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Introducing Network Service Tiers

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

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Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#51

Post by jvreeland »

jerkstate wrote: post #41
arkadiyt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not differentiating by content, you're paying for a different service tier. It's like saying getting faster internet by paying for Comcast Business violates net neutrality.

One of the primary consumer arguments in favor of net neutrality was that ISPs advertised bandwidth at certain speeds, and therefore were obligated to provide that speed to any point on the Internet. Using that same argument, Google should be obligated to provide maximum interface speed from any of their compute instances to any point on the internet, and should not be allowed to sell a tier that gets closer to that…

How are advertised speeds and maximum speeds equivalent? Google is advertising speeds to their consumers and their consumers are selecting a speed. Googles obligation is to provide that service at that speed. Similar to how ISPs should provide service at the selected speed. This isn't the ISP choosing to throttle certain services. This is a service choosing to run at a certain speed.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#52

Post by pbbakkum »

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 to existing network egress prices for the 1-10 TiB/month and 150+ TiB/month buckets.

- The biggest advantage of using private networks is often client latency, since packets avoid points of congestion on the open internet. They don't really highlight this, instead showing a chart of throughput to a single client, which only matters for a subset of GCP customers. The throughput chart is also a little bit deceptive because of the y-axis they've chosen.

- Other important things to consider if you're optimizing a website for latency are CDN and where SSL negotiation takes place. For a single small HTTPS request doing SSL negotiation on the network edge can make a pretty big latency difference.

- Interesting number: Google capex (excluding other Alphabet capex) in both 2015 and 2016 was around $10B, at least part of that going to the networking tech discussed in the post. I expect they're continuing to invest in this space.

- A common trend with GCP products is moving away from flat-rate pricing models to models which incentivize users in ways that reflect underlying costs. For example, BigQuery users are priced per-query, which is uncommon for analytical databases. It's possible that network pricing could reflect that in the future. For example, there is probably more slack network capacity at 3am than 8am.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#53

Post by ProblemFactory »

jstapels wrote: post #13

Egress pricing for Google and AWS (sans Lightsail) continues to be one of the biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I think Google missed an opportunity here. They should have cut the prices more significantly for standard tier (sacrificing performance) to make this more competitive. Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would co…

> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean.

I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit.

The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans.

I guess that it's fine if you reach the limit on a few servers, but if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. Has someone tried to use these hosts just for cheap file servers?

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#54

Post by brunoTbear »

I quite like the way Google has drawn the map here-since no cables reach from India to Europe, they've split the map there making the paths easier to trace between Asia and NA. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QvF57n-55Cs/WZypui8H8zI/AAAAAAAAE...

Compare with the difficulties of https://cloud.google.com/images/locations/edgepoint.png

Elegant and subtle work. Just like the networking.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#55

Post by kyrra »

xg15 wrote: post #29

Not that I'm really surprised, but does that map imply that Google has its own trans-atlantic undersea cables? Is there some more info about that?

Google spun up a trans-pacific cable last year[0].

"The new cable will become the sixth submarine cable that Google has a stake in (the others are Unity, SJC, FASTER, MONET and Tannat)."

So it looks like Google isn't the sole owner, but they do partner with others to do these.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/12/google-and-facebook-are-bu...

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#56

Post by cbr »

always_good wrote: post #32

This precedent (including CloudFlare's new private routing) doesn't bode well for the public internet. Imagine the day when everyone has to use private routing and the public internet barely even gets maintained anymore. Of course, public internet also suffers tragedy of the commons and not much is happening on that front. Like how most people are still behind ISPs that allow their customers to spoof IP addresses. An…

This post is specifically about allowing people to use public routing when previously they were private-only.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#57

Post by komali2 »

breck wrote: post #12

Seeing the map of Google's network makes me appreciate more the impact of undersea cables. If you're interested in the history of earth-scale networks I recommend this free documentary on Cyrus Field and the heroic struggle to lay the first transatlantic cable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFKONUBBHQw

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.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#59

Post by blfr »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #53
jstapels wrote: post #13

Egress pricing for Google and AWS (sans Lightsail) continues to be one of the biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I think Google missed an opportunity here. They should have cut the prices more significantly for standard tier (sacrificing performance) to make this more competitive. Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would co…

> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit. The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans. I guess that it's fine if you reach the l…

I don't know about DO Droplets but you can get a reasonably priced dedicated server* at OVH and knock yourself out piping 4-8 TB to the world for ~$40/mo.

* It's hard to push a lot of useful data with a tiny VPS.

Re: Introducing Network Service Tiers

#60

Post by needcheapbw »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #53
jstapels wrote: post #13

Egress pricing for Google and AWS (sans Lightsail) continues to be one of the biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I think Google missed an opportunity here. They should have cut the prices more significantly for standard tier (sacrificing performance) to make this more competitive. Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would co…

> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit. The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans. I guess that it's fine if you reach the l…

> if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out.

It might happen but it doesn't refute the parent's point:

"Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would cost $85.00 on Google's new standard plan."

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