Google Compute Engine as an alternative to Amazon Web Services (EC2, ELB, etc...)

Question

I am trying evaluate Google Compute Engine (GCE) for a cloud project in our company. We have some experience in working with Amazon Web Services but would like to know if GCE is a better alternative for our project. I have following questions. Our choice for the project will be based on the answers for the questions so please help me with these queries.

1. Is there an equivalent of AWS Route53 and Elastic Load Balancer on Google cloud? If they are not available then how do we load balance GCE instances?
2. Is there a concept like regions? (such as us-east-coast-1, us-west-coast-1, etc…). Helpful in making sure that the service is not affected during natural calamities.
3. Is there an equivalent of Cloud Watch to help us auto scale compute engine instances based on load?
4. Can we setup a private cloud on Google cloud platform?
5. Can we get persistent public IP addresses for GCE instances?
6. Are there any advantages (in terms of tighter integration OR pricing) when using Google services such as Google Analytics, YouTube, DoubleClick, etc?

Compassion

Answer 1

Load Balancing

Google Cloud Platform's Compute Engine (GCE) recently added a Load Balancing feature. It's lower level than ELB (it only supports UDP / TCP, not HTTP(S)).

Regions

GCE has feature parity. AWS Regions correspond to GCE Regions, and AWS Availability Zones to GCE Zones

Autoscaling (CloudWatch)

Google Compute Engine does not have autoscaling, but Google App Engine does. Third party tools such as Scalr or RightScale are however compatible with Google Compute Engine

Disclaimer: I do work at Scalr.

Private Cloud

Did you mean dedicated instances? Those are not available in GCE.

If you meant VPC, then you can use GCE networks to achieve isolation. You'll also wish to disable ephemeral external IP addresses for the instances you want to isolate.

Persistent IPs

GCE has persistent IPs, they are called "Reserved Addresses"

Integration with other services

You will likely get better latency to Google services you use in your backend (I recall a couple presentations at Google I/O talking about Google App Engine + BigQuery).

For frontend services (Google Analytics), you'll likely see not benefit, since this depends on your users, not your servers.

Dannadannel

I have a follow up query on Private Cloud aspect. What I meant by question 4 is, does google cloud platform provide an equivalent of AWS's virtual private cloud? This is very useful in hiding (also protecting) the databases servers, etc... as they are not addressed by web clients directly. If there is no equivalent then what is the preferred method to secure database servers. – Compassion

@Compassion I updated my answer accordingly: GCE supports configurable Networks, which should let you achieve what you need. – Dannadannel

I'm not sure if AWS has this, but Google also has "maintenance windows", which can bring down instances for extended periods of time. The current maintenance window (going on right now) has been projected to last for two weeks! So anyone thinking about building a reliable system will need to think hard about how to work around these issues. – Daile

As of 12/2, Compute Engine will transparently migrate instances to new hosts before performing maintenance, see the docs for details: developers.google.com/compute/docs/zones#maintenance – Gasser