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Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

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Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#91

Post by womod »

NBJack wrote: post #58
mschuster91 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the hyperscalers say they have to charge egress fees to pay for the costs in building their networks, but for some reason doesn't apply to ingress (which they're silent on) because ingress traffic volume is a fraction (in my experience, in website hosting of a well known household brand, barely 1%!) of egress traffic volume, and most peering connections are 1:1 in ingress/egress bandwidth so the egress bandwidth co…

This also holds true on thebflip side for most consumer internet speeds (at least in the US). Many people have a x00 Mbps or even x Gbps downstream, but most have no more than x0 Mbps upstream. Literally their ability to pull traffic from websites is 50X in some cases than to push information out. Going beyond that (greater uploads) often costs significantly more. Whether or not these two are actually related isn't c…

That's due to the DOCSIS standard for cable modems. They specced out more channels for downstream than upstream because of the limited bandwidth of copper and consumer priorities. With fiber there's an order of magnitude more bandwidth available, so the uneven split is much less (if at all?) common with the big backhaul lines between datacenters. For consumer fiber you'll usually get symmetric but for the most part it doesn't make sense as the vast majority of consumers just don't make use of their upstream bandwidth.

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#92

Post by networkchad »

pyuser583 wrote: post #83
zinekeller wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need the "I think" for Microsoft: while not mentioned directly, the links on "unfair legacy software" points to Microsoft.

Oracle is what popped into my mind.

[dead]

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#93

Post by plantain »

anyoneamous wrote: post #81

I love that Google are willing to such a big swing at Microsoft in the text of this announcement - I just wish AWS wasn't so badly shackled busy it's marketing and PR people these days.

I thought it was Oracle they were swinging at.

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#94

Post by whitepoplar »

timenova wrote: post #51
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is part of Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance [1] which is removing most egress fees. Google still charges for egress, but it's half of what AWS is charging. We moved everything off of S3 anyway and have been using Cloudflare's R2 storage along with Google Compute Engine instances. R2 can be a little flaky, but the cost savings for us more than makes up for it. [1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

Can you give a few more details on the flaky nature of R2? Does it lose files? Fails to write but gives an error? Fails to read sometimes? Silently fails?

I'd like to know this as well!

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#95

Post by danpalmer »

jeffbee wrote: post #34
amluto wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, but not for a use case where this matters. FWIW, Google has been working on these fancy nonblocking networks for a very long time. They’re very proud of them. Maybe they don’t actually use them for GCP, but Google definitely cares about network performance for their own purposes.

The whole concept of blocking is inapplicable to packet-switched networks. The whole time I was there I never heard anyone describe any of their several different types of networks as non-blocking. Indeed, the fact that they are centrally-controlled SDNs, where the control plane can tell any participant to stop talking to any other participant, seems to be logically the opposite of "non-blocking", if that circuit-swi…

I think what the parent comment is implying is that at Google a lot of work has been put into making network calls feel as close to local function calls as possible, to the point that it’s possible to write synchronous code around those calls. There are a ton of caveats to this, but Google is probably one of the best in the world at doing this. There is some truly crazy stuff going on to make RPC latency so low.

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#96

Post by bredren »

> Certain legacy providers leverage their on-premises software monopolies to create cloud monopolies, using restrictive licensing practices that lock in customers and warp competition.

This is fine issue of its own. But the way it is laced up here muddies the waters around this actual news.

Google was doing the wrong thing and is changing that while not really taking responsibility for doing the wrong thing.

But to make that less obvious, this other concern is brought into the story creating this high ground on a separate topic.

The strategic reframing of corporate communications is tiring.

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#97

Post by ikiris »

toast0 wrote: post #30
blibble wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accept there's some level of cost, but the prices are so high it's hard to describe it as anything other than gouging to prevent competition

My personal feeling is they're moving costs around so that egress has a big margin and other items have a smaller or potentially negative margin. I've seen this at other providers. We did a competitive pricing exercise at my last company, and our overall cost went down, but the mechanism was per hosts costs went down significantly and egress costs went up significantly, and the per host cost decrease outweighed the e…

y'all vastly underestimate how much it costs to run a CDN as large as that at scale.

bandwidth from cogent at whatever colo you can cross connect to them is wildly cheaper than "i need bandwith to everywhere" bandwidth.

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#98

Post by justinclift »

joeldo wrote: post #89
andrewstuart wrote: post #61

The cynical might wonder if this is a precursor to Google closing down its cloud. They can't really shut Google Cloud down and still be charging people to exit. And if they had suddenly seen the light on egress fees then surely they would have cut egress fees everywhere..... the fact that it's only on account closure is kinda suspicious.

Closing down within a year of it finally becoming profitable.. That would be a plot twist!

But also not out of the question for Google, who don't seem at all rational about what they kill vs let live.

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#99

Post by justinclift »

andrewstuart wrote: post #66

This whole story is very strange. All over the Internet people are slapping google on the back for..... pretty much nothing. In fact much of the praise seems to be worded as though Google had dropped all egress fees. Google continues to charge the nothing-short-of-highway-robbery 12 cents per gigabyte unless you are in Australia in which case its 19 cents per gigabyte. This is astoundingly bad value. What are people…

Hmmm, I'm not seeing many positive comments here about Google. Maybe I started reading a lot later than you? :)

Re: Removing data transfer fees when moving off Google Cloud

#100

Post by Kwpolska »

londons_explore wrote: post #47

The process seems a bit cumbersome... Why not: 1. Migrate your data out. 2. Close your account. 3. You will automatically be refunded all network egress fees incurred in the final 60 days, capped at the number of gigabytes you had stored in our products in the preceding 60 days.

The process requires people to be aware of the offer and contact support. A few months down the road, nobody will remember this exists, so most migrations won't actually make use of it.
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