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  5. Google Compute Engine vs OpenShift

Google Compute Engine vs OpenShift

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.4K
Votes517
GitHub Stars885
Forks510
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Stacks12.4K
Followers9.2K
Votes423

Google Compute Engine vs OpenShift: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Google Compute Engine (GCE) and OpenShift are two popular cloud computing platforms that offer different services and features to users. Understanding the key differences between GCE and OpenShift can help individuals and businesses make informed decisions about which platform best suits their needs.

  1. Deployment Models: Google Compute Engine is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that allows users to deploy virtual machines on Google's infrastructure, providing flexibility and control over the underlying infrastructure. On the other hand, OpenShift is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that provides a higher-level abstraction above the infrastructure, making it easier to deploy and manage containerized applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

  2. Container Orchestration: Google Compute Engine offers support for Docker containers, but users are responsible for managing the orchestration of containers themselves. In contrast, OpenShift includes built-in container orchestration using Kubernetes, making it easier for users to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications without the need for additional tools.

  3. Scalability and Auto-scaling: Google Compute Engine provides users with the ability to manually scale their virtual machines based on their needs, but auto-scaling capabilities are limited. OpenShift, on the other hand, offers robust auto-scaling features that automatically adjust resources based on application demand, providing scalability and efficiency without manual intervention.

  4. Management and Monitoring: Google Compute Engine requires users to manage and monitor their virtual machines, including tasks such as software updates, security patches, and performance monitoring. In comparison, OpenShift includes built-in management and monitoring tools that simplify the management of containerized applications, making it easier for users to ensure optimal performance and security.

  5. Community and Support: Google Compute Engine is a part of the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem, which offers extensive documentation, community support, and integration with other Google Cloud services. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a strong community of developers and contributors but may not provide the same level of integration and support as Google Compute Engine within the Google Cloud Platform ecosystem.

  6. Cost and Pricing: Google Compute Engine offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on their usage of virtual machines and resources. OpenShift, on the other hand, may have a different pricing structure based on the provider or deployment model, potentially impacting the total cost of ownership for users.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Google Compute Engine and OpenShift can help users make informed decisions based on their specific requirements for deployment models, container orchestration, scalability, management, community support, and pricing.

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Advice on Red Hat OpenShift, Google Compute Engine

Stephen
Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.

  • In both cases, the instance much be shut down.

There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java (the standard in today's Enterprise);OpenShift is extensible with a customizable cartridge functionality that allows developers to add any other language they wish. We've seen everything from Clojure to Cobol running on OpenShift;OpenShift supports frameworks ranging from Spring, to Rails, to Play;Autoscaling- OpenShift can scale your application by adding additional instances of your application and enabling clustering. Alternatively, you can manually scale the amount of resources with which your application is deployed when needed;OpenShift by Red Hat is built on open-source technologies (Red Hat Enterprise Linux- RHEL);One Click Deployment- Deploying to the OpenShift platform is as easy a clicking a button or entering a "Git push" command
High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.;Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.;(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.;Load balancing- Native load-balancing technology helps you spread incoming network traffic across a pool of instances, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput and availability at low cost.;Fast and easy provisioning- Quickly deploy large clusters of virtual machines with intuitive tools including a RESTful API, command-line interface and web-based Console. You can also use tools such as RightScale and Scalr to automatically manage your deployment.;Compliance and security- All data written to disk in Compute Engine is encrypted at rest using the AES-128-CBC algorithm. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
885
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
510
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.6K
Stacks
12.4K
Followers
1.4K
Followers
9.2K
Votes
517
Votes
423
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 99
    Good free plan
  • 63
    Open Source
  • 47
    Easy setup
  • 43
    Nodejs support
  • 42
    Well documented
Cons
  • 2
    Decisions are made for you, limiting your options
  • 2
    License cost
  • 1
    Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams
Pros
  • 87
    Backed by google
  • 79
    Easy to scale
  • 75
    High-performance virtual machines
  • 57
    Performance
  • 52
    Fast and easy provisioning
Integrations
No integrations available
RightScale
RightScale
Qubole
Qubole
Scalr
Scalr
Boundary
Boundary
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Kinvey
Kinvey
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Zencoder
Zencoder

What are some alternatives to Red Hat OpenShift, Google Compute Engine?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

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