5 ms·

Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, noth

by blowski 10y ago

Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.

vidarh 10y ago
Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
- merb 10y ago
  > AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons. I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere. There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.
    - merb 10y ago
      Really you probably never hired people.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        I have hired dozens of engineers over the last 20+ years I've done this, so maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions to you have no basis for.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
  - mcpherrinm 10y ago
    Google's "Custom Machine Types" can be a big pricing win over Amazon if your workload doesn't match Amazon's pre-built options.
  - vgt 10y ago
    Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers: - List Prices are cheaper [-1] - Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0] - Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1] - Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2] - Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing - VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3] In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4] [-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible [2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ [3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Cloud-Platform-features-that-can-save-you-time-and-money.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou... [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-cuts-our-cloud-is-still-way-cheaper/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c... (disc: work @ Google Cloud)
  - serge2k 10y ago

by blowski 10y ago

Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.

vidarh 10y ago

Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)

merb 10y ago
> AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.
- vidarh 10y ago
  That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons. I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere. There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.
  - merb 10y ago
    Really you probably never hired people.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      I have hired dozens of engineers over the last 20+ years I've done this, so maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions to you have no basis for.
dexterdog 10y ago
If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
- mcpherrinm 10y ago
  Google's "Custom Machine Types" can be a big pricing win over Amazon if your workload doesn't match Amazon's pre-built options.
- vgt 10y ago
  Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers: - List Prices are cheaper [-1] - Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0] - Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1] - Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2] - Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing - VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3] In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4] [-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible [2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ [3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Cloud-Platform-features-that-can-save-you-time-and-money.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou... [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-cuts-our-cloud-is-still-way-cheaper/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c... (disc: work @ Google Cloud)
- serge2k 10y ago