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Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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

#81

Post by salimmadjd »

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)…

This announcement make me even trust Google less.

First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore's law and how the service should be cheaper.

Why do I trust google less? Because I don't get a feeling Google has any long-term strategy here. It seems like they're winging it every 6-12 months. In contrast Amazon and AWS have been steadily marching in one direction.

I want to like GCE/GAE, I still run services from it, it's good for some use cases. But in back of my mind, I know google can pull the rug at any moment, depending on the popular flavor of the month.

So what am I saying? Use it at your own risk. It's good for somethings but there are other solutions and there are businesses where cloud services is their main or only business. You know those guys will steadily innovate and build up their services.

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

#82

Post by incision »

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)…

In at least one customer I deal with Google services are not considered an option and Google is almost a bad word after a large (tens of thousands) user Google Apps roll-out was aborted - ostensibly due to a "So what? We're Google, that's how it is." attitude regarding what were perceived as minor problems.

Obviously, this is not exactly the same as a service being killed, but I think it speaks to same sort of distrust - a feeling that your needs as a customer are at Google's leisure.

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

#83

Post by capkutay »

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.

They only reduced the prices for compute engine, bigquery, appengine, and cloud storage which are developer oriented cloud services and therefore unrelated to box. If google beefed up google drive, then it could be an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of box.

I personally think google has more incentive to do the latter. Millions of people and thousands of companies already use gmail. It'd be pretty easy to convince people to take those files they already send/receive using gmail and push them to google drive. Convincing hardcore AWS users to move to google app engine might be a bit tougher.

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

#84

Post by fixermark »

jrnkntl wrote: post #4

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

April 1st also happens to be the start of Q2. I think it's kind of nifty that Google is unwilling to let a non-vacation holiday only celebrated by a handful of countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day) disrupt its product planning.

(It's also shrewd business, if its competitors have "Start of Q2" stuff they'd like to announce that they put off until April 2nd).

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

#85

Post by nlake44 »

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.

I've been working on AppScale (https://github.com/AppScale/appscale), the open source implementation of GAE, which implements the datastore API, along with most of the other GAE APIs. Your app is portable to any other hosting environment if the need ever comes.

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

#86

Post by amaks »

debacle wrote: post #39
simon_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising a $250MM IPO is amassing a war chest. If that becomes harder, they become less competitive.

They're not competitive right now, from the sounds of it - they're losing a lot of money, very fast.

I don't see how Box could possibly compete on pricing with Google storage, considering the high volume of hardware purchases Google is doing and high volume discounts it's getting.

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

#87

Post by joebar »

salimmadjd wrote: post #81
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)…

This announcement make me even trust Google less. First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore…

I would not touch this with a 10-foot pole. A few weeks ago Larry Page was asked about "putting the user first" at TGIF. His solution to this problem is to go mobile only and dedicate 80% of the company's resources to mobile (at the expense of everything else)

Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor and go with AWS, you'll end up in a much better position then if you went with Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

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

#88

Post by helper »

JustARandomGuy wrote: post #57
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)…

In your opinion, which cloud providers are the most trustworthy? I see you comment about AWS being trustworthy, how do you feel about Azure, Rackspace Cloud, etc?

@bcantrill is the SVP of Engineering at Joyent. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I'm guessing he would say that Joyent is trustworthy. He would then tell you to use DTrace.

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

#89

Post by rsync »

Lewisham wrote: post #63
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)…

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…

Wow. A member of the team addresses the longevity fears by assuring that a years notice would be given if the service were deprecated.

It's ... 12:55 PST ... do you still have a job ?

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

#90

Post by jedberg »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #21
jedberg wrote: post #6

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' ?

It's not reasoning per se, I've actually talked to both Google and Amazon about it. :)
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