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Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage

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

#122

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)…

Anyone remember how Google toyed with the pricing on its Maps API?

In October 2011, Google upped its Maps API pricing to $4+ for 1,000 map loads [1]. Developers rebelled and switched over to OpenStreet Map [2]. Eight months later, Google dropped the price to $0.50 for 1,000 map loads [3].

[1] http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2011/10/introduction...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/google-maps-api-vs-openstre...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/22/google-maps-api-gets-massiv...

What's to say the GCE pricing won't also yo-yo like this?

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

#123
post #65
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very much our view. Google products are fine for home and non-critical use, but it's far too risky to rely on them when building something that one expects to have a long lifespan. Unless there's clear money in it for Google's advertising revenue, the chance of it being pulled is too high.

Has Google ever pulled a paid product?

Drastic pricing policy changes from a key supplier can be as disruptive as a pulled product (GAE, GMaps, etc).

edit - clarification.

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

#124
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Am I odd in seeing a Google engineer discrediting Google's own product?

Probably not - Google is a big company and there are bound to be a number of employees not pleased with current direction at any time. It could be entirely personal reasons such as wanting to move to the GCE team but being denied because of a push towards mobile - maybe now he's forced to develop for Android and he likes iOS (if what he says is true, who knows?).

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or this is just a culture mismatch, but are you serious about the one year warning? For context, the Windows Server 2008 R2 Lifecycle has mainstream support dedication from 2009-2015. The extended support date is 2020 .

I'm serious in that: a) That's what is written in the contract b) I think you should be able to migrate off the platform within that timeframe, and you shouldn't join our platform if you don't think we're making it easy enough for you to leave again (I deeply believe in initiatives like Google Takeout) I didn't make any comment, nor will I, on whether I perceive that time frame to be long enough. I think it's smarter…

Someone at Google is making a big mistake here then. Enterprise can take a year to migrate off their current coffee machine. Migrating off their infrastructure provider is not something they are going to accept having to do within a years timeframe. Some of the QA testing these guys do can take over a year.

The reason Google's whole cloud division doesn't take off in the same way as pretty much everything else Google releases is because it feels like you guys have no idea what you're doing. Which is incredible considering you obviously know what you're doing - you keep Google running! Would you give your Search team 1 year notice to migrate all of their servers off their current hardware and datacenters to AWS or DigitalOcean? Obviously not, they would probably fire the lot of you and run it themselves. Why do you think other enterprises would think any differently?

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

#126
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.

Both AWS free and GCE require a credit card before doing anything at all, so that's not a barrier.

As for the actual price... GCE's cost of .013c / hour is so tiny that I don't see how you can say it's a "huge deal".

You can spin up a GCE for 5 hours a day for a week to experiment and it'll cost you less than 50 cents. It's not quite free, but it basically is. As long as you're just playing around, always-on shouldn't matter so you can spin the server up to play, down when you're done, and thus pay almost nothing.

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

#127

Does Google Drive support symlinks (symbolic links) on OS X like Dropbox does? If so, I will immediately stop using Dropbox and switch to Google Drive, because it's now five times cheaper than Dropbox.

I didn't see anything that mentioned this affecting google drive - did I miss something?

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

#128
post #32

For anyone planning to use google cloud storage as an s3/cloudfront alternative to host public content, pay close attention to request pricing. Retrieving an object through its HTTP url is considered a class B XML request type by Google Cloud Storage. That is 1.3x - 2.5x times more expensive than cloudfront and s3 respectively.

I don't understand why people expose files they expect to receive significant traffic on public buckets, instead of using a caching reverse proxy from somewhere with cheaper data transfer rates.

Agreed. Especially when they can get a giant Google-sized, caching reverse proxy (CDN) simply by setting cache headers appropriately.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable-cac...

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

#129
post #111

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)…

> 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. Trust is not the issue. Google wants to sell "management" while AWS (et al) are selling raw resources. To use Google Cloud you have to change or build your system for it, using new APIs, configuration systems, other managed services and even pro…

This isn't the case. Google now sells raw VMs as well as their AppEngine PaaS.

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

#130

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)…

The observation that Netflix's infrastructure relies on oe of their biggest competitors isn't one that had occurred to me before. Altogether a really interesting take on the situation.
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