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Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O
- prs 16y ago"Google To Buy Dropbox For An Undisclosed Amount" does not sound far-fetched to me given this announcement. From a strategic viewpoint it makes perfect sense. It would provide their new storage service with the necessary intial momentum at the expense of S3.
- whakojacko 16y agoYep. I mentioned that Amazon should buy Dropbox recently for similar reasons. Of course it remains to be seen if the Dropbox people would be interested in selling out.
- niekmaas 16y agofor the right price everyone is willing to sell out. And by looking at the Google acquisition history they don't mind paying big bucks for a great service.
- pchristensen 16y agoThey've taken investment. They are by definition interested in either a) selling or b) going public. While I would happily buy shares in a DropBox IPO, I'm afraid option a is much more likely. EDIT: taken VC investment from Sequoia.
- detst 16y ago37signals took investment and don't seem interesting in a) or b) so I'm not sure that's true. Not everyone has the same goals.
- neilc 16y agoThey've taken investment. They are by definition interested in either a) selling or b) going public. That doesn't follow "by definition" -- although I agree that the former generally implies the latter.
- smiler 16y agoThat would be very interesting if they did it. I hope they could migrate all the data from S3 to GS very easily! Plus it would be a real kick in the teeth for Amazon.
- MikeCapone 16y agoHopefully this would mean a free account with 10+ gigs of storage...
- johns 16y agoI hope the bit about easy migration from S3 means a compatible API, just change the base URL. Would that make the S3 API the de facto standard for cloud storage APIs?
- rarrrrrr 16y agoPerhaps it already is. The Internet Archive has an S3 like API too: http://www.archive.org/help/abouts3.txt http://www.archive.org/help/abouts3.txt I thought the interface was patented, though? I wouldn't expect Google to copy it precisely.
- seunosewa 16y agoIf APIs could be patented, I don't think WINE would exist.
- rarrrrrr 16y agoHere's the patent: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070156842%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070156842&RS=DN/20070156842 http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...
- Groxx 16y ago/me reads a bit ow.
- grogers 16y agoThat's the application, the actual granted patent seems to be: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&S1=07716180&OS=PN/07716180&RS=PN/07716180 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec... (note that the date is May 11, 2010 - last week)
- detst 16y agoEucalyptus also uses this interface. It would seem that it is becoming the de facto standard. Being able to immediately use all of the existing tools would go a long way for adoption. http://open.eucalyptus.com/ http://open.eucalyptus.com/
- MikeCapone 16y agoThis can only be good. More competition will probably mean better prices, more features, higher reliability and more innovation. And if someone can compete with Amazon on this, it's certainly Google.
- aditya 16y agoThe only question is - why did it take them so long?
- MikeCapone 16y agoMy first guess would be that Google has a lot more cool things to do with its datacenters than Amazon, so up to now any extra capacity was used for a new product/project. Only now did they have enough spare to start leasing it to outsiders (which either says something about Moore's Law, or about a decline in the rate of innovation at Google).
- marketer 16y agoI hope they get the interface right this time. App Engine has an awkward interface that's not nearly as flexible and powerful as EC2.
- stanleydrew 16y agoApp Engine and EC2 don't really compete in my mind for this reason. App Engine seems to compete more with things like Heroku, although the interface complaint certainly applies there too.
- samstokes 16y agoI find App Engine and Heroku to be in stark contrast in this respect. App Engine requires you to code your app in a particular way to work on their platform, and that way will (to a large extent) only work on App Engine. Heroku, on the other hand, requires you to code your app in what is pretty much the recommended way to do Rails apps anyway. While they do impose a few limitations that aren't present on other platforms (e.g. no local writable storage), accommodating those limitations wouldn't prevent you from moving to another platform. There's no proprietary Heroku Database API that you'd have to reimplement in order to move to a physical-server-colo setup, for example.
- tow21 16y agoApp Engine requires you to code your app in a particular way to work on their platform, and that way will (to a large extent) only work on App Engine. This is true, but it does make for a very nice deployment story; and Ian Bicking's silver lining (http://cloudsilverlining.org/ http://cloudsilverlining.org/) is (I think) a very interesting attempt to tell that story in a more generic way.
- grandalf 16y agoYou could replicate the s3 api in a simple (< 30 line) python app for app engine.
- psranga 16y agoBtw, Google already has a BlobStore API which is in beta. Maybe they're releasing it at the conf. If so, not big news. It's the exact same price as Amazon and has a clunkier API (IMHO). Competition is sorely needed in this space. I hope Google undercuts Amazon pricing. IIRC, Amazon has maintained the 15c per GB-Month pricing for 4+ years. I would have expected them to pass along at least some of the price reductions of bare HDDs. I'm hoping for something like the $5 for 20 gig they offer for photos. I'll keep dreaming. :)
- TY 16y ago$5/20 GB = 25c/GB - that's more than 15c/GB at Amazon. Are you dreaming about price increases? :-)
- zhyder 16y agoThat's 25c/GB/year compared to 15c/GB/month.
- detst 16y agoIsn't that also with free bandwidth? ~$0.02/GB/month with free transfer. I'm in.
- cmelbye 16y agoIt's an App Engine API, so unless you're running your application on App Engine you're out of luck. Of course, you could write a wrapper around it to make it accessible over a RESTful API, but what's the point now that Google Storage has been announced?
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- balac 16y agoI'm excited about this, especially the possibility of including other services (like video encoding).
- bdickason 16y agoCould not agree more. Video encoding is still damn expensive. We're using encoding.com and although they have great customer support, we're still paying roughly $1/video to encode. 5% of these videos will account for 95% of the views. Why pay $1 to encode an unpopular video then $0.001 for the bandwidth? Encoding is the only piece of our video model that currently doesn't scale directly.
- wizard_2 16y agoA hacker I know (who has I team I believe - the debuggable.com guys - both successful bloggers and core teamembers of the cakephp community) has been working on transload.it for a while, it's a pretty good service despite still being in beta, but I haven't put it through its paces like I'm sure you would. (I was working on a wordpress plugin.) It sits on ec2 and will save right into your s3. http://transloadit.com http://transloadit.com I don't know their plans for the full release, but they could be a way to break out of your lock in with encoding.com.
- bdickason 16y agoThanks! I'll check them out :) We actually offload right to Akamai so the s3 integration isn't a big deal for us, but anything to drop the price of bandwidth or encoding is a win these days :( Tho I must say the encoding guys are awesome so it will take a damn good product to make me leave them.
- sjs382 16y agoWow. This might be perfect for an upcoming project. I wish there was pricing info though. :-/
- modoc 16y agoYou check out Zencoder? http://zencoder.com/ http://zencoder.com/ Another HN community gem imho.
- ph0rque 16y agoNow what needs to happen is Heroku seamlessly using Google Storage concurrently with S3.
- aresant 16y agoFrom a business WHY are they doing this? The vast majority of their revenue comes from selling advertising on Google OWNED sites eg google.com: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-had-any-doubts-about-where-googles-revenue-comes-from-2010-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-... Google is the industry leader at monetizing search, but nothing else they do comes close. I am truly curious - is the reason that Google keeps investing time and money in "line-extension" businesses to distract competitors, keep the antitrust police away, what?
- smiler 16y agoBecause I guess they see 'cloud computing' in their future and generating money from that. I guess they need some kind of beefier storage service as they start making more ground with their Google App product line.
- run4yourlives 16y agoGoogle is the industry leader at monetizing search Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information". There is tremendous power in information. Not so much in your own, but on the correlation of your data to everyone else's; the collective statistics about anything is where the power lies. In gmail, google reading my email tells them to sell me product x and we think that's the end of it. But there is so much more available in terms of how the aggregate masses behave with regards to product x and its correlated points. This extends right into file storage. Yes I am saying that Google will "read" your data. Even better, I'm saying that Amazon more than likely is already doing this. They're doing it not because they give a damn about you, but because they want the data points that come from the analysis of many separate instances of unrelated bits and bytes. That analysis is worth a fortune. It's a modern day gold rush. This makes perfect sense for Google.
- jim-greer 16y agoThey've already got a ton of storage for end users - I imagine Gmail attachments alone are a pretty massive corpus. What this adds is information about site traffic - who's using what from where. Between Google Analytics, search trends, and toolbar, they've already got a lot of that. But I imagine that's part of the rationale for this.
- grandalf 16y agoInteresting! It had just occurred to me that I could write a competitor to s3 using app engine and blobstore. I guess someone at Google realized that too.
- ShabbyDoo 16y agoThis is what I had thought about. If you don't care that the API is published/sorta-standard, it's not a big deal to deploy a lightweight pass-thru app to AppEngine. The pricing model is what will be most interesting about the announcement.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoThat is great. I'll alternate backups between S3 and GS.
- gasull 16y agoThis reminds me of "Googlezon": http://robinsloan.com/epic/ http://robinsloan.com/epic/
- zh 16y agoThe previous time there were rumours about Google Storage, we've got AppEngine instead. Hm, what we've get how?...