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The Google Storage pricing of $0.026/GB (or $0.020/GB for reduced durability) made my jaw drop. I spend over $6k/month on Amazon S3, and this pricing from Google has me flabbergasted. Our architecture just uses S3 as a pluggable commodity, so a few hours of coding is going to result in a new $4000/month in savings from this announcement. Wow! Edit: misplaced decimal!
Does anyone here have experience using Google's compute engine? In particular, I'm curious to know what the reliability is like, and how performant the storage is.
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu...
Note that this is a year-old article. It also doesn't address reliability; it focuses on common performance benchmarks. The article links to a GitHub repo with some performance benchmarks you can run yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' This is a myth. Both companies created their infrastructure businesses as separate entities by leveraging their datacenter expertise, but they were not 'remainders'.
Very interesting, this doesn't match my experience, can you say more about how you reason to the claim that Google created a separate 'infrastructure business entity' ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Can you speak more to "Google instances give a lot more performance than the supposedly equivalent EC2 instances"?
It's really amazing. I can snapshot a 1 TB volume in the US and start a new instance with it in Europe in less than 10 minutes.
Scalr did a more rigorous benchmark, details here: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu...
Google is essentially a web-services company a SaaS at its best. Stay focused on these services, and keeping bringing awesome things like this.
PS: I'd love if they would drop Google apps pricing too ($5/user). Please Larry/Brin? and let's put a final nail into office coffin.
The Google Storage pricing of $0.026/GB (or $0.020/GB for reduced durability) made my jaw drop. I spend over $6k/month on Amazon S3, and this pricing from Google has me flabbergasted. Our architecture just uses S3 as a pluggable commodity, so a few hours of coding is going to result in a new $4000/month in savings from this announcement. Wow! Edit: misplaced decimal!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pas…
In theory, not necessarily in practice. The Thai floods caused a multi-year pause in Kryder's law we're still recovering from. (I'm not sure how robust Kryder's law is - there's a lot less data and analysis of it than Moore's, since that's the famous one.)
tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE.
In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently) believe their problem in the market is price when it's actually something much more basic: trust. After the abrupt deaths of services like Google Reader and Wave and surprises like the GAE repricing nightmare, customers simply don't trust that Google won't wake up one morning and decide that self-driving cars are actually a lot more interesting than running infrastructure-as-a-service -- and announce the death (or repricing) of GCE. AWS, by contrast, generates no such doubts: one can say what one will about Amazon (and there are certainly many reasons why I believe the future is not AWS's alone), but AWS services do not have a trust issue. (Or, to recast it in the aphorism once said of previous giants like IBM and Microsoft, no one gets fired for deploying on AWS.)
It will be interesting to watch the GCE announcement unfold, but previous Google announcements have lacked a critical ingredient: IaaS customers. (Amazingly, journalists don't seem to notice or demand this; smaller companies can't get away with this, but the aura of Google seems to give them a free pass.) If Google wants to really compete in this space, they should pull across a marquis commercial AWS IaaS customer -- at any cost. In doing this, they would probably learn both how profound the trust issue is -- and at the same time learn any remaining technical hurdles that they need to clear to really compete with AWS. There are several high profile AWS customers to pick from, but the obvious customer to start with is Netflix: they care about GCE's putative differentiators of price and performance -- and Amazon is a mortal threat to Netflix as a competitor, which should give some boardroom-level urgency to the discussion. Until Google gets Netflix (or an equivalent) on GCE, I don't think that the price drops will move the needle because they don't address the fundamental issue of trust. (Indeed, one could make the argument that they exacerbate it: if GCE is a money loser for Google, the feared slaying of GCE may actually be more likely, not less.)
Finally, if GCE can't get a marquis AWS IaaS customer, how about just a marquis Google customer? Knowing that new Google services are being deployed exclusively on GCE (by executive fiat if needed) may itself go a long way to make Google much more competitive in the space by knowing that GCE at least has the trust of Google, even if no one else...