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Our Justification For Google Cloud

We currently are in process of finishing an eGovernment project for a nation in east Africa.

Since many articles focus on the negative of various platforms especially GCP— we thought it would be nice to share our thoughts on cloud in general, and our justifications for using Google Cloud.

We chose Google GCP because of the actual run rate costs. You can stop reading now if you want. That’s the reason why. The explanation is below.

I used to work at the 2nd largest bank in the world as a technical director and principal cloud/applications architect before deciding prior to pandemics that I wanted to go into business for myself (I don’t regret it). I’ve learned extremely deep level concepts to provide financial services to 180,000,000 plus people around the globe with touch points into 95 countries and moved around $700 trillion dollars over the apps that I wrote — so I kind of have some insight and maybe some analytics 🤔😏👀.

On our current project we have already started to roll out eGovernment to about 1,000,000 residents of this particular country.

Google GCP including Firebase, Big Query, AI, Firestore, Realtime Firebase, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Kubernettes and many other Google services to host many of our client side applications.

10,000,000,000 reads and 100,000,000 writes costs you $90,000. Seem expensive to you? It’s not!!!! Consider the alternatives.

Option 1: Build A Private Cloud

A standard firewall that can stand to that volume of traffic will cost around $25,000 at a minimum and one will need two per center $50,000 on exterior and two per center on interior $50,000. Then one will need to consider load balancers, session border controllers $1,400,0000 (maybe, depends on the project, this would be an Oracle NetNet 4200 with TSC). Aggregation switches $5,000-$50,000, edge routers $80,000 and dmz switches $30,000.

Kemp Loadbalancers are the cheapest at around $5,000 for the pair — but one would need 4 to five pairs for geo redudancy per center. So now you are looking at around $20,000.

We choose Cisco, and Arista dependent upon the requirements for low latency queuing — for any type of Nexus Switch setup at a minimum one is looking at $18,000 per switch, and one will need once again 4 sets — $72,000. Unified Compute Clusters on just standardized CX140 Hardware will run you about $5,000 a pop with the correct disk-space, add in ESX, Nutanix, Microsoft Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Redhat Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu Enterprise for the scale that we are in: $250,000 easily spent on licensure for all cores total. Mongo DB Enterprise licensure will also cost you a minimum of $35,000.

Now let’s talk about how much it would actually cost you laborwise — say you are frugal and just decide to hire one general systems engineer — $85,000, one security engineer, $105,000 — one developer $80,000, and one manager — $100,000 minimum for Ohio and across the country that number can double to triple. These people are required regardless of operations perspectives so this becomes a wash — but your systems engineer costs are going to go up by probably $30,000 — $40,000 minimum. Plus your help desk if one doesn’t automate it like we do with Google AI and Chatbots.

Then one has to consider; warranties, support instances, structured cabling costs, relay rack costs, cooling costs and hardware warranties. Datacenter costs — because you shouldn’t really run your company out of your basement (not servers that host a production application 🙃) — the person doing this will try and justify it, but the fact is — you use a lot of power, you use a lot of cooling to do that — and it’s a fire risk (I don’t care what kind of breaker box you have). One way or another $800-$1500 minimum for colocation without internet costs. Ideally we would want terabit speeds — but you are looking at greater than $18,000 per month to get that.

Congratulations — you just spent 10 years of run rate on one project.

Option 2: Use Google, laugh at the person that built their own cloud

Let’s talk about Google Cloud. There are arguments made and yet to be had for Amazon, and Azure directly — however, in our experience (mine mostly) and having talked to, architected and now installed 25 instances plus of a variance of cloud deployments — I give preference to GCP, specific to Firebase.

I want to make it clear — that the run rate costs of Amazon, GCP, and Azure will come in about the same for most of you. Each one has a different price depending on OAuth, app hosting, servers required and services performed — and each one stacks up the same with subtle differences. The only time this doesn’t prove true is when one is running in our case 5,000,000 servers in the cloud. The costs are a lot more than $90,000 — but even then, we reduced our overall dollar spend costs easily by 50%.

So this becomes personal preference and depth of experience — to my knowledge currently there is no “one special thing” in cloud technologies today, its about performance bench marks that won’t affect a very large portion of the readership on Medium and while one should care about a fraction of a millionth of a second.

I started out using Microsoft Azure when I worked at the deathstar — I mean giant financial institution — I’m a big believer in Microsoft, but what I do not like is that there really isn’t a true free tier like Google for smaller projects. The bizspark process for the grant is painful, and now they are actually denying people — one would think if when one applies, writing in the description of application magical unicorn that cures mouse baldness would result in immediate acception.

Not for smaller startup companies, there is always a cost associated and last I checked $50 per month, is still $50 per month while you could spend maybe $18.00 per month total on Google for the same services. Microsoft if you’re listening and if I could somehow whisper in the ear of Satya Nadella I would tell him — create a free tier like Google, then maybe ask him for a couple million: I mean if we’re friends like that why tf not? Wouldn’t you rather blow that $32 on losing lottery tickets? At least you had a chance.

Google’s UI both cloud console, and firebase console are the only things that frustrate me — especially the system logging on cloud functions. However — the complexity of what we were able to string together, and the performance that we get is outstanding.

We have successfully integrated and run Google Cloud Functions for all of our microservices which means making components a breeze. We chose angular for our client and nativescript for compiling — incase you wanted to know.
Microsoft Office Graph Client
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Azure Active Directory
Google OAuth w/Microsoft Authentication for gov employees
Google OAuth w/all social media providers
Google Secrets, Google KMS
Google Documents API,
Google Translate, Google Hangouts, Google Voice
Google Firebase Storage and Google Personal Drive
Google MAPS, Google Analytics, Google Big Query, Google AI
Type ORM, GraphQL

MarkLogic, Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server,
Microsoft CosmosDB, and Jack Henry Semitar
Cisco Meraki, Cisco Meraki Video, Cisco Unified Communications
Genesys GAD, Oracle Financials Cloud
Google Firebase/Firestore and legacy Datastore
Twilio Contact Center, Twilio SMS,
Sendgrid, Twitter, Microsoft, Google Plus, Instagram
WhatsApp, Skype,
Stripe, PaymentTech, Authorize.net
Bitdefender, Shortel, Zendesk
Microsoft Operations Manager
Microsoft Dynamics
Solarwinds, Wistoria
ApplePay, Etherium, and Hyperledger
and probably a good 40–50 other legacy and proprietary systems

We run all that — for $90,000/yr with complete access controls (including storage). We did decide to do an on premise Active Directory Instance per ministry with Active Directory Connect — so we did spend some money on hardware. That was very little though — and we chose Cisco UCS and Cisco Meraki there — because we could actually redirect a large portion of the cloud configuration to a local premise cache in case. That was a bit painful but we did get it done.

Google Cloud, Firebase, Firestore, Google SUB/PUB, Google KMS, Google Secrets, Google Big Query, Google Analytics and dozens of other not exciting or worth mentioning API’s are there.

The experience with Google and Microsoft has been tremendous in terms of support and honestly AWS is even better — and the prior are hard to beat.

So why choose Google? For us it was about a distributed global architecture for back up reasons for the government project, and for those that don’t know about JP Morgan Chase — they are the second largest bank in the world and are located in 95 countries: regional content distribution is paramount for speed especially in terms of retail banking, credit and debit settlement, compliance reporting and trading stocks & bonds.

If one doesn’t like Google’s geo redundancy — or thinks they cannot implement smart contracts, one can if one just thinks abstractly outside of the box — and that’s google does best. They let one think outside of the box, they are responsible for some 40% of all internet traffic, so they know how to build low latency networks. They also give you many complete components in a box ready to go, including simple things like image resizing, to incredibly advanced things like Geo Query and proximity sensing.

Lastly during the hurricane Sandy when half the eastern seaboard was knocked offline and companies like Facebook, parts of Microsoft, and a variance of other providers were all down hard, Google stood tall. Amazon has a very large portion of its resources located on the eastern seaboard, and even though they have distributed data centers — all critical systems are still to this day in fact located along the eastern seaboard. Which flooded twice since then.

The final takeaway from experience and that’s all I wanted to share with you — how Google can do a lot of things, Google has been great. They have extremely talented internal resources that one can have access too for a small $100 a month. Microsofts pay per priority support instance is $450, and even Amazon’s priority support (which is in our case always south) of $15,000 per month.

The downsides of any given technology that are usually written about are lack of understanding; the point of this article you can do a lot of stuff for almost free.

If I am a user and I want to write a blog, or some gaming app, or something simple — and I don’t want a huge learning curve — use Google Firebase. If you want to write something complex, compare them all — the real death knell on Amazon for us is the extreme support costs and we found often the services we rolled to them were slow to wake up on virtual host — even with a consistent ping.

We didn’t choose Microsoft because in our opinion — their cloud is a mess right now from a pricing standpoint. It’s all over the place — and each service feels like its decoupled from others in terms of what you need to buy and not. Its extremely performant and global DNS is a breeze —Microsoft just refuses to leave their dependency upon licensure for everything in the Microsoft sphere. For some of you that’s not a deal breaker, but for us it was. All that said we do use Microsoft Business Logic and Power-apps but that’s for this customers specific requirement and we use them at rest.

We like Google Cloud, consider it… but understand as with all cloud technologies there will always be a learning curve, we just think Google’s approach is better. What we don’t like is their training — we think it sucks for a non technical person. Jeff Delaney from Fireship.io has some cool classes that can help you learn cloud functions and many other Javascript technologies and his classes are an affordable $35 per 3 months.

Can’t win them all… anyway — that sums up my salespitch of why one should use Google. Did I mention Google Doodles are awesome?

Have a good one — I hope you understand the gist — cloud is good, it’s about your preferences and your experiences. There are deeply technical things that make each platform cumbersome, but we’ve read those already. If you are a novice — build these things over and over and over again till you’re not a novice and don’t complain about the technology, or how difficult it is to learn any technology. Don’t roll you’re own either 👀 -😪 that will equate to hours of frustration if you don’t really know what you are doing; I’ve seen many disasters that could have been easily prevented and cost them a fraction had they just hired an expert to begin with.

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