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I actually got excited, thinking that this would be another drop to egress in order to compete with Cloudflare and AWS. AWS just significantly improved pricing

I actually got excited, thinking that this would be another drop to egress in order to compete with Cloudflare and AWS. AWS just significantly improved pricing on egress to compete with Cloudflare, so it seemed like an obvious next step for other clouds to do so. Instead, huge price increases? That's... confusing. I honestly wonder if Google wants to kill off Cloud, given how much money they lose on it every year.

pier25 5y ago
Maybe they want to focus on compute and start pushing users out of storage. I wonder if CF will be able to satisfy the storage demand once they release R2.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  That sounds like a horrible idea, if so. Storage is sticky. You can migrate compute easily, it's databases that keep people in your cloud.
  - pier25 5y ago
    I don't know but for the past 2-3 years Google has been on some crusade to reduce its storage usage/customers. For me it started in 2020 when Google announced my Firebase storage usage would go from maybe $20 per year to something like $800 per year, for a single app. Apparently they had forgotten to charge Firebase users for egress, for years. But then also Gmail stopped adding more storage at some point so I was forced to get a Google One subscription or migrate 15 years of emails to some other service. Etc. I suspect Google has realized it's better to reduce its storage customers and just keep the ones that are ready to pay more, instead of expanding their storage capabilities ad infinitum.
derekdb 5y ago
Having worked on both AWS and GCP, my experience was that AWS had a much better organizational grasp on how to price services. They track the predicted revenue/costs compared to the observed, and expect each team to have roadmap projects to improve that ratio over time (or at least to keep the ratio the same as they drive down prices). When I was there, Google has not such process for tracking their costs. Engineering teams had much less understanding of their costs as well. I never worked on Azure, but I heard similar stories there to my experience at GCP; that there was no institutional process for reducing costs. Building top down process to improve costs to enable price drops is one of Amazon's core strengths. It is core to how they run all their businesses.

pier25 5y ago

Maybe they want to focus on compute and start pushing users out of storage. I wonder if CF will be able to satisfy the storage demand once they release R2.

staticassertion 5y ago
That sounds like a horrible idea, if so. Storage is sticky. You can migrate compute easily, it's databases that keep people in your cloud.
- pier25 5y ago
  I don't know but for the past 2-3 years Google has been on some crusade to reduce its storage usage/customers. For me it started in 2020 when Google announced my Firebase storage usage would go from maybe $20 per year to something like $800 per year, for a single app. Apparently they had forgotten to charge Firebase users for egress, for years. But then also Gmail stopped adding more storage at some point so I was forced to get a Google One subscription or migrate 15 years of emails to some other service. Etc. I suspect Google has realized it's better to reduce its storage customers and just keep the ones that are ready to pay more, instead of expanding their storage capabilities ad infinitum.

derekdb 5y ago

Having worked on both AWS and GCP, my experience was that AWS had a much better organizational grasp on how to price services. They track the predicted revenue/costs compared to the observed, and expect each team to have roadmap projects to improve that ratio over time (or at least to keep the ratio the same as they drive down prices). When I was there, Google has not such process for tracking their costs. Engineering teams had much less understanding of their costs as well. I never worked on Azure, but I heard similar stories there to my experience at GCP; that there was no institutional process for reducing costs. Building top down process to improve costs to enable price drops is one of Amazon's core strengths. It is core to how they run all their businesses.