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Bigstep Metal Cloud vs GCP

Among the top 3 competitors we like Google's services the most. However we have our advantages which make the Metal Cloud a solid alternative. We've put together a side-by-side comparison to make it easy to make a decision.

 Bigstep Metal CloudGCP
Bare metal
Yes
No 
Minimum instance size
8 cores 32 GB RAM
1 core 3.75GB RAM
Self Service
Yes
Yes
Provisioning time
300 seconds
100-300 seconds
OS volume
iscsi
via "persistent disks"
Additional storage volumes
iscsi block devices
via "persistent disks"
On-demand
Yes (per second)
Yes (per second)
Migration-less upgrade support
Yes (with restart)
Yes (including live migration)
Stop and resume support
Yes 
Yes
Service network config.
Yes (L2 & L3)
Yes (L3 only)
L2 technology
MPLS
N/A
Private LAN support
Yes
Yes (VPC)
API enabled
Yes
Yes
IPV6
Yes 
Yes (only as HTTP(S),SSl termination)
BGP support
Yes (custom)
Yes (native)
Shared filesystem support
Yes (via GFS -Bigstep SharedDrive)
Yes (via Cloud Filestore)
Database as a Service
Couchbase, Cassandra, Exasol, 
PostgreSQL, MySQL (Percona), 
Elasticsearch
CloudSQL, Cloud BigTable, Cloud Spanner, 
Cloud Firestore, Cloud Datastore,
Cloud Memorystore
Hadoop & Spark as a Service
Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks, Mesos
Dataproc
Data Science Tools
Jupyter
Colaboratory, DataLab
Native container platform
Yes (Bigstep Container Platform)

Yes (GKE)

Container Apps
Apache Spark, Streamsets, 
Apache Kafka, Zoomdata, Jupyter
No
Object Storage
Yes (Bigstep DataLake service)
Yes (Cloud Storage)
Serverless services
No
Cloud Functions, AppEngine, DataFlow, 
Pub/Sub, BigQuery
Other services
No
Many

Why choose Bigstep?

Single tenant, bare metal 
at no extra cost

Our primary advantage comes from the performance and stability improvements that bare metal offers. You can get "sole-tenant" servers in GCP but at a 10% premium and you will still have the virtualization layer. 

2x compute performance

The Metal Cloud's typical performance improvement you should expect is 2x although it depends on the kind of workload you have. A customer found 20x improvement for deep learning model training.

6x lower network latency

The network latency is 6x lower in Bigstep than in GCP so microservices  on Kubernetes will run faster in Bigstep than GCP.

Why choose GCP?

Serverless & 
shared hosting services

We highlight their AppEngine which is an modern shared hosting environment designed to run apps written in many languages. That is ideal for hobby or otherwise small projects and we recommend them to developers that are just getting started.

Just like AWS, GCP has a service for everything, ranging from publish-subscribe queues and other. Most of them are wrappers around existing technologies such as Kafka but some are Google own, unique IP that is not open source (eg: BigQuery).

Closing words on managed services

The shier broadness of managed services might incline the user to opt for the "just in case I need it" scenario but one must remember that through open source (or commercial) alternatives most of the services can be easily replicated and managed by a 3rd party if the ops resources are not available. What that offers is (sometimes much) lower cost, vendor independence and control. 

As cloud services become comoditized, portability will be essential in being able to quickly leverage future cost reductions or stability issues.

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