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Is this the 3rd or 4th post about some random Google Cloud thing today? I'm losing track. No news here, just the usual business model of the "cloud": cheap in,

Is this the 3rd or 4th post about some random Google Cloud thing today? I'm losing track. No news here, just the usual business model of the "cloud": cheap in, expensive out. They rope you in with a fee tier then charge you 9-18x more for egress than you pay for it running your own hardware with IP transit (or going with a VPS provider like Vultr that charges you the correct prices for it). Have fun scaling your company economically, hope you don't need to send any data to your customers.

qeternity 10y ago
Ah the classic anti-cloud post that pretends to understand everyone's use cases and economics. You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. You realize that people plan and model growth around these figures. You realize that despite all of this, many people still go with cloud solutions because they get other benefits. I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. And fwiw, we're not cloud based for the exact reasons you mention (some spot usage). It makes sense for our business model, we have predictable computing growth needs, so we go bare metal. But I understand why that doesn't make sense for other people.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  > I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC marketing spam all day.
  - webmaven 10y ago
    Feel free to upvote the stuff that you do find interesting, and encourage others to do the same.
  - qeternity 10y ago
    For reasons better analyzed by historians and statisticians. The historical statistics are that Vultr is far more likely to be a risk to the business than Google is. It's as simple as that.
    - kyledrake 10y ago
      Where is this evidence to substantiate this? We would love to read it, please share it with us. I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for all price tiers, access to actual networking power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot. Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to mobile phone CPUs. Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at: giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on. I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.
      - ctlaltdefeat 10y ago
        To be fair, there are some instances where GC has unique technological advantages compared to VPSes. Their new distributed ACID SQL database comes to mind.
        misframer 10y ago
        Google Cloud also has live migration of VMs.
- pg314 10y ago
  > You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. Not everyone. I've had plenty of discussions with people who had no idea.
  - addicted 10y ago
    The industry, and consultants especially, have strongly pushed the idea that cloud will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than alternatives.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  Hugely overpriced bandwidth and other resources limit your flexibility a lot and keep a lot of options closed for you, making it harder to compete or offer value to users. It might not matter for some, but could be a matter of life and death for others, because pursuing those closed options anyway and hoping to dig yourself out of a cloud lock-in hole afterwards might be too expensive to survive.
manigandham 10y ago
Google Cloud is having it's annual NEXT conference: https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ Events like these (whether Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc.) always have multiple big announcements which are worth discussing and it seems many people agree. There are numerous benefits with using a major cloud provider so while the outbound bandwidth is expensive, surely you can see how every business has it's own needs and should weigh the costs for themselves. As a GCP startup, we're scaling very economically on their platform and wouldn't give it up even if the bandwidth was free elsewhere.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
" Is this the 3rd or 4th post about some random Google Cloud thing today? I'm losing track." I believe there's some kind of Google event happening in San Francisco at the moment.
cma 10y ago
Their egress bandwidth pricing was insane when I priced it out for doing a video conferencing tunnel.
- j_s 10y ago
  I was thinking about Scaleway or OVH for this very reason (streaming video). Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023
golergka 10y ago
Out of curiosity, do you really think that operating cost is the only metric that matters from a business standpoint?
nl 10y ago
Have fun scaling your company economically, hope you don't need to send any data to your customers. They are giving you free computing resources. You could enjoy using it for something that makes no sense economically but people might enjoy. Or host your open source application on it. But I guess open source would be uneconomic too. Or you could complain.

qeternity 10y ago

Ah the classic anti-cloud post that pretends to understand everyone's use cases and economics. You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. You realize that people plan and model growth around these figures. You realize that despite all of this, many people still go with cloud solutions because they get other benefits. I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. And fwiw, we're not cloud based for the exact reasons you mention (some spot usage). It makes sense for our business model, we have predictable computing growth needs, so we go bare metal. But I understand why that doesn't make sense for other people.

kyledrake 10y ago
> I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC marketing spam all day.
- webmaven 10y ago
  Feel free to upvote the stuff that you do find interesting, and encourage others to do the same.
- qeternity 10y ago
  For reasons better analyzed by historians and statisticians. The historical statistics are that Vultr is far more likely to be a risk to the business than Google is. It's as simple as that.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    Where is this evidence to substantiate this? We would love to read it, please share it with us. I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for all price tiers, access to actual networking power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot. Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to mobile phone CPUs. Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at: giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on. I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.
    - ctlaltdefeat 10y ago
      To be fair, there are some instances where GC has unique technological advantages compared to VPSes. Their new distributed ACID SQL database comes to mind.
      - misframer 10y ago
        Google Cloud also has live migration of VMs.
pg314 10y ago
> You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff is. Not everyone. I've had plenty of discussions with people who had no idea.
- addicted 10y ago
  The industry, and consultants especially, have strongly pushed the idea that cloud will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than alternatives.
zzzcpan 10y ago
Hugely overpriced bandwidth and other resources limit your flexibility a lot and keep a lot of options closed for you, making it harder to compete or offer value to users. It might not matter for some, but could be a matter of life and death for others, because pursuing those closed options anyway and hoping to dig yourself out of a cloud lock-in hole afterwards might be too expensive to survive.

manigandham 10y ago

Google Cloud is having it's annual NEXT conference: https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/ Events like these (whether Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc.) always have multiple big announcements which are worth discussing and it seems many people agree. There are numerous benefits with using a major cloud provider so while the outbound bandwidth is expensive, surely you can see how every business has it's own needs and should weigh the costs for themselves. As a GCP startup, we're scaling very economically on their platform and wouldn't give it up even if the bandwidth was free elsewhere.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

" Is this the 3rd or 4th post about some random Google Cloud thing today? I'm losing track." I believe there's some kind of Google event happening in San Francisco at the moment.

cma 10y ago

Their egress bandwidth pricing was insane when I priced it out for doing a video conferencing tunnel.

j_s 10y ago
I was thinking about Scaleway or OVH for this very reason (streaming video). Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023

golergka 10y ago

Out of curiosity, do you really think that operating cost is the only metric that matters from a business standpoint?

nl 10y ago

Have fun scaling your company economically, hope you don't need to send any data to your customers. They are giving you free computing resources. You could enjoy using it for something that makes no sense economically but people might enjoy. Or host your open source application on it. But I guess open source would be uneconomic too. Or you could complain.