AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#21

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:26 PM UTC

umsm wrote: post #16

As I look at the pricing wars, I realized something: If you choose to use "cloud" based in your projects or businesses, you will never know the long-term costs associated with operating in the cloud. The cloud provider can raise or lower prices as they see fit. What prevents these for-profit companies to keep lowering prices and not raising them?

Nothing really, although on the flip side if you've got machines in a co-location data center that lease comes up for renewal and your prices are going to change. Often they will go up because the data center folks figure its harder for you to move than negotiate. As long as AWS and Google prices are 10x the cost of self running for large deployments that won't be an issue, but when they start getting closer to parity it is going to put the data center guys in a world of hurt.

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#22

Post by bashcoder » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

avalaunch wrote: post #8

bdicasa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of frustrating, really. I just bought 2 reserved instances about 6 weeks ago. Would have saved a nice penny if I waited. It's definitely nice to see the pricing become more affordable over time though. Before this cut I really struggled going with AWS, but wouldn't even need to think about choosing them after this reduction.

You should contact support. I hear aws is really nice about offering price reductions in situations like yours.

Based on my experience today, I can attest to this. If you purchased recently, they may very well accommodate you.

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#23

Post by Patrick_Devine » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

umsm wrote: post #16

As I look at the pricing wars, I realized something: If you choose to use "cloud" based in your projects or businesses, you will never know the long-term costs associated with operating in the cloud. The cloud provider can raise or lower prices as they see fit. What prevents these for-profit companies to keep lowering prices and not raising them?

It's unlikely that AWS prices would increase because they're already making some healthy profits, and there is (as others have said) more and more competition. For the competition, they don't offer the same services at AWS, and don't have the same market share, so they have to offer at a discount.

That said, there can be quite a bit of customer lock-in associated with the "premium" services, such as DBaaS, or DNSaaS which make it really difficult to switch off of a platform. That could be the hook at some point in the future to keep people paying the "AWS tax".

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#24

Post by Patrick_Devine » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:36 PM UTC

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #6

I keep expecting Amazon to change their reserved instance policy. Who's going to commit to reserved instances during an ongoing price-war? Amazon themselves proudly announce it as their 42nd price drop. That's not really a strong selling point for long term contracts.

I've been wondering about this too. I'd love to see a price breakdown comparing reserved prices vs. prices with expected price drops.

There is still utility in knowing exactly what you're going to be paying, so for some people, that might be more desirable than getting the best deal.

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#25

Post by jamiesonbecker » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:39 PM UTC

h1karu wrote: post #14

akg_67 wrote: post #13

I am wondering how many and who in enterprises are using Google cloud? I understand few startups, typically associated with Google in some way, are using google cloud. I just can't imagine many enterprises putting up with poor customer service and ego of Google.

Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is not designed to handle sudden spikes. Customers need to request AWS to pre-warm the ELB to get it ready to handle the expected load. This requires a subscription to AWS support. GCE’s Load Balancer doesn’t require pre-warming. It scales instantly to support spiky traffic. Compute Engine Load Balancing hits 1 million+ requests per second with no pre-warming.

You can pre-warm without a support subscription if you want to take the time (and know how) to do it yourself.

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#26

Post by awj » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:50 PM UTC

pdq wrote: post #9

evan_ wrote: post #5

I'm surprised this is being cast as Amazon responding to Google's price cuts- the AWS conference was scheduled months in advance so if anything Google heard about the price cuts and announced their own just ahead of the conference as a (successful; apparently) attempt to take the wind out of Amazon's announcement. Interesting that they dropped by the same amount; either it was a lucky guess, Amazon adjusted their adj…

I'll go with Occam's Razor: Amazon just responded to Google's newly announced pricing. To believe they guessed correctly or they have a "mole" is pretty far fetched.

So your version of Occam's Razor is "Amazon hurriedly cut prices on a profitable service without much time for evaluation" over "someone at Amazon told Google about upcoming price changes while Google had time to decide they could jump in early on it".

I'm not saying that either interpretation is wrong, but I think your use of Occam's Razor here says more about your assumptions than the nature of things.

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#27

Post by mercenario » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

umsm wrote: post #16

As I look at the pricing wars, I realized something: If you choose to use "cloud" based in your projects or businesses, you will never know the long-term costs associated with operating in the cloud. The cloud provider can raise or lower prices as they see fit. What prevents these for-profit companies to keep lowering prices and not raising them?

> The cloud provider can raise or lower prices as they see fit. What prevents these for-profit companies to keep lowering prices and not raising them?

This is different from non-cloud based providers how?

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#28

Post by mcintyre1994 » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 4:54 PM UTC

awj wrote: post #26

pdq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go with Occam's Razor: Amazon just responded to Google's newly announced pricing. To believe they guessed correctly or they have a "mole" is pretty far fetched.

So your version of Occam's Razor is "Amazon hurriedly cut prices on a profitable service without much time for evaluation" over "someone at Amazon told Google about upcoming price changes while Google had time to decide they could jump in early on it". I'm not saying that either interpretation is wrong , but I think your use of Occam's Razor here says more about your assumptions than the nature of things.

Could it be that Amazon had a less significant price drop planned, Google announced theirs and Amazon decided to increase their drop to match? Amazon would have already evaluated what they could drop to, so they'd know as soon as Google announced they could match.

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#29

Post by h1karu » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

jamiesonbecker wrote: post #25

h1karu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) is not designed to handle sudden spikes. Customers need to request AWS to pre-warm the ELB to get it ready to handle the expected load. This requires a subscription to AWS support. GCE’s Load Balancer doesn’t require pre-warming. It scales instantly to support spiky traffic. Compute Engine Load Balancing hits 1 million+ requests per second with no pre-warming.

You can pre-warm without a support subscription if you want to take the time (and know how) to do it yourself.

fair enough.. I didn't realize there was a good solution to pre-warm yourself but I suppose it makes sense that it should be possible. My intention with the comment was to point out that we're not comparing apples with apples when it comes to flexibility of the core infrastructure.. and load balancing is about as core as it gets.

Both platforms have features that the other doesn't have for example GCE has Persistent Disks that can be connected to multiple VMs. Amazon has ElastiCache and a DNS service, etc

Re: AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2

#30

Post by chimeracoder » Mon, Mar 31, 2014, 5:13 PM UTC

umsm wrote: post #16

As I look at the pricing wars, I realized something: If you choose to use "cloud" based in your projects or businesses, you will never know the long-term costs associated with operating in the cloud. The cloud provider can raise or lower prices as they see fit. What prevents these for-profit companies to keep lowering prices and not raising them?

This is the old rent vs. buy debate, but for hardware instead of real estate.

Renting an apartment places a rough upper bound on your monthly expenses, since in most places, the landlord is required to do maintenance and cannot raise your rent until the lease is up for renewal.

Buying a house a rough lower bound, since your mortgage can increase unexpectedly, and you are responsible for all repairs and maintenance yourself.

So, you can never know all costs with certainty ahead of time, but if you care about predictability, it's probably better to rent (ie, go with the cloud) than to buy, because it's easier to bound your costs over a given duration.