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Google Storage Now Available To Developers
- ASUmusicMAN 15y agoNo more invites required to use, but at first glance it appears to be more expensive than S3.
- stumm 15y agoCost of storing data: S3: $0.140 per GB (at the most expensive rate) vs. Google: $0.17 per GB (at their only listed rate) The rest seems to be the same though.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tejaswiy 15y agoHmm, that additional zero at the end for S3's price threw me off for a a few secs :)
- ChuckMcM 15y agoFascinating, so a 1TB sata drive is $70 [1] these days and that equates to about 7 cents per GB, if you made three copies to insure your backups had a 'good' copy that would be 21 cents/gB so its cheaper than using your own hard drives. The whole 'we've decided to kill that product, you've got 30 days to get your stuff back' and the 'we lost a switch or something and we'll be back online day after tomorrow' kinds of things are still concerns of course. I've always been impressed at the prices Amazon could charge for S3 and keep it a going concern. I'd love to see the breakout on that revenue but I'm sure that isn't going to happen any time soon. [1] http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014%20103530090%201035313496&name=1TB&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-HardDrives-_-NA-_-NA http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...
- mrshoe 15y agoYour comparison assumes that the average lifetime of a hard drive is 1 month. I sure hope that's not the case! Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not come from ec2.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoOh it gets much worse if you assume that you replace your hard drives every 3 years (their warranty period) which would add a $1.94/month depreciation cost. You could add into the cost / GB of bandwidth to access the files, not as easy to factor into a TCO model in the personal use case.
- doty 15y agoIt gets better, not worse. At steady state you just account for the depreciation cost, though, right? So that's $1.94/TB/MO/Drive, or $0.0019/GB/MO/Drive or $0.01/GB/MO for 3-way redundancy.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThe way I was accounting for it you have to replace the drive in 3 years, you have 3 drives. So you've got a cost of $210 that recurs every three years (purchasing the drives). If you distribute that cost across the 36 months that is a $5.83/month fixed cost (doesn't vary by storage usage because you have to replace the entire drive). Unlike Google which can amortize depreciation on a per-GB basis because they are spreading out the replacements amongst many thousands of drives, as an individual you're on the hook for your own drives regardless.
- AlisdairO 15y agoright, but the point being made was that the storage fee Google/S3 charge is not a one-time thing - it recurs monthly.
- brucehart 15y agoGoogle's pricing is pretty close to Amazon's for low-end users, but high-end users will still find S3 to be much cheaper. I was hoping Google would be the competitor that would pressure Amazon to reduce the cost of S3. S3's prices have been pretty constant over the last few years even though I would assume that Amazon's expenses have decreased due to lower storage and hardware costs.
- jcampbell1 15y ago5 years, 1 month and 28 days after S3 is publicly launched. It is just a reminder that the threat by incumbents to startups is hardly worth worrying about.
- jggube 15y agoAmazon was hardly a startup 5 years ago. And we're talking about a service and a space that's difficult to replicate and get into. S3 had resources most startups won't have to get that 5-year lead.
- smackay 15y agoThe push by Amazon into cloud services was very different from the business they were pursuing up to then. OK, so they were essentially just wringing some money out of all the infrastructure they already had in place but it was quite a radical change for an incumbent.
- gburt 15y agoAmazon wasn't the "startup" in his example. His point was the 5 year wait time for a "giant"* to get a product out the door... * who, even worse for their case, already had the infrastructure, resources, engineers, etc. to get it done.
- jggube 15y agoThe point still stands; this isn't an example of why startups shouldn't fear giants/incumbents. Just because Google couldn't/chose not to get a product like Amazon S3 out the door to compete with Amazon, doesn't mean incumbents can't replicate and dominate a bootstrapped start-up's low-cost, innovative web app or mobile app. The statement should say that startups with innovative, hard-to-reproduce products have nothing to fear; you'll either produce a product that they'll choose not to compete with/can't compete with (Twitter, Facebook) or get bought by them. How many startups get killed because they can't compete with the big guys, though? Here's an example: http://family.go.com/assets/bubbleshare/ http://family.go.com/assets/bubbleshare/
- jbyers 15y agoIt's really nice to see that boto (python AWS library) supports S3 and Google Storage side-by-side. Being able to pick and choose providers behind the same API is how the cloud should be.
- spullara 15y agoIt probably wouldn't have worked out that way if Google didnt clone S3's API.
- weavejester 15y agoTo be fair to Google, most of the S3 REST API is pretty obvious. Even if you'd never seen S3, you'd likely come up with an API that was 80% similar.
- samuel1604 15y agonot the openstack storage api..
- weavejester 15y agoWhat do you mean? I haven't looked into Openstack in great deal, but my impression of the storage API was that it was very similar to S3, aside from how it handles authentication.
- joeyh 15y agoCloned but with some required new fields like "x-goog-api-version", so existing S3 libraries won't quite work without modification, it seems.
- zbailey 15y agoA compelling reason for our use case to switch from S3 is their support for lots of buckets coupled with CNAME support: http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html Due to Amazon's limitation of 100 buckets per account and the coupling between bucket name and CNAME, hosting files for our clients and supporting custom CNAMEs has not been possible for us. If we were to move to Google Storage, it would be.
- ceejayoz 15y agoI just wish either one would support SSL for CNAMEd buckets.
- dsl 15y agoThat is a limitation of SSL. If you don't like it, ask your browser vendor to support section 3.1 of RFC 3546.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- joeyh 15y agoAnother good reason for certain use cases is its support for resumable uploads: http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/developer-guide.html#resumable http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/developer-guide.htm... Afaik S3 can't do that.
- lzm 15y agoA bucket in Latin America would be a killer feature. Doesn't Google already have a data center in São Paulo?
- akshat 15y agoAt Google's scale I would have guessed that they would have had no difficulty in matching and even beating Amazon's pricing. This is surprising. Why so?
- orijing 15y agoEven if they could, why should they, if they don't have to?
- bdonlan 15y agoPerhaps they're looking to grow the service slowly initially? If they announced pricing significantly lower than amazon's right at launch they'd get a flood of new traffic that could overload however much resources they provisioned for launch. By starting out with a slightly higher pricing model, they can test out the service with production customers, and slowly reduce prices to attract more business when they're confident they can handle the load.
- MatthewB 15y agoI am a little confused about Google Storage Manager. Is this supposed to be a consumer facing product? AKA dropbox killer?
- ceejayoz 15y agoNo, it's an Amazon S3 competitor.
- MatthewB 15y agoThen what is the point of the frontend app?
- michaelbuckbee 15y agoS3 has a web based access application as well. It is nice if you need to just manipulate a few files, check that a backup actually did make it to S3, etc. Dropbox isn't really a storage company (they're built on top of S3) their secret sauce is in the syncing.
- reedlaw 15y agoAnyone know how to copy an S3 bucket to Google Storage?
- michaelbuckbee 15y agoThe quickest/cheapest thing would probably be to startup an ec2 instance, install the GSUtils [1] and then pull from S3 and push to GS. 1 - http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/gsutil.html#install http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/gsutil.html#install
- haploid 15y agoSo it's a less redundant, less mature, less documented, more expensive, 5 year late, and invite-only version of S3 that doesn't have one-click CDN enabling? And it's built by a company perpetually embroiled in privacy and data retention scandals? Sign me the fuck up.
- riobard 15y agoDownload data: $0.15 to Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa $0.30 to Asia-Pacific So if a bunch of people from Japan decide to download from your app, you are screwed.
- SkyMarshal 15y agoYou're screwed if a bunch of people download from your app from anywhere, for sufficiently large values of 'bunch'.
- netnichols 15y agoNot if they paid you a sufficiently large sum of money for the privilege of downloading your app. :-)
- SkyMarshal 15y agoTruth. My comment was quite negatively off-base, considering lots of downloads is what everybody strives for. I almost deleted it. Funny it got so many upvotes, should have been downvoted to oblivion.
- tybris 15y agoOnly 5 years, 1 month, and 28 days after Amazon made S3 available to developers.
- gburt 15y agoCan someone explain why I would choose this over S3, when S3's starting rate is 0.14 / GB and goes down from there?
- peteforde 15y agoThe pricing is far less interesting to me than the differences between GS and S3. In some significant ways, GS appears to be a much more technically sophisticated product. And there are some arguably less used functionality like BitTorrent which are removed from the picture. The ACL scheme is significantly more flexible on GS. In fact, one of the two major problems I have with S3 is a non-issue on GS: 1. All files on S3 are not world-readable when they are first uploaded. You cannot change the default permission for a file uploaded to a bucket. On GS you can set the default ACL on a bucket to world-readable. 2. For me, the most incredible thing GS could do right now is add a callback API. I want it to notify my application when my bucket is updated, webhooks style. With both 1 & 2 in place, you can build storage driven applications in the cloud that don't require constant polling. Man, that would sure be something.
- epynonymous 15y agodoes anyone know if s3 is profitable?
- elithrar 15y agoOnly the same people who know how many Kindles they've sold. Amazon is pretty tight-lipped about their financials, at least at a granular level.
- bane 15y agomeh, in 3 years they'll probably just announce a new pricing structure where every reasonable use of this ends up with 1000%-2000% price hike (GAE user here, grumble grumble)
- zackattack 15y agoi thought this was just an auxiliary service to other google services.. not really a competitor to s3?
- neworbit 15y agoDamn, I was hoping this was going to spur Amazon to cut prices.