From my previous post How to scan millions of ... you know we have been doing a lot of playing around with AWS S3 and its speed. What we are going to talk about today is how does S3 compare to GCS for our needs.

Background

We use S3 as one of our origins to our CDN, and time taken to get our content to S3 is very important. 100% or our customer base is in Asia. We started of with S3 buckets in North California (NC) region and because of our customer base decided to use the Singapore region buckets as our origin.

Problem Statement

Time taken to deliver our content from AWS S3 Singapore region (SG) as origin was less as compared to delivering from AWS S3 NC region. But time taken to upload content to SG region was higher then to upload content to NC region.

Solution

We figured out that uploading content to AWS S3 (NC) and then letting AWS make a copy of our bucket into the SG region was faster then us directly uploading to AWS S3 (SG) region.

This solution works, reduces time taken from our CMS to our clients but made us manage two buckets, and paying for two network charges (NC --> SG) and (SG --> CDN)

Google Cloud Storage Comparison

We had a solution but did not like that we had to pay for two buckets and twice on the network cost. That's when we tested with Google Cloud Storage in the Asia pacific region (AP - Taiwan). We had heard multiple times from Google on how they had a better network, and they have owned the dark fiber to support it. We were astonished by the results

Performance Results

Video Uploads average file size (2.6 GB). It takes on an average 210 sec to upload from our data center in California to AWS S3 (SG). Path taken is DC --> AWS S3 (NC) --> AWS S3 (SG). It takes about 50 sec to upload to GCS (AP). Direct upload to DC --> AWS S3 (SG) takes 256 sec

Video uploads in chunks. It takes on an average 390 sec to upload the same video file size (2.6 GB) but broken into chunks from our data center in California to AWS S3 (SG). Path taken is DC --> AWS S3 (NC) --> AWS S3 (SG). It takes about 85 sec to upload to GCS (AP). Direct upload DC --> AWS S3 (SG) takes 1745 sec

Time taken from AWS S3 (SG) to our CDN and from GCS (AP) to our CDN was almost same

Cost Results

It cost us about $26,000/month on AWS S3. This includes storing 200 TB each on two buckets, with Infrequent access configured for the NC bucket cost of $10,000, and network cost of AWS S3 (SG) --> CDN 200 TB out and NC --> SG 23 TB out at about $16,000.

To do the same on Google Cloud storage it cost us $17,000. Storage cost of $5000 and network cost of $12,000

Overall results

Uploading big files Google Cloud Storage (AP) is 4 X faster then AWS S3 (SG)

Uploading small chunks Google Cloud Storage (AP) is 20 X faster then AWS S3 (SG)

Google Cloud Storage costs 35% less then AWS for the same solution

Added on 10/21 three days after the main post