Google Cloud Platform Blog

Part of the problem here could definitely be communication.
For whatever reason, it's been incredibly hard to follow what is going on
with the Docker project. Keeping info in one place would
definitely help.

I'm not able to find any details that support what
you're saying. It seems that in June Eric Brewer was
still publicly asking for libcontainer to merge in
LMCTFY support.

I definitely could be wrong, but looking at this screenshot from Eric's
June talk it looks like they were still trying to get it merged:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4DKb51CYAA687s.jpg:large

In June, Eric Brewer posted this:

We’ve released an open-source tool called cAdvisor that
enables fine-grain statistics on resource usage for containers.
It tracks both instantaneous and historical stats for a wide
variety of resources, handles nested containers, and supports
both LMCTFY and Docker’s libcontainer. It’s written in Go with
the hope that we can move some of these tools into libcontainer
directly if people find them useful (as we have).

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/06/an-update-on-container-support-on-google-cloud-platform.html

I have about 5 years experience with both AWS and Google Cloud (App Engine, Google Compute, ..). I agree that AWS has more services to offer than Google. Initially Google took the route of the App Engine and fell behind AWS. However, recently its Compute Engine and other related services like Container Engine, Datalab (IPython, Jupyter as a Service), Big Query, Dataproc, Pub/Sub and more started outshining their AWS counterparts. Google's network is way faster than AWS. AWS network is too slow and flaky. For anyone taking the route of microservies, Google Cloud offers a huge advantage. Google new cloud console (which is still in beta) is sleek and sexy. Google's cloud services are a pleasure to use compared to AWS (other than a few pain points). I recommend small and medium Cloud-based shops to relook into Google Compute again. Google Cloud is adding services to its arsenal at a super fast rate (much faster than AWS). Just take a look at their engineering blog: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/. In a year I see google Cloud overtake AWS in terms of the capability.

I hear you express this sentiment often. Could you explain your thoughts on this?

If anything, I think the stories are the problem. Cool hacks and interesting science often fail to get the 2-3 upvotes they need to escape the new page. On page 2 of "New", I've found the following fairly decent stories that died recently: http://simplystatistics.org/2014/03/20/the-8020-rule-of-statistical-methods-development/ http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/cassandra-hits-one-million-writes-per-second-on-google-compute-engine.html

Yet both of these are vastly more useful than Julie Horvath's "omfg, I had a workplace conflict" or "Yay basic income, no facts, no reasoning, yay" (currently 380 pts, 441 comments, was #1 for a while today).

I'd suggest that it's far more important to improve the stories than to improve the comments. The comments on a story like "JDK 8 Release Notes" or "Circuit Breaker" (about a distributed computing design pattern) are actually quite good.

I'm looking at GAE as a AWS alternative too, so what follows is not complete, just a few observations.

Here is the run down on the runtime services available in the Java SDK (I think that it and Python are the most complete, not everything is available for Go last I checked):
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis

This is a good supplement: https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips

So queues and email are in, messaging might be served by Google Cloud Messaging or the recently announced Trello partnership. I don't think anything quite like CloudWatch or Route53 is available.

I think of GAE as more like Heroku + add-ons than a straight AWS competitor so I wouldn't expect them to be entirely equivalent. On the other hand more control over the runtime lets them offer things that are entirely out of scope for AWS (channels).

As far as updates, the blog shows the the SDK gets new features fairly frequently: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/

Maybe not exactly the same?

The Docker technology was a by-product of the dotCloud product, which spun-off to create the company Docker, Inc to focus on Docker. Docker Inc sold dotCloud to the Berlin-based company cloudControl.

This appears to be a facelift coming from the new leadership.

Also, www.dotcloud.com references next.dotcloud.com with this language:

"Take the new and improved dotCloud PaaS on Google Compute Engine for a test-drive."

Their old FAQ said that containers were pushed to AWS East, so it looks looks like this is one thing that has changed. Actually, yes, here are some details on the move from AWS to Google Compute Engine:

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/12/dotcloud-provides-faster-more-reliable-PaaS-with-Google-Cloud-Platform.html

AppEngine is Google Cloud Platform's PaaS offering. Its the oldest product on Google Cloud Platform, but its not one of the ones mentioned that Spotify is using (the Spotify post doesn't talk much about the products, but Google's [0] does.)

The Google Cloud Platform services they are identified as using are: Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Bigtable, Direct Peering, Cloud VPN, Cloud Router, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery, and Cloud Dataproc.

So, its not surprising that they might be doing something that Google AppEngine doesn't support particularly well.

[0] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Spotify-chooses-Google-Cloud-Platform-to-power-data-infrastructure.html