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Introducing Network Service Tiers

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#121

Post by gumby »

rb808 wrote: post #77
_7iun wrote: post #50

A long standing complaint of mine is that Cloud egress pricing severely limits the usefulness of compute. If I want to say process some visual effects on a large (1TB) ProRes video, I might spend $1 on the compute but $100 on the egress getting it back. Unfortunately these changes don't really resolve that problem. "Standard" pricing is a paltry 20% less. That 1TB video egress still costs $80 and for that price I can…

I was going to back up my photos to AWS Glacier before noticing that retrieval costs are multiple times the storage cost. I guess that is possibly OK for a backup but scared me into a physical alternative. http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/

FWIW Amazon drive will store any number of photos (or anything it thinks is a photo -- I havent looked to see if it looks at the file name or checks to see if it's a valid jpeg/png) for free. So if you're really backing up your photos that's an option.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#122

Post by dimva »

nealmueller wrote: post #102
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #58

It would be nice if they would say if their pricing is per GB or per TB. https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/pricing

I worked on this product release, at Google. Can you guide my eye please where we don't specify TB? I'll get that fixed. I took a look and it says TB. @nealmueller if that's easier for you.

You are right, it does say TB everywhere, and does not mention GB anywhere. But, if this is correct and all prices are per TB, that would be a ~1000x price cut compared to your current pricing, which is per GB.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#123

Post by vl »

pbbakkum wrote: post #52

A few notes here: - An unmentioned alternative to this pricing is that GCP has a deal with Cloudflare that gives you a 50% discount to what is now called Premium pricing for traffic that egresses GCP through Cloudflare. This is cheaper for Google because GCP and Cloudflare have a peering arrangement. Of course, you also have to pay Cloudflare for bandwidth. - This announcement is actually a small price cut compared t…

The problem with bundling is that it stops reflecting underlying costs and creates incentives for customers that skew customer population.

Contrived example of this: since most HDDs workloads are IOPS bound, you decide to sell IOPS bundles and give space for free. Not before long all your customers are backup companies that have low IOPS and high space usage. Your service runs at loss, customers are doing nice price arbitrage on top of it.

Same goes for all aspects of computing platforms for sale: CPUs, RAM, Networking, HDDs, SSDs, GPUs.

Two additional problems are bin packing and provisioning: you need to sell things in such quantities and ratios that you can actually effectively utilize your hardware configurations. You need to order and design your hardware in a flexible manner to be able to adapt for changing ratios of component needs due to changing customer demand.

So it's easier to run "pay for what you use plus profit" pricing, but some customers don't like it due to perceived complexity and potential unpredictability.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#124

Post by jlg23 »

wmf wrote: post #111
captainmuon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what that same 1 TB of data costs on the "open market" (or how it is even priced). Say I'm a smallish ISP on the east coast and want to send 1 TB to another smallish ISP on the west coast. I probably have a contract with, I don't know, AT&T or whoever owns the cables (I'm from Europe so I have no clue, in Germany it would be Telekom). I'm guessing it would probably cost cents (and that would bring my data ac…

1 TB = $35. https://www.packetfabric.com/pricing/

Intentionally not linking to any of the companies I found with just a quick search at google (mislaid the PDF for carrier 2 carrier pricing of a major provider): 40E/month for 30TB traffic, 1G uplink (1G/s guaranteed), 2x500G SSD on a i7.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#127

Post by CodeWriter23 »

nealmueller wrote: post #102
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #58

It would be nice if they would say if their pricing is per GB or per TB. https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/pricing

I worked on this product release, at Google. Can you guide my eye please where we don't specify TB? I'll get that fixed. I took a look and it says TB. @nealmueller if that's easier for you.

> Can you guide my eye please where we don't specify TB?

I would be extremely surprised to find that the new pricing is 1/1000th what the old price was. It's not really $0.105/TB is it?

I think the key confusing factor on the linked page is there is no "per" anything detailed. To answer your request for guiding your eye: http://imgur.com/a/9je4T

Thanks for taking the time. I figured someone at Google would read my comment and review the pricing table; I did not expect to engage with someone directly involved in the product release.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#128

Post by Tepix »

kwindla wrote: post #119
komali2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely boggles my gorram mind the large-scale engineering that goes into making the internet work. Love the parts in Cryptonomicon where they delve into the sea cables stuff.

Related, one of my favorite Wired Magazine stories -- and favorite pieces of long form journalism, period -- Neal Stephenson goes out on a boat to string some cable: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Yep, 50 pages of awesomeness!

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#129

Post by btown »

adventured wrote: post #94
nik736 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could simply ban adult websites in their ToS, I doubt this is the reason. Also seed boxes are nowhere near useful if you still would pay $10 / TB and at the same time can get traffic for free at OVH or Online/Scaleway. It's most likely vendor lock-in and people are dumb enough to pay for it.

The reason, is that bandwidth is a solid profit center for the cloud majors. Amazon initiated it, the rest are going along in cartel fashion, nobody wants to disrupt one of the lucrative angles by driving that profit center toward zero. There's no other rational explanation why Azure or Google aren't hammering AWS on bandwidth cost as a competitive angle. They're basically conspiring in the industrial sense, no diffe…

No need for conspiracy theories. When one market participant anchors a price at a high premium, you don't need to collude to know that undercutting them is a scorched earth strategy that causes both of you to lose. Part of this is because financial markets value your revenue more than market share, and undercutting bandwidth pricing hurts the former more than it helps the latter.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#130

Post by Tepix »

cwt137 wrote: post #7

I thought I read an article about an online game company who was doing something similar with their users; trying to get their users on their private network as soon as possible. Does anyone else remember that article on HN?

DIDlogic also does this (voip provider)
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