I have yet to run PostgreSQL on GCE in production. I am still testing it but I have learned the following:
- A standard provision disk for GCE will give you ~ 80MB/s random write.
- A standard SSD provisioned disk for GCE will give you ~ 240MB/s.
Either disk can be provisioned as a raw device allowing you to use Linux Software Raid to build a RAID 10 which even further increases speed and reliability. Think about that, 4 SSD provisioned disks in a RAID 10...
The downside I see outside of the general arguments against cloud services (shared tenancy, all your data in a big brother, lack of control over your resources, general distaste for $vendor, or whatever else we in our right minds can think up) is that GCE is current limited to 16 virtual CPUS and 104GB of memory.
What does that mean? Well it means that it is likely that GCE is perfect for 99% of PostgreSQL workloads. By far the majority of PostgreSQL need less than 104GB of memory. Granted, we have customers that have 256GB, 512GB and even more but those are few and far between.
It also means that EC2 is no longer your only choice for dynamic cloud provisioned VMs for PostgreSQL. Give it a shot, the more competition in this space the better.