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Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices

googledevelopers.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices

#12

Post by andrewem »

ldargin wrote: post #7
thomasjames wrote: post #2

Does anyone know what the effective bandwidth and latency would be between machines? They talk about thousands of cores a little too casually. I guess they mean unrelated independent instances of some task as opposed to actual parallelism. I am confused as to what market segment they are going for here.

According to this review, their bandwidth is high and latency low, compared to EC2: http://bit.ly/Z3Peob

Non-shortened link: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu...

Re: Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices

#14

Post by DonnyV »

t0 wrote: post #11

$93/month seems a bit outrageous. What do they offer that makes it worth this much?

Yeah and thats only for single vcore. Maybe for 2 vcores. Do you really need 420GB for single. How about half that and give me another vcore.

Re: Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices

#16

Post by gwern »

declan wrote: post #10
icey wrote: post #3

After being bitten a few times by Google unceremoniously shutting down services, it feels like unnecessary risk-taking to build software on their infrastructure.

When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE? They may have, I admit, but I can't think of any. The point is raising the standard Google Reader/Google Buzz/etc. free examples isn't really apropos.

> When has Google shut down a paid service that was popular and under heavy development like GCE and GAE?

As far as I know, never. I've been compiling a list of live and shut down services/products/etc (~299 so far), and while payment doesn't seem to be an important factor (plenty of shut down paid things, including many more advertising services than I expected), I cannot name a service which was under heavy development and was shut down during said development. However, I think that is just because development tends to stop before the final death knell. Reader, for example, used to regularly update and improve during its heyday.

Re: Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices

#17

Post by OGinparadise »

These are paid services but before I'd jump in, Google would have to guarantee this service for say 5 years, with updates and no catch (like increasing the price by 5000% to force you out.) Microsoft is a lot of things, but one they do good is guaranteed, long term, support for their products. At least for the core ones. For example they are still supporting Windows XP, so when Coca Cola signs at the dotted line they know that the hundreds of millions they spend on developing their specific apps, they will serve them for at least 10 years. That's worth extra to me and apparently to many others.

Going all in in Google an then Google deciding that their latest experiment is not worth their time is painful. It will most likely ruin the start-up. This may seem as an emotional knee-jerk reaction to Reader, but it's the reality. You cannot throw 100 things against the wall, ask people to invest time and money on them and then drop all but a few of them. Trust is gone, fool me once and all...

Re: Google Compute Engine: Expanded availability, new features, and lower prices

#18

Post by plorkyeran »

ww520 wrote: post #6
yanw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is you actually have to pay for this one.

AppEngine was a pay service too but price rise pretty much forced many people out.

It's not so much the difference between free and paid that matters as whether or not the pricing is actually economically viable. The original GAE pricing pretty obviously wasn't, so it might as well have been a free product in that you were relying on Google continuing to want to subsidize it for whatever reason.
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