7 ms·

Care to give some specifics?

madiathomas 9y ago
First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. Google offered me $300 credit which lasted for 5 months because the total monthly cost is $59.00. Azure was expensive compared to Google Cloud. Their pricing was also complicated and full of jargons. Microsoft offering was also not appealing. They were offering less memory and less storage space. Up to this day, I still don't understand why Google can offer services using Microsoft software cheaper than Microsoft itself. Maybe I am just not their target market.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- raesene9 9y ago
  I'd suggest that's easy, Google are running a loss-leader to get you onto their platform. In terms of market share on cloud computing platforms, Google is currently running third to AWS and Azure, so it makes sense for them to take some short term losses to help build their position. Whether they will maintain that kind of pricing in the long term, remains to be seen.
  - madiathomas 9y ago
    I doubt it is a loss leader. That's a fair price to pay for the kind of hosting I require. Local web hosting companies who are profitable charge less than what Google is charging me.
    - raesene9 9y ago
      if they provide you with $300 of free credit how can that be anything other than a loss leader? They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide...
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        > They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide... At Google's scale, unless you mine bitcoins and actually use CPU/GPU time, the money Google actually spends on your tiny $300 free trial is maybe worth a dollar or two (and if they run free trials on machines that are paid off in terms of taxes, the only "expenses" are a tiny tiny sliver of maintenance - at Google scale network connectivity is basically free). Cloud providers, especially for 24/7 running services, are a total rip-off even compared to managed servers, and deploying your own bare metal will blow any cloud calculation away when you're getting serious (> 200GB RAM, 50+ cores). The real strength of cloud is when you need extremely high computing power for very short time (e.g. heavy software builds, occasional transcoding, ML training).
        raesene9 9y ago
        that's still a loss leader... And it's opportunity cost we're looking at here. It may only cost them a small amount to provide the resources (although that ignores the cost of developing/maintaining the services) but if they provide $300 of credit to one party that's resources they're not selling for $300 to someone else.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Google has been running the most advanced cloud far longer than the others, and has the efficiency and costs to show for it, which they pass on to their customers. They're definitely being aggressive with pricing but they're still making money. Their pricing is definitely way better to deal with than AWS or Azure.
    - raesene9 9y ago
      Advanced I'd suggest is subjective, however Google cloud has not been running longer than AWS (GCP started in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform), AWS started in 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services), with Azure coming along a bit after those two in 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure)
      - j_s 9y ago
        I'm giving OP the benefit of the doubt, assuming they're including the time Google itself was the only user of their cloud. Still not sure how that timeline compares to the Amazon-only pre-AWS.
      - manigandham 9y ago
        I'm not talking about their public cloud offering but rather their entire operational experience as one of the first companies to truly use next-gen architecture to build their software and data centers. They're just now offering the same tech to the public with GCP products like Compute Engine, Spanner, BigQuery, etc. which shows in the level of sophistication and performance compared to Azure and AWS.
        raesene9 9y ago
        I'm afraid that all feels very subjective to me, Microsoft were providing online services before Google even existed as a company, so I'm not sure how Google could have more operational experience of online services. You obviously feel that Google's services are more advanced than Microsoft's and Amazon's but from a market share perspective they're clearly running third to those two.
- 300bps 9y ago
  You said, "after experiencing very bad service from Azure". Now that you give details it doesn't seem to fit what you said. Sounds like your issues were pricing (no trial, higher cost, fewer resources per $) and your confusion with Microsoft "jargon". That doesn't equal very bad service to me.
  - madiathomas 9y ago
    That's just a quarter of the story. I wasn't happy with their customer service and setup tools too. That's part of the customer experience. As for Google, I never needed to contact them. Everything just worked. Right information was provided every step of the way, which eliminated the need to contact them. The whole setup took me less than an hour and my site was up and running.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    Your use of quotes around jargon qualifies as "scare quotes" clearly indicating your disdain for OP's concern about Microsoft jargon. Microsoft does indeed use jargon, and it's an entirely reasonable principle of purchasing to avoid products the purchasor don't understand. Jargon is a well-known source of misunderstanding.
- itaysk 9y ago
  You don't have to be eligible for a trial. Everyone can open a trial account with 200$ for 3 months. Additionally Azure App Services has a nice free tier which, if your needs are basic, might even let you run free forever. Disclaimer - I work for Microsoft.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    "Free Tier" is "60 CPU minutes / day" [1]. That's barely enough time to create the default project in Visual Studio and build it, let alone do some trial development off of it. [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...
    - taspeotis 9y ago
      You do the development on your computer, then deploy it to Azure. See this example: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/aspnet-4-ci-cd-azure-automatic https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/as... The CPU minutes/day come from serving your site's HTTP requests and the like.
      - infogulch 9y ago
        So if you put up a site on a random domain and nobody ever touches it, it won't accumulate minutes?
        stan_rogers 9y ago
        Not without scheduled jobs (crons or the equivalent) or always-live processes, no. If you're leaning on a runtime the server owns and your own code is never invoked, you are (or your account is) not using any CPU time.
        infogulch 9y ago
        Thank you for the explanation. I learned something today. (To be fair the site is not clear.)
- blablabla123 9y ago
  I had mostly positive experience with Azure. Sure, it's definitely not the cheapest cloud - but on the other hand it compares well with AWS. I credit Azure for focussing on simplicity and having a polite customer service. Regarding Google, I had really bad experience with that at some point. When App Engine was still young, it was mega unreliable, it seemed not even the Google people could predict when it failed. Not only that, at some point, when it wasn't so beta anymore, they changed pricing model and raised the prices unproportionally high. Eventually I painfully migrated my app onto some Virtual Private Server. > First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. I had 150 € for free a month, for half a year or so and afterwards access to a 60k € program. You can try to apply for that. Anyways, I don't want to make any advertisment. My current project is hosted on Scaleway using Docker, so I can do what I want and I don't depend on any Tech Giant's benevolence.

First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. Google offered me $300 credit which lasted for 5 months because the total monthly cost is $59.00. Azure was expensive compared to Google Cloud. Their pricing was also complicated and full of jargons. Microsoft offering was also not appealing. They were offering less memory and less storage space. Up to this day, I still don't understand why Google can offer services using Microsoft software cheaper than Microsoft itself. Maybe I am just not their target market.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
raesene9 9y ago
I'd suggest that's easy, Google are running a loss-leader to get you onto their platform. In terms of market share on cloud computing platforms, Google is currently running third to AWS and Azure, so it makes sense for them to take some short term losses to help build their position. Whether they will maintain that kind of pricing in the long term, remains to be seen.
- madiathomas 9y ago
  I doubt it is a loss leader. That's a fair price to pay for the kind of hosting I require. Local web hosting companies who are profitable charge less than what Google is charging me.
  - raesene9 9y ago
    if they provide you with $300 of free credit how can that be anything other than a loss leader? They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide...
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > They're providing you something for free, which costs them money to provide... At Google's scale, unless you mine bitcoins and actually use CPU/GPU time, the money Google actually spends on your tiny $300 free trial is maybe worth a dollar or two (and if they run free trials on machines that are paid off in terms of taxes, the only "expenses" are a tiny tiny sliver of maintenance - at Google scale network connectivity is basically free). Cloud providers, especially for 24/7 running services, are a total rip-off even compared to managed servers, and deploying your own bare metal will blow any cloud calculation away when you're getting serious (> 200GB RAM, 50+ cores). The real strength of cloud is when you need extremely high computing power for very short time (e.g. heavy software builds, occasional transcoding, ML training).
      - raesene9 9y ago
        that's still a loss leader... And it's opportunity cost we're looking at here. It may only cost them a small amount to provide the resources (although that ignores the cost of developing/maintaining the services) but if they provide $300 of credit to one party that's resources they're not selling for $300 to someone else.
- manigandham 9y ago
  Google has been running the most advanced cloud far longer than the others, and has the efficiency and costs to show for it, which they pass on to their customers. They're definitely being aggressive with pricing but they're still making money. Their pricing is definitely way better to deal with than AWS or Azure.
  - raesene9 9y ago
    Advanced I'd suggest is subjective, however Google cloud has not been running longer than AWS (GCP started in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform), AWS started in 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services), with Azure coming along a bit after those two in 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure)
    - j_s 9y ago
      I'm giving OP the benefit of the doubt, assuming they're including the time Google itself was the only user of their cloud. Still not sure how that timeline compares to the Amazon-only pre-AWS.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      I'm not talking about their public cloud offering but rather their entire operational experience as one of the first companies to truly use next-gen architecture to build their software and data centers. They're just now offering the same tech to the public with GCP products like Compute Engine, Spanner, BigQuery, etc. which shows in the level of sophistication and performance compared to Azure and AWS.
      - raesene9 9y ago
        I'm afraid that all feels very subjective to me, Microsoft were providing online services before Google even existed as a company, so I'm not sure how Google could have more operational experience of online services. You obviously feel that Google's services are more advanced than Microsoft's and Amazon's but from a market share perspective they're clearly running third to those two.
300bps 9y ago
You said, "after experiencing very bad service from Azure". Now that you give details it doesn't seem to fit what you said. Sounds like your issues were pricing (no trial, higher cost, fewer resources per $) and your confusion with Microsoft "jargon". That doesn't equal very bad service to me.
- madiathomas 9y ago
  That's just a quarter of the story. I wasn't happy with their customer service and setup tools too. That's part of the customer experience. As for Google, I never needed to contact them. Everything just worked. Right information was provided every step of the way, which eliminated the need to contact them. The whole setup took me less than an hour and my site was up and running.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  Your use of quotes around jargon qualifies as "scare quotes" clearly indicating your disdain for OP's concern about Microsoft jargon. Microsoft does indeed use jargon, and it's an entirely reasonable principle of purchasing to avoid products the purchasor don't understand. Jargon is a well-known source of misunderstanding.
itaysk 9y ago
You don't have to be eligible for a trial. Everyone can open a trial account with 200$ for 3 months. Additionally Azure App Services has a nice free tier which, if your needs are basic, might even let you run free forever. Disclaimer - I work for Microsoft.
- infogulch 9y ago
  "Free Tier" is "60 CPU minutes / day" [1]. That's barely enough time to create the default project in Visual Studio and build it, let alone do some trial development off of it. [1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-service/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/app-servic...
  - taspeotis 9y ago
    You do the development on your computer, then deploy it to Azure. See this example: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/aspnet-4-ci-cd-azure-automatic https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/as... The CPU minutes/day come from serving your site's HTTP requests and the like.
    - infogulch 9y ago
      So if you put up a site on a random domain and nobody ever touches it, it won't accumulate minutes?
      - stan_rogers 9y ago
        Not without scheduled jobs (crons or the equivalent) or always-live processes, no. If you're leaning on a runtime the server owns and your own code is never invoked, you are (or your account is) not using any CPU time.
        infogulch 9y ago
        Thank you for the explanation. I learned something today. (To be fair the site is not clear.)
blablabla123 9y ago
I had mostly positive experience with Azure. Sure, it's definitely not the cheapest cloud - but on the other hand it compares well with AWS. I credit Azure for focussing on simplicity and having a polite customer service. Regarding Google, I had really bad experience with that at some point. When App Engine was still young, it was mega unreliable, it seemed not even the Google people could predict when it failed. Not only that, at some point, when it wasn't so beta anymore, they changed pricing model and raised the prices unproportionally high. Eventually I painfully migrated my app onto some Virtual Private Server. > First I was told that I am not eligible for trial. I had 150 € for free a month, for half a year or so and afterwards access to a 60k € program. You can try to apply for that. Anyways, I don't want to make any advertisment. My current project is hosted on Scaleway using Docker, so I can do what I want and I don't depend on any Tech Giant's benevolence.