10 ms·
Extending per-second billing in Google Cloud
- nealmueller 9y agoAWS wasn't first with per second billing. As the GCP blog states, GCP Persistent Disks had it since 2013. (I work for Google)
- deanCommie 9y agoMaybe instead of constantly having to disclose working for Google, all you Google Compute engineers could just try not bragging about it so much every time there is a discussion thread on it, and just let the community figure it out for themselves what cloud provider they prefer.
- theDoug 9y agoWe disclose our employer to be clear that while we are super excited about these releases, we're also trying to be as open and clear that our opinions come with a natural bias that others seem to rarely disclose. There's no coordination or conniving to this, people just like rad stuff. Also, I /wish/ I was a Compute Engineer.
- Veratyr 9y agoI don't really have a problem with it. So long as they're on topic and relevant (i.e. not trying to sell GSuite in an AWS thread), it's fine. Certainly better than not hearing from them at all.
- BartSaM 9y agoThis is not bragging, it is an important piece of the information that informs you if someone commenting can be biased or self-promoting in a news, that their company is featured in.
- kylecazar 9y agoSeems like parent merely stated a pretty uncontroversial fact. And they are part of this community as much as anyone else is -- I at least appreciate the stakeholder participation and honest disclosure.
- musage 9y ago> Seems like parent merely stated a pretty uncontroversial fact. Exactly. Here's one scenario: > "I think this is a really fun movie, and I thought the ending was very smart (disclosure, I did some FX on the sequences with the Shnorp, and I have an affair with the producer's sister)" here's another: > "You are both right, actually: the running time for the US release is 94 minutes, whereas the Swedish contains the Shnorp nipple scenes which increase the total length to 96 minutes. (full disclosure, I was a roadie on the set)" Guess what I find obnoxious and see many discussions filled with? If it's in a dictionary, thanks for the fact, no I don't care who you work for or how "excited" you are and how "awesome" your team is and whatnot. It's so incredibly needy and tacky and seems the norm now; where the person calling it out actually gets piled on, while BS like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342721 is fine. It is what it is.
- musage 9y agoCircle the wagons and just clap it out.
- m00x 9y agoI actually enjoy the extra information they give, and the clear excitement about what they work on. I've seen how the sausage is made at AWS and the people I've met that worked on it were extremely detached. This very much shows in the product. GCP is behind on features, but I find the features work very well and are super nice to work with.
- azurezyq 9y ago(disclosure: I also work for Google Cloud.) I think put the disclosure upfront just make things clearer that we are not dragging. You already know where our butts sit and you can judge our words from pure-technical perspective. Otherwise, people may say Google hire a bunch of ghost accounts just for promotion purpose. I personally prefer the former.
- vgt 9y agoI personally prefer to weave the fact that I work at Google right in the middle of the point that I am trying to make.
- RKearney 9y agoAWS is miles ahead in IPv6 adoption though. Why do GCP employees always post in HN articles about how much "better" GCP is than AWS or how GCP "did it first"? Our company literally can't use GCP, full stop, because Google is completely ignoring IPv6 support. I heard load balancers are now in beta, which just terminates IPv6 and connects to the back end with IPv4. When am I going to be able to make an outbound IPv6 connection from GCP? Specifically the Compute Engine VMs.
- boulos 9y agoThe IPv6 termination is now GA, but I agree with your sentiment (we're behind on IPv6). That said, it's a very binary thing: you either have IPv6 throughout the virtual networking stack or you don't. We're not ignoring it, particularly since Google cares so deeply about IPv6 worldwide, but we are behind. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Edit: I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a fair criticism.
- samstave 9y agoCan you ELI5 what we ppl who are deploying to any cloud should have as First Principles WRT IPv6 and why we should be architecting around it? Disclosure: I like turtles.
- blasdel 9y agoApple's App Store review has a hard requirement that everything works on a pure IPv6 network
- soccerdave 9y agoThe only thing that you have to do to satisfy this requirement is don’t hardcode IPv4 addresses in your app. If you are using domain names for everything then it doesn’t matter if those are only resolvable to v4 addresses.
- snuxoll 9y agoCorrect, using DNS on a IPv6 only network is enough since the point is to use DNS64/NAT64 to handle the transition until services are IPv6-native.
- MightySCollins 9y agoThis feels very much like copying the person who copied you. I am not sure that I like the lack of notice though (unless I missed something)
- dantiberian 9y agoWhat is the issue with the lack of notice? While the net effect of this is pretty small for most use cases, it's only going to be cheaper, never more expensive?
- jgritty 9y ago(disclosure: he works for Amazon) j/k
- manigandham 9y ago...why does it matter who copied who? The most common complaint about any provider is that they don't have something that a competitor does. Also what lack of notice are you referring to? This blog post is the notice.
- boulos 9y agoI assume he means that we enabled it immediately instead of charging more for a while...
- jpatokal 9y agoGenuine question: As far as I'm aware, there are no cases where moving to per-second billing would increase your bills, so what would be the point of providing notice?
- notyourwork 9y agoHe has Google stock and is concerned about cloud profits impacting next quarterly.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fhoffa 9y agoSpecially interesting given other similar recent announcements, Google's per-second billing also covers: | "premium operating system images including Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server" (disclosure: I work for GCP)
- DannyBee 9y agoI'm completely unsure why that is worth special mention? (disclosure: I don't consider what I do to be work)
- rch 9y agoThat's the only helpful use of the disclosure line I've seen in a few years .. thanks.
- unshift 9y agomany employers request that employees provide a disclosure when discussing their products on social media
- TheIronYuppie 9y agoWe don't, but generally do it out of an abundance of caution. (disclosure: I work with the above two)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- morgo 9y agoI think it's a pretty good policy. Fake reviews/astroturfing comments can hurt a brand quite severely. The riskiest situation of course is talking about a competitor's product (which we kind of are here). It doesn't have to sound like a legal disclaimer, but its nice to identify your relationship to the product may have (even subconscious) bias.
- nodesocket 9y agoYour move AWS. Google improves to per-second with a 1 minute minimum.
- manigandham 9y agoThey already did it: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances-and-ebs-volumes/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-...
- boulos 9y agoThey announced last week :). Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- nodesocket 9y agoYes I know about AWS per second, I was being somewhat playful. Huge GCP fan. Keep it up boulos and the rest of the GCP team.
- plandis 9y agoMan the Google shills are not even trying to be subtle anymore just knowingly trying to mislead people.
- zimbatm 9y agotranslation: we are pleased to announce that we're extending per-second billing across our platform. we were first to do it. it's actually useless (but we were first!). let me show you why: ... but we are forced to do it because of <unnamed competitor> bunch of ads of why we are cool and doing "real innovation", compared to that stupid other competitor that forced us to enable per second billing. we are still better than competitor so.. signup! (disclosure: I don't work for Google)
- andrioni 9y agoOne thing of note is now both Google Cloud and AWS charge at least one minute per instance (AWS used to charge a full hour, and GCP ten minutes).
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoWhere'd you see 10 minutes? The very first sentence of the post says "one minute minimum."
- sagadotworld 9y agoHe said it used to be 10 minutes. (disclosure: The cake is a lie)
- dantiberian 9y agoI think dropping the minimum charge to one minute will turn out to have a bigger effect than the per second billing. I build app images with Packer, and these generally take a few minutes, but I'm charged for the full ten. It's nice to know only pay for exactly what I'm using. It also opens up opportunities for spinning up a fresh VM for every CI build. GCP startup latency is pretty good, so this might be doable for some CI systems.
- andoma 9y agoEven though a GCE instance can be made to boot pretty quicky it's a bit sad that it takes around 40-50 seconds before any network connectivity can be established. I asked a question about it here a while ago https://serverfault.com/questions/845298/no-network-connectivity-until-one-minute-after-boot https://serverfault.com/questions/845298/no-network-connecti... Checked again just now, approx. 40 seconds between pressing START in the console UI and until I can ping 8.8.8.8, using serial console on Debian Stretch. If anyone have a clue how to improve this I'd be most happy to hear about it. I'm using this for CI builds.
- boulos 9y agoWe're working on it. It's a major initiative for us, because as you see we get the damn thing "booting" in a handful of seconds and then reachability to/from the internet is the long pole. Fwiw, we at least got to/from *.googleapis.com way down, so if you need to say fetch something from GCS, that should be a bit faster. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- mythz 9y agoThe primary driver that's going to get me to switch to Google Cloud from AWS is their simplified pricing. AWS's reserved pricing is fraught with inefficiency and prone to manual errors where it looks like they've intentionally made it hard to determine what's covered by reserved pricing. Everything else in AWS looks to be automated except for their pricing which I'm assuming they're avoiding adopting an automated sustained usage model so their prices appear cheaper then they are by taking advantage of manual inefficiencies from trying to map reserved pricing to services used.
- ChrisAntaki 9y agoIf you have time, please elaborate on what you'd like to see.
- mythz 9y agoA "no-touch" effort-free pricing model similar to GCP's sustained usage where the hourly rate automatically drops based on continuous usage for each month. Reserved pricing is an unnecessary waste of time/effort turning us into manual book keepers where we have to try carefully match our reserved pricing plan to each service we use. It's time consuming and frustrating when you purchase the wrong reserved pricing SKU or are not notified when you have instances not covered by a reserved pricing so you end up paying the highest rate despite it running 24/7. It's frustrating enough that I've started moving servers that don't require access to other AWS services to hetzner.
- endymi0n 9y ago...and EC2 reservations are still a Godsend compared to some other offerings out there, I mean at least they're interchangeable by node class: We've got Redshift reserved instances and due to growth, we need to upgrade our node type soon (even in the same class!!). But because you can't reuse, recycle or sell the reservations between node types, we have to let all of our small node reservations expire before, complicated by the fact they were already bought in several layers. There's no reserved instances market for Redshift (all of this looks like not very well thought out from the beginning) and it took us hours to finally come up with a semi good plan to do this (which will still cost thousands of dollars in lost expired instances). All of this was completely unproductive time in regards to our product, so the antithesis of what AWS stands for. Managing financial matters on AWS is such a royal PITA, I'm so glad we switched 90% of our stack to Google. They even give you a big fat yellow warning sign directly in the console: "Want so SAVE money? One click here and we'll resize your instance online instantly." Leave it on for a month and get nice discounts automatically. It's heaven. (Yes, BigQuery. I'd LOVE to, however there's a lot of very good reasons we're still on Redshift...)
- plandis 9y agoIs it okay to have the comment section of a HN post be just one giant ad? The majority of the posts seem to be Google employees. There is basically no discussion. Unless we are counting misleading companions between GCP products and their competitors as discussion. :-/
- boulos 9y agoDisappointingly, there haven't been any material questions or comments (perhaps because it's straightforward). I think it would actually be inappropriate for us to have attempted to lead the conversation too much, so I prefer to respond to questions. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- deanclatworthy 9y agoI’m delighted their employees are active in the community. I wish more companies that are discussed here would engage with their audience.
- nimos 9y agoReally enjoying this price and feature war between Amazon and Google. Now who wants to drop their egress pricing to be reasonable?
- boulos 9y agoWorking on it! We released our new "Standard" networking tier last month and switched to src x dst pricing that saved some people ~10-20% depending on the src x dst pair. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
- Veratyr 9y agoAre you ever going to be competitive with transit? I can buy gigabit from a number of providers for $400/month, which saturated the entire time is 330TB or $0.0013/GB. I can also see 10Gbps for $999, which is $0.00030/GB. There are so many things I'd love to use Compute Engine for but storage is obscenely expensive for my needs and egress pricing makes it impossible to get data out after I send it in.
- ucombinator 9y agoAlthough the difference isn't as big as you think: when you buy from an ISP, you typically pay for a router (and space/power to host it), a $250/mo cross-connect fee, two ports if you want reliability, and you have a >2x unit price increase just from running a port at <50% average utilization. But yeah, it's still cheaper if you have >1Gbps of traffic.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fiokoden 9y agoMinimum 60 seconds = per minute billing. Not per second billing. Nice try google.