiring me at least to see what else is out there. \u00a0Some examples come to mind:<\/p>\n

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  1. If you stop or reboot a running instance\u2014 which obviously stops your production instance\u2014 you’re required to confirm your intention. \u00a0If you create a new\u00a0machine image from a running instance\u2014 which in not-at-all-an-obvious way stops your instance\u2014 there’s no warning.<\/li>\n
  2. If you use the Amazon Web Services console to manage your various tools, you’re shown only<\/em> the obscure initials for the services\u2014 EC2, SES, S3. \u00a0If you try to manage the administrative logs, you’re shown\u00a0only<\/em> the fully spelled out service names.<\/li>\n
  3. Meeting all the recommended security points on their checklist requires that you turn off the default login. \u00a0But if you already have a retail account connected with your AWS account\u2014 which is encouraged and can’t be separated\u2014 then you must<\/em> use the default login.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The pain arrived today. \u00a0According to AWS billing records, my otherwise innocent micro instance had been spending several days last month spewing obscene amounts of data for an unknown reason to an unknown destination, racking up a huge bill. \u00a0While chances are this is something I might have been able to do something about, there’s little evidence immediately available to even corroborate that this data actually transferred. \u00a0I haven’t submitted a ticket yet to Amazon to see if there’s anything they can do to, at a minimum, explain what happened.<\/p>\n

    In any case, this has inspired me to evaluate deploying my software on other platforms. \u00a0It’s certainly advantageous to at least be very clear on the extent to which you’re committed to a vendor.<\/p>\n

    I’ve begun\u00a0separating the actual requirements for the services I use from the niceties that AWS has been providing. \u00a0To wit:<\/p>\n