Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#11

Post by panarky » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

westonh wrote: post #2

From @clstokes With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: - an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month - an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

That's not quite a fair comparison. The $35.38 Google price takes advantage of their sustained usage discount, if the instance is running the entire month.

The EC2 price is the full rack rate. You can do better with a spot instance, or by paying up front for a 1-year or 3-year reserved instance.

It's still a stunning price drop from Google. And from my tests, the Google instances give a lot more performance than the supposedly equivalent EC2 instances.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#12

Post by simon_ » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

Is this partially an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of the Box IPO? If there's going to be a price war anyway, better to start it now and prevent a competitor from amassing a big war chest.

I don't understand how much Box is a (potential) competitor in this market, so could be way off base.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#13

Post by debacle » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #5

ChuckMcM wrote: post #3

Its an interesting choice of battlegrounds. I find the infrastructure vs infrastructure wars fascinating by how Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting less and less for it.

>Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting less and less for it. Are the prices dropping faster than moore's law? The costs are dropping approximately with moore's law. Edit: the interesting bit here is just how you lower your prices. In the VPS market, it is traditional to keep charging your customers the same, and to just give them more ram/cpu…

Moore's law doesn't say shit about storage.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#14

Post by kissickas » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:55 PM UTC

jrnkntl wrote: post #4

"Prices are effective April 1, 2014". Unfortunate date for such unbelievable price drops.

Unfortunate? Gmail caught on pretty well...

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#15

Post by shrikant » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:56 PM UTC

jrnkntl wrote: post #4

"Prices are effective April 1, 2014". Unfortunate date for such unbelievable price drops.

Exactly 10 years from when Gmail was launched to the public, with its massive 1 GB of storage.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#16

Post by asharpe » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

If and when AWS responds will be quite interesting. GCE launched with lockstep product offering and pricing with AWS. This is the first real movement away from that lockstep position. On one hand it is competitive, on the other hand does it speak to other underlying issues: maybe GCE uptake has not been as expected and needs to do something drastic to compete with AWS?

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#17

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

tnuc wrote: post #8

westonh wrote: post #2

From @clstokes With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: - an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month - an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

Digital Ocean is still cheaper. Amazing how competition works.

Did you seriously just compare Digital Ocean to Amazon and Google?

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#18

Post by asb » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

Now if only Google would announce spot pricing for the cloud compute instances much like EC2 has...

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#19

Post by gtaylor » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

tnuc wrote: post #8

westonh wrote: post #2

From @clstokes With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: - an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month - an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

Digital Ocean is still cheaper. Amazing how competition works.

DO is a completely different service. It's Apples to Oranges. You don't go with GC or AWS just for a bare-bones VM, you use them if you already use (or want to use) their greater portfolio of services.

If you are just using EC2 or GC for VM hosting, you are doing it wrong and are throwing away a lot of money.

Re: Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

#20

Post by lsc » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #13

lsc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting less and less for it. Are the prices dropping faster than moore's law? The costs are dropping approximately with moore's law. Edit: the interesting bit here is just how you lower your prices. In the VPS market, it is traditional to keep charging your customers the same, and to just give them more ram/cpu…

Moore's law doesn't say shit about storage.

>Moore's law doesn't say shit about storage.

Yes, the cost progression of storage is expressed by Kryder's law, and is actually faster than moore's law. (well, in terms of storage space, not storage speed.)

Of course, both are observations and not true laws; things will get interesting if/when the capital and power required per unit compute (or per unit ram or storage) stops dropping.

But, my point is that in the past, the costs involved in providing compute infrastructure has fallen dramatically over time, and most people expect this to continue, at least for a while.