Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 223 posts

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

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

petenixey wrote: post #70
Lewisham wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work on the Cloud SQL team, but everything here is a completely my own FWIW, the Google products that are subject to the deprecation policy [1] will give a year's heads-up before they are shut down. We aren't doing our job well enough if you can't easily transition off Cloud Platform (at least for the components that have obvious competitors... something like BigQuery is necessarily less simple). You sh…

The problem though is that if there is even a chance a service will be shut down (with a year's notice or otherwise) then on a financial basis alone, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost. I agree entirely with @bcantrill's comment. I look at Google's PaaS services with the very real concern that they may be switched off or changed at any time. The reality of this is not just tha…

> I think the point is though that if there is even a chance that a service will be shut down in a year then even on a financial basis, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost.

There is always a chance that a service will be shut down in a year no matter who the provider is.

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

#72

Post by darkarmani »

blantonl wrote: post #35

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!

As long as you don't need to use the external network with that data. The network costs dominate the price if you need to serve up any of that data.

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

#73

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

geekbri wrote: post #55

Maybe I'm the only one but the lack of ability for me to use GCE for a personal server to become familiar with the service is a huge deal. AWS offers a free tier. This let me play with AWS on my own time gratis. I think GCE needs this... unless they have it and I'm just not aware.

I built stuff on Google App Engine for free, for years.

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

#74

Post by domdip »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
petenixey wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem though is that if there is even a chance a service will be shut down (with a year's notice or otherwise) then on a financial basis alone, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost. I agree entirely with @bcantrill's comment. I look at Google's PaaS services with the very real concern that they may be switched off or changed at any time. The reality of this is not just tha…

> I think the point is though that if there is even a chance that a service will be shut down in a year then even on a financial basis, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost. There is always a chance that a service will be shut down in a year no matter who the provider is.

And when that chance is perceived to be particularly high at Google people will act accordingly.

Even if you think it's equal, we're probably in a regime of "nobody got fired for building on AWS".

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

#75

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

simon_ wrote: post #12

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.

I think this is a salvo against Amazon. I don't think Google cares about Box very much right now ... Box has a long way to go.

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

#76

Post by phillmv »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #62
bcantrill wrote: post #50

Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. 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)…

We are building on Google App Engine. We have enough trust in Google that we aren't worried about App Engine disappearing. I think this trust deficit is mostly in the eyes of Google's competitors. For my part, I was more worried about not being able to execute 3rd party modules that aren't supported on App Engine ... but even that apprehension disappeared with today's announcement of managed VMs. App Engine is a no b…

Aren't you still stuck using their implementation of BigTable? I forget if that's changed.

The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it.

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

#77

Post by samrift »

jeromegv wrote: post #68
Vermeulen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do we really need to see a post like this for every submission on a Google service? It seems pretty obvious GCE is fundamentally different than something like Reader/Wave, both consumer products (not platforms), given away for free, and very far from Google's main focus (cloud computing) they are obviously putting incredible resources into GCE - comparing that to some of their consumer app experiments is just ridicul…

Do not forget Google Commerce Search was shut down. It was a paid product, used by entreprises and pretty close to Google main focus (search) https://support.google.com/gcs/answer/163357?hl=en http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/google-quietly-shutters-com...

And Google Checkout (a paid product) was pulled as well. Google Wallet is a replacement in the same way that Google+ is a replacement for Reader.

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

#78

Post by lern_too_spel »

bcantrill wrote: post #50

Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. 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)…

Are you talking about Amazon Auctions or Askville?

If you had used any of those services, would you ask the same questions about AWS? The notion that any company would shut down a service handling billions of queries per day is patently absurd. Just because Google shut down some duds that you used doesn't make them any more likely to shut down their cloud offerings.

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

#79

Post by laureny »

bcantrill wrote: post #50

Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. 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)…

> 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.

... so far. Trust is fragile, it only takes one incident to completely take it away. Just because AWS hasn't faced such an incident so far doesn't mean they never will. And when they do, they will be at the same level of trust as Google. It can happen overnight.

Similarly, there is really no guarantee that Amazon won't decide to shut down AWS at some point in the future for some reason. The two companies are really on an equal footing on these two points.

Which is why I think the reasoning "GCE is not seeing traction because people don't trust Google" is flawed. There are several possible reasons why GCE is not growing fast and Google is slowly addressing them one by one.

Don't discount them, and don't think for a second that their competitors are magically immune to the flaws you are currently seeing in Google's offer.

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

#80

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

phillmv wrote: post #76
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are building on Google App Engine. We have enough trust in Google that we aren't worried about App Engine disappearing. I think this trust deficit is mostly in the eyes of Google's competitors. For my part, I was more worried about not being able to execute 3rd party modules that aren't supported on App Engine ... but even that apprehension disappeared with today's announcement of managed VMs. App Engine is a no b…

Aren't you still stuck using their implementation of BigTable? I forget if that's changed. The main benefit of say Heroku is that while migrating away is not trivial, in principle you shouldn't have to rearchitect your app to do it.

You mean Datastore. Yeah.

I kinda like Datastore though. Maybe I'm just use to it. The limitations just make sense if you want to scale.

They also have a RDBS you can use though ... I've never used it.

Still haven't figured out a clean way to do geospatial stuff with Datastore, so that is one big caveat.

Post reply on HN