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

131–140 of 223 posts

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

#131

Post by nl »

laureny wrote: post #79
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…

Your "trust is fragile" thing is kind of the point. Of course Amazon can lose it, but they haven't yet. Any vendor might screw up. Google has, Amazon hasn't.

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

#132

Post by sazpaz »

I've been wanting to build a quick side project for a couple weeks, so decided to give it a try today and put it up in App Engine instead of heroku.

Put simply, App Engine has a higher learning curve. I remember using heroku for the first time a couple years ago, and it was smooth and seamless. Can't say the same about App Engine. Installation isn't a blink, docs are scattered around, and even a simple Flask app isn't straightforward.

I understand they might offer more features, better prices, so side-projects are unlikely their target audience, but nevertheless if they want developers love, it should "just work".

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

#133

Post by blantonl »

darkarmani wrote: post #72
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.

In our case, the vast majority of the data is not ever served up and is removed via lifecycle rules. However, just the fact that we have the data serves a number of our customer's use cases.

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

#134

Post by fennecfoxen »

bronson wrote: post #109
gnufied wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The thread where we question the activities of employees outside their workplace was yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7459529

Ah, yes. Don't you love that we live in a day and age where you make a donation to a political movement and people who disagree with it call for your job? (A mainstream political movement, for that matter. Mainstream enough that they won.) Next step, I expect, will be the Spanish Inquisition. :P

... Sorry, everybody. I'd missed that one yesterday. :( We now return you to your regularly scheduled Google-skepticism

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

#135

Post by massev »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #120
joe3barrera wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"joebar" -- I don't know who the fuck you are, but you're not joebar@google.com, I am. Who are you really?

Like he's going to admit that after violating his nondisclosure agreement discussing Q&A at TGIF and disparaging GCE in public. Of all the things to discuss outside of work, the meeting that starts with a "everything you see, hear, and taste here is confidential as shit, man," slide... Speaking from (direct personal) experience, someone that malicious needs to be identified quickly and removed, because that's without…

Or... he's just lying.

Anyone can append a disclaimer to an anonymous comment claiming all sort of stuff.

Also one would expect Google employees to be smart his/her comment conveys the opposite: there is no inherent conflict between being mostly about mobile while providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares which are also becoming increasingly mobile.

There is a large amount of malice targeted at Google and much of it manifests in HN comments, as this threat would suggest.

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

#136

Post by larrys »

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…

"rock solid 5-year SLA"

File that with "will always be free we promise".

Just so you know there is no such thing as "rock solid" with respect to legal contracts. There is always wiggle or weasel room. Better predictor is past behavior (which is what everyone is discusssing).

Not only that but a company like google has the finances to take any kind of legal action hit if they do decide to go against the contract even w/o a leg to stand on. And a band of users and a class action won't stop the process. [1]

Even Apple has in the past killed products (clones, xserve, newton for example). I remember specifically that a close friend told me that "they will never kill xserve" he was a big rep in sales and had tons of business in that area. Yet they killed it. Oh yeah mobileme also. I know I'm forgetting many other things.

While it's not unusual that companies kill products or services and there is never an explicit guarantee there are definitely companies that are more likely to do so if the product doesn't meet certain goals or fit in.

[1] Re-read this part. In other words promise one thing, do another thing, then simply clean up the resulting mess.

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

#137

Post by massev »

RyanZAG wrote: post #124
gnufied wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most likely misrepresenting himself.

Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly mobile.

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

#138

Post by jfoster »

samrift wrote: post #77
jeromegv wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd like to add some color to that. Google Wallet is for Digital Goods only. Checkout was for pretty much anything. (especially ecommerce)

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by boundlessdreamz »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #128
Kudos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

How does that help when your content is in Cloud Storage? Is there an app which serves content out of Cloud Storage and runs on app engine? (I haven't worked with app engine)

You can set caching headers on Cloud Storage also. But that doesn't help when 1. you have a large number of requests with cold cache 2. want the flexibility to keep cache time small. Unlike cloudfront there is no purge method in GCS. GCS doesn't guarantee to serve new versions until the old one's cache time has expired.

Post reply on HN