9 ms·

Amazon’s New Cloud Prices Show That Google Is Now a Threat

115 points by kevbin 12y ago

emidln 12y ago
Reading the article, I can't help but think of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html. Reads too much like a Google marketing response to an Amazon announcement.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  I honestly hate this type of response, there must now be one in any thread where any company is discussed in anything that could be construed as a positive light.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Both are going to compete fiercely on prices, so my money goes to whoever doesn't make it easier for CIA and NSA to assassinate people, much like how IBM made it easier for the Nazi to gas people.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  So you run workloads on clusters of Commodore-64's?
- cdelsolar 12y ago
  which Nazi?
javaistheworst 12y ago
In the longer term, I would expect both of rthem to be afraid of the many smaller local players in each country when they start to up their game in terms of hosting. People are starting to become wary of putting all your data in one cloud - whether it is a Google or amazon shaped one.
tschellenbach 12y ago
Well for now AWS still charges a large premium over discounted hosting companies such as Hetzner. Over the past years it doesn't seem like anybody is catching up though. AWS is still by far the most advanced cloud hosting solution. Some great features: - ELB - Cloudformation - RDS - ElastiCache - The BOTO api client - Snapshots (Also see snaptastic btw, https://github.com/tschellenbach/snaptastic https://github.com/tschellenbach/snaptastic)
rikacomet 12y ago
I'm a bit curious, as to whether AWS has a open DNS like the Google DNS?
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Amazon DNS is done via their Route 53 service I believe.
  - budgi3 12y ago
    On a side note, Route 53 doesn't support DNSSEC unfortunately. Might be part of the reason that Amazon.com uses Dyn and UltraDNS instead?
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    OP is asking whether Amazon offers public addresses that will respond to DNS requests for end users, such as 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (OpenDNS). To my knowledge, they do not - Route 53 is made for domain administrators to use as their nameservers instead of their domain registrar's.
    - rikacomet 12y ago
      Indeed that was my question.
zenocon 12y ago
The problem with AWS reserved instances is their limitations on modification later http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html#ri-modification-limits http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify... -- if you grow and need more capacity, you're kinda stuck unless you have Amazon Linux AMI. It would be nice if you could upgrade RDS instance, for example -- but I don't think that is possible.
- edpichler 12y ago
  If you have a US bank account you can sell it and buy another that fit your needs.
  - meritt 12y ago
    Annoyingly, you can't resell RDS reserved instances. Just EC2. We're stuck paying for a m3.large heavy and our newly upgraded m3.xlarge on-demand.
    - edpichler 12y ago
      Oh, sorry, I did not know about that! It need some extra planning before buying it.
      - brianwawok 12y ago
        Cept it can be hard to plan for smaller companies. If your startup is a fail, you don't need anything. If it is bootstrapping, you might need a medium or large for a DB. If you are hitting it huge, you need all you can get. The pricing system with reserved instances is fine for a stable business with 10% yearly growth, not good for a startup. As a user I would totally just prefer a discount for using more, but I can also see why amazon doesn't want to have a bunch of hardware that is 1 year old and no one wants to use it (but couldn't they just adjust the price to make it valuable still? )
        edpichler 12y ago
smwht 12y ago
If this is Amazon trying to compete with Google's pricing scheme, they missed. Google's sustained use discounts just happen, and give you a discount on whatever time you used. With Amazon's new pricing for reserved instances, any reserved instance you buy (upfront fee or not) commits you to pay an hourly fee regardless of whether the instance is running now. They removed the light/medium reserved instance options where you paid a discounted usage rate, and now just have 3 ways of purchasing a heavy reserved instance. This is going to raise prices for us on AWS because we won't be able to use reservations for the instances we autoscale so the current medium reservations we have are going to be on-demand now.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Yes exactly. The author of that article (and their strange quotes) doesn't understand what Amazon just changed or doesn't understand Google's sustained usage discounts. If anything Amazon just moved in the opposite direction of what Google is doing, not to copy it as the article implies.
melling 12y ago
What's it cost to run a website with a MySQL database on app engine? Starting with a free App Engine instance and a data store always had a propriety lockin.
- nly 12y ago
  Just go get a VPS or small dedi. Cloud services aren't really ideal for dedicated site hosting, they're really for people growing their own services. The main killer for anyone wanting to host infrastructure is that bandwidth is something like 20x dearer.
josephv 12y ago
The price-wars between amazon, ms, and google are constant. They always tweak pricing to match the tweaks the other two make. Given this is no change to the norm, i don't see this as a referendum on google's position in the market. If revenue is changing, that may be an indication. But price changing by itself has little meaning at this point.
- softdev12 12y ago
  i'm absolutely in the aws camp. in my opinion (having tried both), aws is far superior to google. but the biggest difference in pricing, which no one has mentioned, is that AWS offers a free 1 year trial for developers, while google only offers 60 days. That's a big difference for indie developers prototyping a MVP.
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    Good point, but to counter it: Google has a fairly generous AppEngine free tier.
Someone1234 12y ago
This article read like a paid Google App engine advert. They point to the announcement about RI pricing simplification as proof that "Google has finally arrived." No justification at all, and it isn't obvious how one relates to the other (in particular as the RI changes weren't a direct price reduction). > “Google is making a dent and AWS is starting to feel the pain from a pricing perspective,” But they didn't announce a price reduction this week! > says one ex-Amazon employee who asked not to be identified because his current employer works with the cloud company. Because they work for Google. Because this is a paid Google advert. > But this spring, Google introduced a product called Sustained Use Discounts, and this made things much simpler. I'd argue that the sustained use model makes it harder to calculate your ultimate bill, not easier. It has the same issues Amazon's now retired Light and Medium usage tiers had, how do you track if you're at 25%, 50%, 75%, etc utilisation? Keeping track of that is annoying and harder than you'd think in a real production environment with dynamic instances responding to load. Amazon's new pricing model actually just scrapped something akin to sustained use billing because it was unpopular. You wouldn't know that reading the article. > Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to what’s obviously a reaction to Google Maybe it was a reaction to customer feedback? I see no evidence that Google caused this change, and the fact that Amazon moved AWAY from Google's model is very telling. Light and medium utilisation RI are effectively Google's model, they just do it dynamically. Amazon hasn't added that or indicated that they will. Do these people even understand Amazon's RI pricing structure, or Google's sustained usage, or anything at all? > Byrne says that until Amazon changed its pricing, his company was toying with the idea of switching to Google, a move that would have saved Copper.io hundreds of thousands of dollars—until Monday, at least. That literally makes zero sense. Heavy utilisation RIs have been available since forever, and are extremely price competitive with every other major competitor in the cloud infrastructure space (namely Google, and Azure). If it would have saved you "hundreds of thousands" legitimately then you are mismanaging your account heavily. > “When I saw the Amazon announcement, I said: ‘Great. We don’t have to consider moving.'” Because, why? I don't understand what it is they think Amazon changed. Because that statement makes no sense. If you were mismanaging your account before, you'd still be mismanaging it now. Amazon moving payments will save you a little money (due to the interest on that money sitting in your accounts) but nothing like what is described here. > When Google first got into the cloud business back in 2008, the company bet that people would want to run cloud applications on its infrastructure in highly specialized ways and not mess around with operating systems and virtual machines. That proved to be a bad bet. That is an under-statement. Google thought that people wanted to be locked into their cloud APIs and initially at least have to completely re-write all of their software for Google's app engine. It was supremely arrogant on Google's part. App engine now supports more standardised APIs and databases, but it remains more expensive to do than it should be. Azure's "web-sites" product is what Google App Engine should have been when it first got released, and even today I find "web-sites" more compelling as a bottled solution than Google App Engine (although VMs trump both). > And now the company is fast catching up. Is that a fact? Because both Google and Azure topped $1B in 2013, and from what I've been seeing Azure, not Google, has been growing to compete with Amazon in 2014. Microsoft has been leveraging many pre-existing channels (education, MSDN, et al) to give out Azure trials and it seems to be working for them. > Byrne says that while Google doesn’t offer the wide range of products, it beats out Amazon in many respects. Google’s compute speed and network “is faster than Amazon’s,” he says. “They’re probably the only people where you can say that their infrastructure is really world-leading.” If you weren't certain this was a paid product advert, now you should be. Compute speed is relative to cost, and dollar per dollar that statement seems untrue. Network speed on Amazon and Google is great, Google might be better but I wouldn't migrate to them because neither Amazon or Azure have let me down in that department.
mmastrac 12y ago
So Amazon has "simplified" billing by removing a number of complicated options, but simultaneously adding a bunch of new options. I much prefer Google's approach where the discounts "just happen". Planning for reserved instances, even before AWS added the crazy light/medium/heavy workloads, was always stressful (do I take 3 years? do I take 1?).
_dayum_dayum 12y ago
Great article to read with the CloudToButt chrome extension
glynjackson 12y ago
My decision on which provider to use is based on trust. How can any developer trust that Google won't pull the rug out from under them. This can happen with AWS too but Google has a history of doing this. No matter how cheap I'll stick with AWS and the safer bet for my business, thanks!

115 points by kevbin 12y ago

Reading the article, I can't help but think of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html. Reads too much like a Google marketing response to an Amazon announcement.

serve_yay 12y ago
I honestly hate this type of response, there must now be one in any thread where any company is discussed in anything that could be construed as a positive light.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Both are going to compete fiercely on prices, so my money goes to whoever doesn't make it easier for CIA and NSA to assassinate people, much like how IBM made it easier for the Nazi to gas people.

Spooky23 12y ago
So you run workloads on clusters of Commodore-64's?
cdelsolar 12y ago
which Nazi?

javaistheworst 12y ago

In the longer term, I would expect both of rthem to be afraid of the many smaller local players in each country when they start to up their game in terms of hosting. People are starting to become wary of putting all your data in one cloud - whether it is a Google or amazon shaped one.

tschellenbach 12y ago

Well for now AWS still charges a large premium over discounted hosting companies such as Hetzner. Over the past years it doesn't seem like anybody is catching up though. AWS is still by far the most advanced cloud hosting solution. Some great features: - ELB - Cloudformation - RDS - ElastiCache - The BOTO api client - Snapshots (Also see snaptastic btw, https://github.com/tschellenbach/snaptastic https://github.com/tschellenbach/snaptastic)

rikacomet 12y ago

I'm a bit curious, as to whether AWS has a open DNS like the Google DNS?

valarauca1 12y ago
Amazon DNS is done via their Route 53 service I believe.
- budgi3 12y ago
  On a side note, Route 53 doesn't support DNSSEC unfortunately. Might be part of the reason that Amazon.com uses Dyn and UltraDNS instead?
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  OP is asking whether Amazon offers public addresses that will respond to DNS requests for end users, such as 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (OpenDNS). To my knowledge, they do not - Route 53 is made for domain administrators to use as their nameservers instead of their domain registrar's.
  - rikacomet 12y ago
    Indeed that was my question.

zenocon 12y ago

The problem with AWS reserved instances is their limitations on modification later http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modifying.html#ri-modification-limits http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-modify... -- if you grow and need more capacity, you're kinda stuck unless you have Amazon Linux AMI. It would be nice if you could upgrade RDS instance, for example -- but I don't think that is possible.

edpichler 12y ago
If you have a US bank account you can sell it and buy another that fit your needs.
- meritt 12y ago
  Annoyingly, you can't resell RDS reserved instances. Just EC2. We're stuck paying for a m3.large heavy and our newly upgraded m3.xlarge on-demand.
  - edpichler 12y ago
    Oh, sorry, I did not know about that! It need some extra planning before buying it.
    - brianwawok 12y ago
      Cept it can be hard to plan for smaller companies. If your startup is a fail, you don't need anything. If it is bootstrapping, you might need a medium or large for a DB. If you are hitting it huge, you need all you can get. The pricing system with reserved instances is fine for a stable business with 10% yearly growth, not good for a startup. As a user I would totally just prefer a discount for using more, but I can also see why amazon doesn't want to have a bunch of hardware that is 1 year old and no one wants to use it (but couldn't they just adjust the price to make it valuable still? )
      - edpichler 12y ago

smwht 12y ago

If this is Amazon trying to compete with Google's pricing scheme, they missed. Google's sustained use discounts just happen, and give you a discount on whatever time you used. With Amazon's new pricing for reserved instances, any reserved instance you buy (upfront fee or not) commits you to pay an hourly fee regardless of whether the instance is running now. They removed the light/medium reserved instance options where you paid a discounted usage rate, and now just have 3 ways of purchasing a heavy reserved instance. This is going to raise prices for us on AWS because we won't be able to use reservations for the instances we autoscale so the current medium reservations we have are going to be on-demand now.

Someone1234 12y ago
Yes exactly. The author of that article (and their strange quotes) doesn't understand what Amazon just changed or doesn't understand Google's sustained usage discounts. If anything Amazon just moved in the opposite direction of what Google is doing, not to copy it as the article implies.

melling 12y ago

What's it cost to run a website with a MySQL database on app engine? Starting with a free App Engine instance and a data store always had a propriety lockin.

nly 12y ago
Just go get a VPS or small dedi. Cloud services aren't really ideal for dedicated site hosting, they're really for people growing their own services. The main killer for anyone wanting to host infrastructure is that bandwidth is something like 20x dearer.

josephv 12y ago

The price-wars between amazon, ms, and google are constant. They always tweak pricing to match the tweaks the other two make. Given this is no change to the norm, i don't see this as a referendum on google's position in the market. If revenue is changing, that may be an indication. But price changing by itself has little meaning at this point.

softdev12 12y ago
i'm absolutely in the aws camp. in my opinion (having tried both), aws is far superior to google. but the biggest difference in pricing, which no one has mentioned, is that AWS offers a free 1 year trial for developers, while google only offers 60 days. That's a big difference for indie developers prototyping a MVP.
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  Good point, but to counter it: Google has a fairly generous AppEngine free tier.

Someone1234 12y ago

This article read like a paid Google App engine advert. They point to the announcement about RI pricing simplification as proof that "Google has finally arrived." No justification at all, and it isn't obvious how one relates to the other (in particular as the RI changes weren't a direct price reduction). > “Google is making a dent and AWS is starting to feel the pain from a pricing perspective,” But they didn't announce a price reduction this week! > says one ex-Amazon employee who asked not to be identified because his current employer works with the cloud company. Because they work for Google. Because this is a paid Google advert. > But this spring, Google introduced a product called Sustained Use Discounts, and this made things much simpler. I'd argue that the sustained use model makes it harder to calculate your ultimate bill, not easier. It has the same issues Amazon's now retired Light and Medium usage tiers had, how do you track if you're at 25%, 50%, 75%, etc utilisation? Keeping track of that is annoying and harder than you'd think in a real production environment with dynamic instances responding to load. Amazon's new pricing model actually just scrapped something akin to sustained use billing because it was unpopular. You wouldn't know that reading the article. > Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to what’s obviously a reaction to Google Maybe it was a reaction to customer feedback? I see no evidence that Google caused this change, and the fact that Amazon moved AWAY from Google's model is very telling. Light and medium utilisation RI are effectively Google's model, they just do it dynamically. Amazon hasn't added that or indicated that they will. Do these people even understand Amazon's RI pricing structure, or Google's sustained usage, or anything at all? > Byrne says that until Amazon changed its pricing, his company was toying with the idea of switching to Google, a move that would have saved Copper.io hundreds of thousands of dollars—until Monday, at least. That literally makes zero sense. Heavy utilisation RIs have been available since forever, and are extremely price competitive with every other major competitor in the cloud infrastructure space (namely Google, and Azure). If it would have saved you "hundreds of thousands" legitimately then you are mismanaging your account heavily. > “When I saw the Amazon announcement, I said: ‘Great. We don’t have to consider moving.'” Because, why? I don't understand what it is they think Amazon changed. Because that statement makes no sense. If you were mismanaging your account before, you'd still be mismanaging it now. Amazon moving payments will save you a little money (due to the interest on that money sitting in your accounts) but nothing like what is described here. > When Google first got into the cloud business back in 2008, the company bet that people would want to run cloud applications on its infrastructure in highly specialized ways and not mess around with operating systems and virtual machines. That proved to be a bad bet. That is an under-statement. Google thought that people wanted to be locked into their cloud APIs and initially at least have to completely re-write all of their software for Google's app engine. It was supremely arrogant on Google's part. App engine now supports more standardised APIs and databases, but it remains more expensive to do than it should be. Azure's "web-sites" product is what Google App Engine should have been when it first got released, and even today I find "web-sites" more compelling as a bottled solution than Google App Engine (although VMs trump both). > And now the company is fast catching up. Is that a fact? Because both Google and Azure topped $1B in 2013, and from what I've been seeing Azure, not Google, has been growing to compete with Amazon in 2014. Microsoft has been leveraging many pre-existing channels (education, MSDN, et al) to give out Azure trials and it seems to be working for them. > Byrne says that while Google doesn’t offer the wide range of products, it beats out Amazon in many respects. Google’s compute speed and network “is faster than Amazon’s,” he says. “They’re probably the only people where you can say that their infrastructure is really world-leading.” If you weren't certain this was a paid product advert, now you should be. Compute speed is relative to cost, and dollar per dollar that statement seems untrue. Network speed on Amazon and Google is great, Google might be better but I wouldn't migrate to them because neither Amazon or Azure have let me down in that department.

mmastrac 12y ago

So Amazon has "simplified" billing by removing a number of complicated options, but simultaneously adding a bunch of new options. I much prefer Google's approach where the discounts "just happen". Planning for reserved instances, even before AWS added the crazy light/medium/heavy workloads, was always stressful (do I take 3 years? do I take 1?).

_dayum_dayum 12y ago

Great article to read with the CloudToButt chrome extension

glynjackson 12y ago

My decision on which provider to use is based on trust. How can any developer trust that Google won't pull the rug out from under them. This can happen with AWS too but Google has a history of doing this. No matter how cheap I'll stick with AWS and the safer bet for my business, thanks!