Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:28 PM UTC

joebar wrote: post #87

salimmadjd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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?

Granting, for the sake of argument, that the story you relate is true, um, yes? One of the big things in Google's cloud platform push has been to build infrastructure that on which applications can be built for Google end-user platforms -- Android and Chrome. If Google was adopting a mobile-as-central-end-user-focus strategy, then backend services that support mobile development like Cloud Platform (and tools that rely on it like Cloud Endpoints) would seem to be rather important.

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

#142

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:30 PM UTC

gnufied wrote: post #100

joebar wrote: 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?

No, I think everyone sees someone claiming to be a Google employee (not specifically an engineer, though) trashing Google's product.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:32 PM UTC

joebar wrote: post #87

salimmadjd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by trhway » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:36 PM UTC

oinksoft wrote: post #119

trhway wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a year's notice in enterprise space. That shows one more time how deep Google's [mis]understanding of B2B business is.

Google understands on some level how B2B works ... for a while, they only made money through B2B channels, especially via sales of the Google Search Appliance. I think that the people directing the App Engine lack a clear vision. They should know that price isn't what's stopping GAE. It certainly makes a statement about Google's vision for the App Engine if they have all of their good product people working on someth…

>Google understands on some level how B2B works ... for a while, they only made money through B2B channels, especially via sales of the Google Search Appliance.

during last 14 years i've worked in 3 BigCo's and 1 mid-size. The corporate portal search in all of them i can describe only using long sequences of Russian unprintable words. Google not being able to penetrate these companies when these companies have during last decade bought so much of other enterprise software, incl. a lot of junk, is a very indicative in my view.

>I think that the people directing the App Engine lack a clear vision

another possibility would be that they calculated how much it would cost Google to implement the AWS's level of features/support/quality, and thus how much they would need to charge to break even, and probably they just balked at it as it is hard to beat Amazon in margin/pricing business. I mean, all these anecdotal "horror" stories about overworked Amazon engineers vs. Google guys enjoying the life/work balance :)

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

#145

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:39 PM UTC

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.

> 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.

How is that an advantage over App Engine, given the existence of AppScale? [1]

[1] http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/09/appscale-bri...

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

#146

Post by bcantrill » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:42 PM UTC

rdw wrote: post #113

bcantrill wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! So, I guess my disclaimers have been made for me. ;) In terms of trust, I would tell you that trust needs to be earned -- and that it can only be earned one day at a time and that it can be frivolously spent away with a single bad decision. (Trust me that Joyent has learned this the very, very hard way.) So I would say that you should force anyone to earn your trust. That infrastructure is such a trust business i…

Really appreciate the open source software, but I recently had some trust issues with Joyent the service. Cloud servers switched from tiered transfer rates (with a generous free tier) to on-demand pricing, with only a month of notice. It wasn't possible to monitor one's own bandwidth usage before the switch, so we were caught off guard by our bill jumping by nearly 30%. It would have been more trustworthy to grandfat…

I hear you -- and trust me, this kind of stuff is awful because even when you're actually trying hard to not screw anyone, you still accidentally screw someone. In terms of this in particular: we did really try to roll this out without abrupt notice or unpleasant surprises, so I'm sorry to hear that we missed the mark with you. If it was more than just annoyance, feel free to reach out to me directly (my first name -- spelled correctly -- at joyent.com) and I'll try to right the ship.

Again, my apologies -- and to my point, trust is very hard to earn, and very easy (too easy) to piss away. :(

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

#147

Post by _delirium » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

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!

That's a part that also stuck out to me. With that kind of price, "online" storage is approaching what was previously only available in Amazon Glacier "cold storage" pricing. When Glacier launched, it was about a 10x difference between online object stores ($0.10/GB) and Glacier ($0.01/GB). Since last year it's been down to a 7-8x difference, and now it's down all the way to a 2x difference. Imo, that makes the number of use-cases where it's worth dealing with Glacier's retrieval model smaller than previously (effectively only those where you have a truly huge amount of data, such that the remaining $0.01/GB price differential adds up to meaningful money).

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

#148

Post by enneff » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

agwa wrote: post #27

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.

(I'm a Google employee, so take what I say with a grain of salt.)

I just took ownership of the godoc.org documentation service, and am running it on Compute Engine. It's been a great experience so far.

I've noticed a few benefits that Compute Engine has over EC2 (the other virtual machine service that I have used). The "gcutil" command line tool is more intuitive, Google's Cloud Console is more responsive than the AWS console, the general performance is better (especially disk and startup time), Compute supports live migration of running VMs (avoid downtime), and finally Compute bills by the minute, not the hour, so you can spin up a bunch of high-spec VMs for a quick test without running up big charges (I got a little burned by this with EC2, in the past).

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

#149

Post by akh » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

westonh wrote: post #2

From @clstokes With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: - an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month - an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

See full comparison of GCE instance types vs on-demand, RI 1 year and RI 3 year here: http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/google-sl...

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

#150

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Mar 25, 2014, 10:02 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #104

jedberg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get Amazon, and I've seen copies of the purported Bezos 'everyting must be a platform' missive, but when I joined the Google platforms group in 2006 and talked with Urs Hoezle about why all this infrastructure for search, we had a lot of interesting and far ranging discussions but he never said "Oh and we're going to rent this stuff out for money too!" Until the original AppEngine project, and that got a lot of pus…

Thinking at Google has changed since you left. The more recent IaaS products from Google (from GCE onwards) have relatively little to do with earlier cloud initiatives like AppEngine, other than learning from their experience.