8 ms·

Upcoming price increases for Cloud Storage

100 points by gotmedium 4y ago

lee101 4y ago
Best to Checkout alternatives e.g. https://text-generator.io https://text-generator.io does text to speech over 8x cheaper which is crazy, cloud storage costs going up a lot but compute costs have always been high esp for managed services/ml so shop around and on a code level, ideally use a wrapper around your Cloud usage to make switching easier
cypress66 4y ago
I know people hate oracle, and its features and polish is much lower than AWS. But you should check out oracle Cloud pricing, it's really good. And its free tier is absurdly good.
- gazby 4y ago
  When Oracle decides it's time to start making money instead of gathering market share with a loss leader, it's gonna hurt a lot more than the adjustment from Google here.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  I hope you read those ULAs very carefully - you may owe your firstborn to lary if it’s that cheap
depole12 4y ago
I actually think this is the sign of GCP growing up, and trying to become a profitable business. Long gone are the days where pricing was set by a PM throwing shit against the wall, with little attention paid to cost structure or margins (who remembers free GKE clusters?)
cl0ckt0wer 4y ago
Latin America egress is going from one cent to fourteen cents? Is that a typo?
- htrp 4y ago
  a PM at google is trying to get promoted.
  - simfree 4y ago
    More likely the cable owners or the reseller Google is going through for most of their LATAM traffic boosted their rates up, resulting in crazy transit costs. Transit costs should really be per ASN (eg: Sending 1TB to an ISP we peer with is free, sending that to an ISP we pay is $5), not these extremely broad abstractions of per continent pricing.
jqpabc123 4y ago
This is why you should manage your own data storage if possible.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Preferably far far away from the cloud servers that perform workloads on that storage, so you can enjoy high latency plus ingress and egress costs to access it? None of these costs are valid in isolation. The DIY savings is probably not a savings for most use cases. // Disclosure: 10+ years back, our company undersold S3 at 1/10th the cost and much higher performance, but only for multi hundred megabyte up to multi gigabyte files. S3 does the generalized object store shape of work extremely well, likely better than anyone, and is worth it -- even before adding IAM, local querying, and all the other S3 goodies when native AWS. While underselling them for storage we operated, we also used them for our own storage needs.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Latency to in-region storage is not minimal like using SSDs on the same server. Often data in the same region can be at different physical data centers.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      True, but SSDs don't provide instant access to petabytes. Also, it is not well known that for a long time you could colocate in the same facility or in the same biz park and enjoy LAN latencies to that campus' AZ of your CSP.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Well there you have it - don’t use cloud severs either ;) Also ingress is free and if that’s your requirement a lot of time you can colo in the same locale/building as cloud region and plug directly into their network
acchow 4y ago
Aren't storage drives and networking costs getting cheaper? Are rising prices like this a result of the market being an oligopoly?
- acdha 4y ago
  My guess is that it's more along the lines of GCP being expected to be profitable. They're a distant #3, possibly #4 in the market so it seems unlikely that they're trying to exploit market position when that'll just give customers another reason to switch to AWS.
  - ohashi 4y ago
    Who/what order do you have? I have to imagine AWS is first. Azure? Who is maybe third above them? Oracle? Alicloud?
    - makestuff 4y ago
      AWS 34%, Azure 21%, GCP 11%, Alibaba 5% https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...
    - acdha 4y ago
      https://canalys.com/newsroom/global-cloud-services-Q1-2022 https://canalys.com/newsroom/global-cloud-services-Q1-2022 has it has AWS at 33%, Azure at 21%, and GCP at 8%. Oracle and AliCloud are the two I'd expect to try for that #3 spot, especially since that could be a single acquisition if e.g. IBM is interested in selling. The potential confound here is how you measure it, of course: Microsoft gets a big jump from all of the people using Office 365, Google has G-Suite, etc. but I don't think there's any world in which Google has enough leverage to increase pricing if they don't have to.
      - simfree 4y ago
        G-Suite is not a Microsoft 365 competitor. Only businesses with limited needs seem to use G-Suite, and theu supplement it with Microsoft software a fair bit to make using G-Suite palatable. I say this as a wholly anti-Microsoft person. Even Nextcloud is doing better at delivering features to small and medium businesses than G-Suite.
rektide 4y ago
Hot on the heels of CloudFlare raising prices 25% (and offering an annual plan to drop prices back down). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795808 https://blog.cloudflare.com/adjusting-pricing-introducing-annual-plans-and-accelerating-innovation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/adjusting-pricing-introducing-an...
- dhdgrygev 4y ago
  However, using Cloudflare R2 to distribute content is still thousands of times cheaper than GCP.
- tebbers 4y ago
  Cloudflare is ludicrously good value for money, even on the $25 a month plan. Even on the free plan you get a huge amount for $0.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Note that Cloudflare is cracking down on heavy caching, its an Article 10 violation. If they see you using terabytes of bandwidth a week (especially if your end users are in expensive regions like New Zealand or Australia) they will suspend your site: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwidth-over-usage/42969 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi...
belltaco 4y ago
Network egress doubling from 0.01 to 0.02? Seems a bit much.
- FredPret 4y ago
  Egress is why I own a back end server for my projects rather than rent one from AWS/GCP. Unfortunately you still need at least a small instance to host a website.
  - tomr75 4y ago
    hetzner/OVH?
    - Volundr 4y ago
      Not OP, but at a previous company we coloed our servers we owned in a local data center. It's surprisingly affordable.
      - simfree 4y ago
        Colo and even office/home hosting can be surprisingly affordable for non-critical workloads. $0.10/kWh power, Gigabit Fiber for $65 to $90 a month and free heating (computers are just as efficient as electric space heaters) can make for very low operating costs.
      - FredPret 4y ago
        I never knew to Google that before, thank you!
- zxspectrum1982 4y ago
  It's worse in Asia (x8), Oceania (x8) and Latin America (x14). Wow. Asia $0.01/GB => $0.08/GB Oceania $0.01/GB => $0.08/GB Latin America $0.01/GB => $0.14/GB
foota 4y ago
I think this is old news. See the linked faq https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure/services-updates https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure/services-updates
qwertyuiop_ 4y ago
This is expected. First they offer multi year free usage contracts. Bring customers onboard and then raise prices because they were a loss leader.
jmugan 4y ago
People say you should manage your own data. That's great until you have to demonstrate compliance with security regulations. If I'm a big cloud provider, the more regulations and requirements there are the better it is for my business.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  If you run petabyte size storage clusters, engineering for compliance should still be small fraction of dollars saved compared to what you’d be paying in cloud (even with old pricing).
- ilyt 4y ago
  If you mom and pops shop sure, but if you have like... enough people to cover for 24/7, you have enough people for that. Managing compliance within the app itself is much more work to that.
metalspot 4y ago
raising prices by 50% on a steadily depreciating asset
andirk 4y ago
Curious if issues of deeply centralized (think: monopoly) storage services give airt time for the several decentralized storage options such as Sia [0], File [1], and tried and true torrenting. [0] https://sia.tech/sia.pdf https://sia.tech/sia.pdf [1] https://github.com/filecoin-project/filecoin-docs/blob/main/content/en/about-filecoin/what-is-filecoin/index.md https://github.com/filecoin-project/filecoin-docs/blob/main/...
nisa 4y ago
If you don't need all the cloud stuff - Hetzner has also storage server i.e. SX134 with 10x16TB for 250€/month. For 50€/month you can order a 10Gbit upgrade and after 20TB free traffic it's 1€/TB egress. It's an ordner of magnitude cheaper. Of course that's because you are responsible for checking the disks, setting everything up and keeping it up to date - but at least for the problems we have where I work there is absolutely no need to use Google or any other cloud and Hetzner is more than good enough.
- acdha 4y ago
  You need to multiply those numbers by 3 to reflect that the cloud storage service has geographic redundancy, and you need a software stack which provides the same replication and bitrot protection, etc.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Most use cases do not need triple redundancy with geographic redundancy. If you really do need this, just order this and use Wasabi as well ($6/TB, pricing below) and you will get all that along with having cross-provider redundancy. https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
    - acdha 4y ago
      I’m not saying that this is the only factor but most places do need redundancy and the cost of providing it is non-trivial. There’s still plenty of margin but you need a fair amount of storage to balance out the staff time you’d need to run that service on bare servers.
      - smartbit 4y ago
        > you need a fair amount of storage to balance out the staff time you’d need to run that service on bare servers. Do you have any proof of your statement? Eg. same type of org, one using Hetzner the other using one of the big three? Are the sizes of the DevOps team that different? And don’t forget to calculate the overhead on the big three from having to architect for the cost of egress. I know there is the sales fairy of being able to scale out quickly, does that really matter in both cases? And if really required, can’t it be done for the couple of hours/days on one of the big three? Not to forget that scale-out isn’t available in some regions, as we’ve seen discussed here recently.
alphabettsy 4y ago
Costs go down and prices go up?
lossolo 4y ago
Cloud pricing is insane, we are handling around 3 billion dynamic requests a month and serving 100+ TBs of static content a month for a few hundred euros, all rented/dedicated servers, with zero problems. So we would pay like 10-100x times more in the cloud for the same hardware and traffic.
- ilyt 4y ago
  We had bosses come few times to price the cloud migration and every single time it ends up being few times as expensive. "What about extra work to keep the physical hardware running" - for 7 racks we have maybe a dying drive every month or two. Installing a rack of servers takes about a day with all preparations. "What about setting up software" - we have automation and paid it off long time ago. Genuine concern for company that starts up but not really for one that needs at least few racks worth of servers.
  - simfree 4y ago
    Cloud pricing is often not competitive with an optimized on-prem platform that has noteworthy resource usage. It is wild to think some people see it as a cure all, when it has real risks of destroying a budget.
    - tomjen3 4y ago
      The resource usage is not too bad, but the fees all the cloud charges for bandwidth are insane. Charging bandwidth in gigabytes should get you laughed out of the room. I have an unmetered connection at home; if you cannot provide one in your own data center, why are you even in business? That said, the cloud is great if you need to train AI models, convert old data, do end-of-year processing, or do something else that requires a massive amount of resources for a short time. Unless you are Howard Huges, why would you live in a hotel? And if you wouldn't live in a hotel yourself, why would you pay to have your data live there?
      - ilyt 4y ago
        The price per GB aside from obvious (earns more money) have other reason; it's just so much easier to meter when you have hundreds different services. You just increase the counter. You don't have to worry when service sent data. How much BW the service actually costs is hard to calculate because you are essentially buying peak capacity, so only thing that matters is that hour in a day where there is peak traffic and which services use that up. Sure there is a bit on power used flipping actual bits in the network devices but that's tiny fraction of that.

100 points by gotmedium 4y ago

Best to Checkout alternatives e.g. https://text-generator.io https://text-generator.io does text to speech over 8x cheaper which is crazy, cloud storage costs going up a lot but compute costs have always been high esp for managed services/ml so shop around and on a code level, ideally use a wrapper around your Cloud usage to make switching easier

cypress66 4y ago

I know people hate oracle, and its features and polish is much lower than AWS. But you should check out oracle Cloud pricing, it's really good. And its free tier is absurdly good.

gazby 4y ago
When Oracle decides it's time to start making money instead of gathering market share with a loss leader, it's gonna hurt a lot more than the adjustment from Google here.
dilyevsky 4y ago
I hope you read those ULAs very carefully - you may owe your firstborn to lary if it’s that cheap

depole12 4y ago

I actually think this is the sign of GCP growing up, and trying to become a profitable business. Long gone are the days where pricing was set by a PM throwing shit against the wall, with little attention paid to cost structure or margins (who remembers free GKE clusters?)

cl0ckt0wer 4y ago

Latin America egress is going from one cent to fourteen cents? Is that a typo?

htrp 4y ago
a PM at google is trying to get promoted.
- simfree 4y ago
  More likely the cable owners or the reseller Google is going through for most of their LATAM traffic boosted their rates up, resulting in crazy transit costs. Transit costs should really be per ASN (eg: Sending 1TB to an ISP we peer with is free, sending that to an ISP we pay is $5), not these extremely broad abstractions of per continent pricing.

jqpabc123 4y ago

This is why you should manage your own data storage if possible.

Terretta 4y ago
Preferably far far away from the cloud servers that perform workloads on that storage, so you can enjoy high latency plus ingress and egress costs to access it? None of these costs are valid in isolation. The DIY savings is probably not a savings for most use cases. // Disclosure: 10+ years back, our company undersold S3 at 1/10th the cost and much higher performance, but only for multi hundred megabyte up to multi gigabyte files. S3 does the generalized object store shape of work extremely well, likely better than anyone, and is worth it -- even before adding IAM, local querying, and all the other S3 goodies when native AWS. While underselling them for storage we operated, we also used them for our own storage needs.
- simfree 4y ago
  Latency to in-region storage is not minimal like using SSDs on the same server. Often data in the same region can be at different physical data centers.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    True, but SSDs don't provide instant access to petabytes. Also, it is not well known that for a long time you could colocate in the same facility or in the same biz park and enjoy LAN latencies to that campus' AZ of your CSP.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Well there you have it - don’t use cloud severs either ;) Also ingress is free and if that’s your requirement a lot of time you can colo in the same locale/building as cloud region and plug directly into their network

acchow 4y ago

Aren't storage drives and networking costs getting cheaper? Are rising prices like this a result of the market being an oligopoly?

acdha 4y ago
My guess is that it's more along the lines of GCP being expected to be profitable. They're a distant #3, possibly #4 in the market so it seems unlikely that they're trying to exploit market position when that'll just give customers another reason to switch to AWS.
- ohashi 4y ago
  Who/what order do you have? I have to imagine AWS is first. Azure? Who is maybe third above them? Oracle? Alicloud?
  - makestuff 4y ago
    AWS 34%, Azure 21%, GCP 11%, Alibaba 5% https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-of-leading-cloud-infrastructure-service-providers/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...
  - acdha 4y ago
    https://canalys.com/newsroom/global-cloud-services-Q1-2022 https://canalys.com/newsroom/global-cloud-services-Q1-2022 has it has AWS at 33%, Azure at 21%, and GCP at 8%. Oracle and AliCloud are the two I'd expect to try for that #3 spot, especially since that could be a single acquisition if e.g. IBM is interested in selling. The potential confound here is how you measure it, of course: Microsoft gets a big jump from all of the people using Office 365, Google has G-Suite, etc. but I don't think there's any world in which Google has enough leverage to increase pricing if they don't have to.
    - simfree 4y ago
      G-Suite is not a Microsoft 365 competitor. Only businesses with limited needs seem to use G-Suite, and theu supplement it with Microsoft software a fair bit to make using G-Suite palatable. I say this as a wholly anti-Microsoft person. Even Nextcloud is doing better at delivering features to small and medium businesses than G-Suite.

rektide 4y ago

Hot on the heels of CloudFlare raising prices 25% (and offering an annual plan to drop prices back down). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795808 https://blog.cloudflare.com/adjusting-pricing-introducing-annual-plans-and-accelerating-innovation/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/adjusting-pricing-introducing-an...

dhdgrygev 4y ago
However, using Cloudflare R2 to distribute content is still thousands of times cheaper than GCP.
tebbers 4y ago
Cloudflare is ludicrously good value for money, even on the $25 a month plan. Even on the free plan you get a huge amount for $0.
- simfree 4y ago
  Note that Cloudflare is cracking down on heavy caching, its an Article 10 violation. If they see you using terabytes of bandwidth a week (especially if your end users are in expensive regions like New Zealand or Australia) they will suspend your site: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwidth-over-usage/42969 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/the-way-you-handle-bandwi...

belltaco 4y ago

Network egress doubling from 0.01 to 0.02? Seems a bit much.

FredPret 4y ago
Egress is why I own a back end server for my projects rather than rent one from AWS/GCP. Unfortunately you still need at least a small instance to host a website.
- tomr75 4y ago
  hetzner/OVH?
  - Volundr 4y ago
    Not OP, but at a previous company we coloed our servers we owned in a local data center. It's surprisingly affordable.
    - simfree 4y ago
      Colo and even office/home hosting can be surprisingly affordable for non-critical workloads. $0.10/kWh power, Gigabit Fiber for $65 to $90 a month and free heating (computers are just as efficient as electric space heaters) can make for very low operating costs.
    - FredPret 4y ago
      I never knew to Google that before, thank you!
zxspectrum1982 4y ago
It's worse in Asia (x8), Oceania (x8) and Latin America (x14). Wow. Asia $0.01/GB => $0.08/GB Oceania $0.01/GB => $0.08/GB Latin America $0.01/GB => $0.14/GB

foota 4y ago

I think this is old news. See the linked faq https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure/services-updates https://cloud.google.com/infrastructure/services-updates

qwertyuiop_ 4y ago

This is expected. First they offer multi year free usage contracts. Bring customers onboard and then raise prices because they were a loss leader.

jmugan 4y ago

People say you should manage your own data. That's great until you have to demonstrate compliance with security regulations. If I'm a big cloud provider, the more regulations and requirements there are the better it is for my business.

dilyevsky 4y ago
If you run petabyte size storage clusters, engineering for compliance should still be small fraction of dollars saved compared to what you’d be paying in cloud (even with old pricing).
ilyt 4y ago
If you mom and pops shop sure, but if you have like... enough people to cover for 24/7, you have enough people for that. Managing compliance within the app itself is much more work to that.

metalspot 4y ago

raising prices by 50% on a steadily depreciating asset

andirk 4y ago

Curious if issues of deeply centralized (think: monopoly) storage services give airt time for the several decentralized storage options such as Sia [0], File [1], and tried and true torrenting. [0] https://sia.tech/sia.pdf https://sia.tech/sia.pdf [1] https://github.com/filecoin-project/filecoin-docs/blob/main/content/en/about-filecoin/what-is-filecoin/index.md https://github.com/filecoin-project/filecoin-docs/blob/main/...

nisa 4y ago

If you don't need all the cloud stuff - Hetzner has also storage server i.e. SX134 with 10x16TB for 250€/month. For 50€/month you can order a 10Gbit upgrade and after 20TB free traffic it's 1€/TB egress. It's an ordner of magnitude cheaper. Of course that's because you are responsible for checking the disks, setting everything up and keeping it up to date - but at least for the problems we have where I work there is absolutely no need to use Google or any other cloud and Hetzner is more than good enough.

acdha 4y ago
You need to multiply those numbers by 3 to reflect that the cloud storage service has geographic redundancy, and you need a software stack which provides the same replication and bitrot protection, etc.
- simfree 4y ago
  Most use cases do not need triple redundancy with geographic redundancy. If you really do need this, just order this and use Wasabi as well ($6/TB, pricing below) and you will get all that along with having cross-provider redundancy. https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info
  - acdha 4y ago
    I’m not saying that this is the only factor but most places do need redundancy and the cost of providing it is non-trivial. There’s still plenty of margin but you need a fair amount of storage to balance out the staff time you’d need to run that service on bare servers.
    - smartbit 4y ago
      > you need a fair amount of storage to balance out the staff time you’d need to run that service on bare servers. Do you have any proof of your statement? Eg. same type of org, one using Hetzner the other using one of the big three? Are the sizes of the DevOps team that different? And don’t forget to calculate the overhead on the big three from having to architect for the cost of egress. I know there is the sales fairy of being able to scale out quickly, does that really matter in both cases? And if really required, can’t it be done for the couple of hours/days on one of the big three? Not to forget that scale-out isn’t available in some regions, as we’ve seen discussed here recently.

alphabettsy 4y ago

Costs go down and prices go up?

lossolo 4y ago

Cloud pricing is insane, we are handling around 3 billion dynamic requests a month and serving 100+ TBs of static content a month for a few hundred euros, all rented/dedicated servers, with zero problems. So we would pay like 10-100x times more in the cloud for the same hardware and traffic.

ilyt 4y ago
We had bosses come few times to price the cloud migration and every single time it ends up being few times as expensive. "What about extra work to keep the physical hardware running" - for 7 racks we have maybe a dying drive every month or two. Installing a rack of servers takes about a day with all preparations. "What about setting up software" - we have automation and paid it off long time ago. Genuine concern for company that starts up but not really for one that needs at least few racks worth of servers.
- simfree 4y ago
  Cloud pricing is often not competitive with an optimized on-prem platform that has noteworthy resource usage. It is wild to think some people see it as a cure all, when it has real risks of destroying a budget.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    The resource usage is not too bad, but the fees all the cloud charges for bandwidth are insane. Charging bandwidth in gigabytes should get you laughed out of the room. I have an unmetered connection at home; if you cannot provide one in your own data center, why are you even in business? That said, the cloud is great if you need to train AI models, convert old data, do end-of-year processing, or do something else that requires a massive amount of resources for a short time. Unless you are Howard Huges, why would you live in a hotel? And if you wouldn't live in a hotel yourself, why would you pay to have your data live there?
    - ilyt 4y ago
      The price per GB aside from obvious (earns more money) have other reason; it's just so much easier to meter when you have hundreds different services. You just increase the counter. You don't have to worry when service sent data. How much BW the service actually costs is hard to calculate because you are essentially buying peak capacity, so only thing that matters is that hour in a day where there is peak traffic and which services use that up. Sure there is a bit on power used flipping actual bits in the network devices but that's tiny fraction of that.