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Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage
- ChuckMcM 13y agoIts an interesting choice of battlegrounds. I find the infrastructure vs infrastructure wars fascinating by how Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting less and less for it.
- lsc 13y ago>Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting less and less for it. Are the prices dropping faster than moore's law? The costs are dropping approximately with moore's law. Edit: the interesting bit here is just how you lower your prices. In the VPS market, it is traditional to keep charging your customers the same, and to just give them more ram/cpu/disk/network. This is way easier on the bottom line, as your revenue doesn't fall (by much. Most people won't bother changing to a smaller plan, some will.) - in the "cloud" the tradition is a bit more consumer-friendly; the tradition is to just cut the price and hope the consumer will buy more.
- debacle 13y agoMoore's law doesn't say shit about storage.
- lsc 13y ago>Moore's law doesn't say shit about storage. Yes, the cost progression of storage is expressed by Kryder's law, and is actually faster than moore's law. (well, in terms of storage space, not storage speed.) Of course, both are observations and not true laws; things will get interesting if/when the capital and power required per unit compute (or per unit ram or storage) stops dropping. But, my point is that in the past, the costs involved in providing compute infrastructure has fallen dramatically over time, and most people expect this to continue, at least for a while.
- voellm 13y agoCheck out Kryder's Law for Storage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder
- gwern 13y ago> Yes, the cost progression of storage is expressed by Kryder's law, and is actually faster than moore's law. (well, in terms of storage space, not storage speed.) In theory, not necessarily in practice. The Thai floods caused a multi-year pause in Kryder's law we're still recovering from. (I'm not sure how robust Kryder's law is - there's a lot less data and analysis of it than Moore's, since that's the famous one.)
- jedberg 13y ago> Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' This is a myth. Both companies created their infrastructure businesses as separate entities by leveraging their datacenter expertise, but they were not 'remainders'.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoVery interesting, this doesn't match my experience, can you say more about how you reason to the claim that Google created a separate 'infrastructure business entity' ?
- SpikeGronim 13y agoI am an ex-AWS employee. I can verify that AWS was founded as a new line of business using new servers purchased for AWS. The idea that AWS was started using Amazon's spare capacity is widely repeated but false. Amazon is definitely leveraging their expertise and not their physical machines. Source: I've seen the original pitch deck for Amazon S3.
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- cperciva 13y agoAWS may not have used Amazon's spare hardware, but it certainly used Amazon's spare code.
- jsnell 13y agoIsn't it just common sense? The provisioning / capacity planning for a DC has to be done based on peak usage. The usage patterns of the core business and the hosted customers are almost certainly going to be the same -- there's going to be a trough in the night-time, and a peak in the evening. At the time when people want to buy resources, you'll have no spare resources to sell. The only way the business model of selling spare resources could work is if you found customers with a different usage pattern to fill the trough. That's hard. Yes, you can find some customers with time-insensitive batch processing that could be done during the night time. But Google and Amazon already do massive amounts of batch processing, and still won't have a flat utilization level over the day. Or alternatively you could try to flatten out the diurnal variations by making sure there's no geographic affinity between users and the DCs. But that's suboptimal given intercontinental network latencies.
- westonh 13y agoFrom @clstokes With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: - an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $ $35.38/month - an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month
- tnuc 13y agoDigital Ocean is still cheaper. Amazing how competition works.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoDid you seriously just compare Digital Ocean to Amazon and Google?
- gtaylor 13y agoDO is a completely different service. It's Apples to Oranges. You don't go with GC or AWS just for a bare-bones VM, you use them if you already use (or want to use) their greater portfolio of services. If you are just using EC2 or GC for VM hosting, you are doing it wrong and are throwing away a lot of money.
- nolok 13y agoAnd OVH (Kimsufi) is still cheaper than DO (Amazing how ...). However AWS and GCE are not the same service at all, if you're comparing/deciding between the two based on price you're doing it wrong.
- icco 13y agoSure it's cheaper, but DO doesn't provide consistent performance or security. Look at their past security problems with users able to read others disks or performance benchmarks for proof.
- gtaylor 13y agoI don't like having to commit to an entire year, but reserving that m3.medium brings the price down considerably. Hopefully AWS will take a look at Google's automatic cuts and think long and hard about it. We're using AWS, but reservations are a constant point of friction for us.
- jrnkntl 13y ago"Prices are effective April 1, 2014". Unfortunate date for such unbelievable price drops.
- malanj 13y agoI think that's a standard Google thing. They announced Gmail (and the then insane 1GB free storage) on 1 April too.
- kissickas 13y agoUnfortunate? Gmail caught on pretty well...
- shrikant 13y agoExactly 10 years from when Gmail was launched to the public, with its massive 1 GB of storage.
- fixermark 13y agoApril 1st also happens to be the start of Q2. I think it's kind of nifty that Google is unwilling to let a non-vacation holiday only celebrated by a handful of countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day) disrupt its product planning. (It's also shrewd business, if its competitors have "Start of Q2" stuff they'd like to announce that they put off until April 2nd).
- hatred 13y agoOh Boy ! This is quite a steep decrease.. So if I am reading it reading right, this makes S3 ~300 percent more expensive ( 2.6 vs 8.5 ). Sounded more like a April 1 hoax ad to me at first ( too good to be true ). It will be also interesting to see how much this drives down S3 prices.
- simon_ 13y agoIs this partially an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of the Box IPO? If there's going to be a price war anyway, better to start it now and prevent a competitor from amassing a big war chest. I don't understand how much Box is a (potential) competitor in this market, so could be way off base.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoHow does losing > $100e6 per year result in "amassing a big war chest"?
- simon_ 13y agoRaising a $250MM IPO is amassing a war chest. If that becomes harder, they become less competitive.
- debacle 13y agoThey're not competitive right now, from the sounds of it - they're losing a lot of money, very fast.
- amaks 13y agoI don't see how Box could possibly compete on pricing with Google storage, considering the high volume of hardware purchases Google is doing and high volume discounts it's getting.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y agoI think this is a salvo against Amazon. I don't think Google cares about Box very much right now ... Box has a long way to go.
- capkutay 13y agoThey only reduced the prices for compute engine, bigquery, appengine, and cloud storage which are developer oriented cloud services and therefore unrelated to box. If google beefed up google drive, then it could be an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of box. I personally think google has more incentive to do the latter. Millions of people and thousands of companies already use gmail. It'd be pretty easy to convince people to take those files they already send/receive using gmail and push them to google drive. Convincing hardcore AWS users to move to google app engine might be a bit tougher.
- asharpe 13y agoIf and when AWS responds will be quite interesting. GCE launched with lockstep product offering and pricing with AWS. This is the first real movement away from that lockstep position. On one hand it is competitive, on the other hand does it speak to other underlying issues: maybe GCE uptake has not been as expected and needs to do something drastic to compete with AWS?
- dragonwriter 13y agoYou always need to do something drastic to compete with a widely perceived market leader; its the cost of being late to the party.
- asb 13y agoNow if only Google would announce spot pricing for the cloud compute instances much like EC2 has...
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI didn't see the automatic price reduction for AppEngine. Did I just miss that?
- notatallcorrect 13y agoFrom the Google announcement, regarding AppEngine: "We've lowered pricing for instance-hours by 37.5%, dedicated memcache by 50% and Datastore writes by 33%. In addition, many services, including SNI SSL and PageSpeed are now offered to all applications at no extra cost." Pricing is here: https://cloud.google.com/products/app-engine/#pricing https://cloud.google.com/products/app-engine/#pricing
- boundlessdreamz 13y agoFor anyone planning to use google cloud storage as an s3/cloudfront alternative to host public content, pay close attention to request pricing. Retrieving an object through its HTTP url is considered a class B XML request type by Google Cloud Storage. That is 1.3x - 2.5x times more expensive than cloudfront and s3 respectively.
- Kudos 13y agoI don't understand why people expose files they expect to receive significant traffic on public buckets, instead of using a caching reverse proxy from somewhere with cheaper data transfer rates.
- boundlessdreamz 13y agoThat's another point of failure. One of the use cases of cloud storage is serving static assets. "a developer could store and host media and other static assets for a web game in Google Cloud Storage". https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/faq#services https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/faq#services Due to their request pricing, serving static assets is significantly costlier than cloudfront since storage costs tend to be minimal
- CoffeeDregs 13y agoAgreed. Especially when they can get a giant Google-sized, caching reverse proxy (CDN) simply by setting cache headers appropriately. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable-caching-with-gae http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable-cac...
- boundlessdreamz 13y agoHow does that help when your content is in Cloud Storage? Is there an app which serves content out of Cloud Storage and runs on app engine? (I haven't worked with app engine) You can set caching headers on Cloud Storage also. But that doesn't help when 1. you have a large number of requests with cold cache 2. want the flexibility to keep cache time small. Unlike cloudfront there is no purge method in GCS. GCS doesn't guarantee to serve new versions until the old one's cache time has expired.
- agwa 13y agoDoes anyone here have experience using Google's compute engine? In particular, I'm curious to know what the reliability is like, and how performant the storage is.
- jvilk 13y agoNot personally, but this article has stuck in my mind: http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compute-engine-stacks-up-to-amazon-ec2/ http://gigaom.com/2013/03/15/by-the-numbers-how-google-compu... Note that this is a year-old article. It also doesn't address reliability; it focuses on common performance benchmarks. The article links to a GitHub repo with some performance benchmarks you can run yourself.
- enneff 13y ago(I'm a Google employee, so take what I say with a grain of salt.) I just took ownership of the godoc.org documentation service, and am running it on Compute Engine. It's been a great experience so far. I've noticed a few benefits that Compute Engine has over EC2 (the other virtual machine service that I have used). The "gcutil" command line tool is more intuitive, Google's Cloud Console is more responsive than the AWS console, the general performance is better (especially disk and startup time), Compute supports live migration of running VMs (avoid downtime), and finally Compute bills by the minute, not the hour, so you can spin up a bunch of high-spec VMs for a quick test without running up big charges (I got a little burned by this with EC2, in the past).
- suyash 13y agoCan anyone explain the "App Engine Pricing" in layman terms?
- BaconJuice 13y agoCan you deploy and host websites like Microsoft Azure on this?
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoYes
- nickconfer 13y agoMy startup is probably going to use Google storage at this point. We are hosting video that only gets accessed a couple times, but needs to be available for 1 year, so the reduced storage cost is going to be big for us.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoNice to see support for both their free git private repo's and github. There are probably use cases of just using free Google private repo's that might take some business away from github.
- blantonl 13y agoThe Google Storage pricing of $0.026/GB (or $0.020/GB for reduced durability) made my jaw drop. I spend over $6k/month on Amazon S3, and this pricing from Google has me flabbergasted. Our architecture just uses S3 as a pluggable commodity, so a few hours of coding is going to result in a new $4000/month in savings from this announcement. Wow! Edit: misplaced decimal!
- voellm 13y agoThe new price sheets are below. It's 0.026/GB and 0.020/GB. Let your jaw drop more :) GCS pricing - https://developers.google.com/storage/pricing https://developers.google.com/storage/pricing GCE pricing - https://developers.google.com/compute/pricing https://developers.google.com/compute/pricing
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- dragonwriter 13y agoYour prices are off by an order of magnitude (correct prices are $0.026/GB and $0.020/GB), and the latter is "Durable Reduced Availability" [1] not "Reduced Durability". It is availability, not durability, that is reduced. [1] https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/durable-reduced-availability https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/durable-reduced-a...
- darkarmani 13y agoAs long as you don't need to use the external network with that data. The network costs dominate the price if you need to serve up any of that data.
- rsync 13y agoYes, what is that price ? That is, what does 1 GB cost to upload and then store for one month ?
- bananas 13y agoThis should drive Azure pricing down as well which is good for those of us using it!
- bdcravens 13y agoNice - it looks like for the Compute Engine, you essentially get "AWS Reserved Instance"-like pricing without requiring an up-front payment.
- frade33 13y agothis is where, Google should keep focusing than going after and pursuing things which other people can do better. I meant I am a die-hard Apple fanboi, But If they launch a search engine, I am definitely not gonna switch at once. Google is essentially a web-services company a SaaS at its best. Stay focused on these services, and keeping bringing awesome things like this. PS: I'd love if they would drop Google apps pricing too ($5/user). Please Larry/Brin? and let's put a final nail into office coffin.
- eie 13y agoI hope there's comparison chart for cost per computation/memory of cloud services, based on benchmarking.
- bcantrill 13y agoFull disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS. tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE. In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they (apparently) believe their problem in the market is price when it's actually something much more basic: trust. After the abrupt deaths of services like Google Reader and Wave and surprises like the GAE repricing nightmare, customers simply don't trust that Google won't wake up one morning and decide that self-driving cars are actually a lot more interesting than running infrastructure-as-a-service -- and announce the death (or repricing) of GCE. AWS, by contrast, generates no such doubts: one can say what one will about Amazon (and there are certainly many reasons why I believe the future is not AWS's alone), but AWS services do not have a trust issue. (Or, to recast it in the aphorism once said of previous giants like IBM and Microsoft, no one gets fired for deploying on AWS.) It will be interesting to watch the GCE announcement unfold, but previous Google announcements have lacked a critical ingredient: IaaS customers. (Amazingly, journalists don't seem to notice or demand this; smaller companies can't get away with this, but the aura of Google seems to give them a free pass.) If Google wants to really compete in this space, they should pull across a marquis commercial AWS IaaS customer -- at any cost. In doing this, they would probably learn both how profound the trust issue is -- and at the same time learn any remaining technical hurdles that they need to clear to really compete with AWS. There are several high profile AWS customers to pick from, but the obvious customer to start with is Netflix: they care about GCE's putative differentiators of price and performance -- and Amazon is a mortal threat to Netflix as a competitor, which should give some boardroom-level urgency to the discussion. Until Google gets Netflix (or an equivalent) on GCE, I don't think that the price drops will move the needle because they don't address the fundamental issue of trust. (Indeed, one could make the argument that they exacerbate it: if GCE is a money loser for Google, the feared slaying of GCE may actually be more likely, not less.) Finally, if GCE can't get a marquis AWS IaaS customer, how about just a marquis Google customer? Knowing that new Google services are being deployed exclusively on GCE (by executive fiat if needed) may itself go a long way to make Google much more competitive in the space by knowing that GCE at least has the trust of Google, even if no one else...
- geekbri 13y agoMaybe I'm the only one but the lack of ability for me to use GCE for a personal server to become familiar with the service is a huge deal. AWS offers a free tier. This let me play with AWS on my own time gratis. I think GCE needs this... unless they have it and I'm just not aware.
- TheMagicHorsey 13y agoI built stuff on Google App Engine for free, for years.
- geekbri 13y agoI'm not as concerned with the app engine as I am with the compute engine. app engine is more like AWS beanstalk where as compute engine is more like ec2? Maybe I'm wrong here.
- euank 13y agoBoth AWS free and GCE require a credit card before doing anything at all, so that's not a barrier. As for the actual price... GCE's cost of .013c / hour is so tiny that I don't see how you can say it's a "huge deal". You can spin up a GCE for 5 hours a day for a week to experiment and it'll cost you less than 50 cents. It's not quite free, but it basically is. As long as you're just playing around, always-on shouldn't matter so you can spin the server up to play, down when you're done, and thus pay almost nothing.
- mjibson 13y agoI run goread (http://goread.io http://goread.io) on App Engine. Doing the math by hand, I'll get a 25% reduction in costs. This comes from cost reduction of instance hours and datastore writes, and free SSL and datastore small ops. I didn't get the advertised 30% because my largest single cost is datastore storage, which didn't drop. I'm happy with how this all went. I saw another comment asking about app engine pricing. It is priced based on many different usages: instance hours (where instances are automatically added and removed by app engine itself), writes, reads, and storage to their NoSQL datastore (far and away its best feature, which no other provider in the world offers). They charged small amounts for other things, too. I was paying $9/month for SSL and other small one-offs. This new pricing basically eliminated all the other one-offs, making them free. It reduced the number of kinds of things that are billed. Before the datastore had 3 pricing tiers depending on the operation. They made the cheapest free and the other two the same price (reducing the price of the more expensive). Overall things got much simpler and cheaper.
- hkh 13y agoI did the comparison with AWS On-Demand and RIs, and I have to admit, very impressive! Here is the blog: http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/google-slashes-cloud-prices-google-vs-aws-price-comparison http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/google-sl...
- ycaspirant 13y agoDoes Google Drive support symlinks (symbolic links) on OS X like Dropbox does? If so, I will immediately stop using Dropbox and switch to Google Drive, because it's now five times cheaper than Dropbox.
- netcraft 13y agoI didn't see anything that mentioned this affecting google drive - did I miss something?
- ycaspirant 13y agoSorry, it may not be directly related, but Google also slashed prices for Google Drive about ten days ago. http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/google-drive-gets-a-big-price-drop-100gb-now-costs-1-99-a-month/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/google-drive-gets-a-big-pri...
- sazpaz 13y agoI've been wanting to build a quick side project for a couple weeks, so decided to give it a try today and put it up in App Engine instead of heroku. Put simply, App Engine has a higher learning curve. I remember using heroku for the first time a couple years ago, and it was smooth and seamless. Can't say the same about App Engine. Installation isn't a blink, docs are scattered around, and even a simple Flask app isn't straightforward. I understand they might offer more features, better prices, so side-projects are unlikely their target audience, but nevertheless if they want developers love, it should "just work".
- foxylad 13y agoLong-time Appengine developer here. I'm glad that GCE is here now, because a lot of the criticism of GAE came down to people expecting infrastructure (and infrastructure prices) instead of a platform. A massively and seamlessly scalable platform. Which brings me to my point: yes, GAE does have a steeper learning curve, but almost all of that is due to scalability constraints. If you think you will ever need to scale past one server, it's well worth the initial pain. Or put another way, you get to choose between a small development learning curve at the start for a pretty scary sysadmin learning curve when you need to scale your app.
- aiiane 13y agoYep. AppEngine is a platform, not a pure infrastructure offering. GCE is the pure infra offering.
- jgalt212 13y agoHi Larry, Thanks for crapping on my IPO plans. -Aaron
- imthatguyama 13y agoWow. I'd drop AWS like it's hot if I was Dropbox.
- copergi 13y agoHas there been any talk of getting some of the holes in google's cloud offering filled? I would switch to google in a heart beat but I am using route53, SQS, cloudfront, glacier and VPC. That is a lot to be giving up. I also didn't see anything about any sort of health/service checking/alerting support, but I probably just missed it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ballard 13y agoGoogle is about 2 years too late. Many startups switched to AWS in droves and never looked back. The failure is that Google would have to give away GAE, GCE and friends in order for folks to switch because the work to change stack tooling would be very costly.
- sudhirj 13y agoDoes the managed VM feature mean we can finally run any language / framework on it?
- drawkbox 13y agoThis is great news for all cloud platforms and product development, amazon, azure and now google, repeat. Don't you which there were multiple broadband providers like this that could continue commoditizing bandwidth rather than trying to limit supply?