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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

#171

Post by Freaky »

capkutay wrote: post #83
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 conv…

They reduced Google Drive pricing about a fortnight ago - 100GB for $1.99/month, 1TB for $9.99/month.

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

#172

Post by PythonicAlpha »

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)…

I agree, that trust is the real stumbling block for any cloud service today. When I read, that MS is just searching the eMail accounts of its customers, with some thin explanation, than the question arises, what will be with other (sensitive) data I store in any cloud service. Can anyone be trusted, or will I find today or tomorrow some obscure statement in the terms, that is a loophole to just inspect my information at will.

How can Google, MS or the other players know, that the customers don't infringe on their patents? Don't they have the right to inspect? (trust is good, prove is better ...) Or does just a lazy sysadmin sell my data in this moment to the competition?

I also wonder, if the price drops now are a reaction to a big trust-drop (also because of Snowden) by the users ...

I think, cloud based services are a good idea, but until such issues are addressed, I would really recommend to think twice, which data can go cloud.

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

#173

Post by foxylad »

sazpaz wrote: post #132

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'…

Long-time Appengine developer here. I'm glad that GCE is here now, because a lot of the criticism of GAE came down to people expecting infrastructure (and infrastructure prices) instead of a platform. A massively and seamlessly scalable platform.

Which brings me to my point: yes, GAE does have a steeper learning curve, but almost all of that is due to scalability constraints. If you think you will ever need to scale past one server, it's well worth the initial pain.

Or put another way, you get to choose between a small development learning curve at the start for a pretty scary sysadmin learning curve when you need to scale your app.

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

#174

Post by ww520 »

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!

Outbound bandwidth is still expensive.

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

#175

Post by toomuchtodo »

massev wrote: post #137
RyanZAG wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mobil…

> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't.

I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience? Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google? The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the latest versions of Android.

Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible decisions collectively.

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

#176

Post by toomuchtodo »

domdip wrote: post #74
dragonwriter wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

AWS DevOps here (besides my many other jobs titles/responsibilities).

When was the last time AWS EOL'd a service? Honestly, I can't remember, and I've been using AWS (S3/EC2 to start) since 2007.

GAE, storage, etc could be close to free, and I'll still stick with Amazon; I'm paying for consistency and the long-term lifecycle of AWS as a system.

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

#177

Post by Spooky23 »

trhway wrote: post #118
Locke1689 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure in it's entirety doesn't (1 year notice of changes coming), but Microsoft has a separate "private cloud" IaaS offering, which has a similar lifecycle to server. This is definitely not my area of expertise, but the word I've heard is this is pretty attractive to the big businesses that are most worried about that. For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let any…

>For example, I know a major hospital/research center who has said that they will 100% never let anything onto the public Internet, but are about to clear use of a Microsoft private cloud. until they run a private fiber [which don't also have NSA's splitters attached] directly to the MS datacenter, they are being sold a snow in Antarctic [ie. mutually exclusive dichotomy between "100% never let anything onto the publ…

As a Microsoft cloud services user, I know what metropolitan areas our services are hosted out of, and I believe that we can request a physical tour of one or more of those datacenters can be arranged. If you are a large customer, you can also arrange for dedicated connectivity to the Microsoft network via a peering connection.

Re the NSA splitter issue, that's just a reality of life. If you've run a large email, backup or similar system for a length of time, you've inevitably come across requests from law enforcement or litigating attorneys for data. So don't assume that nobody is accessing your stuff because it's in a room in your building.

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

#178

Post by ericd »

res0nat0r wrote: post #169
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…

Sorry but I have to disagree with this and the above. There is a fundamental difference in the Google Cloud platform which caters to (paying!) customers and has (paid!) support vs. a playground free service for end users like Google Reader. The "meh" of GCE so far has really just been that it is behind the times vs. AWS kicking out new features monthly and is years late to the game. When they keep adding features to…

Well, here you go. I would never choose GCE, because I'd be worried about it going away, or Google increasing the price by some absurd amount with little warning and no feedback period, making my initial assumptions untenable, and leaving me to do a massive rewrite due to lockin on their proprietary features. Google did this with Maps (before backing off, perhaps due to backlash), and has done this with GAE in the past. Trust is a fragile thing, and hard to rebuild.

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

#179

Post by fpgeek »

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)…

Moving from Amazon to Google (Play Movies & TV, YouTube [especially given the perennially rumored subscription service]) doesn't really move the needle very much for Netflix in terms of depending on a competitor. I doubt Google would get much traction with Netflix if they made that argument for migrating to GCE.

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

#180

Post by aiiane »

foxylad wrote: post #173
sazpaz wrote: post #132

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'…

Long-time Appengine developer here. I'm glad that GCE is here now, because a lot of the criticism of GAE came down to people expecting infrastructure (and infrastructure prices) instead of a platform. A massively and seamlessly scalable platform. Which brings me to my point: yes, GAE does have a steeper learning curve, but almost all of that is due to scalability constraints. If you think you will ever need to scale…

Yep. AppEngine is a platform, not a pure infrastructure offering. GCE is the pure infra offering.
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