
Google Drops Compute Engine Prices by 10 Percent - jonas21
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/01/google-drops-all-compute-engine-prices-by-10-percent/
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timothya
This is expected. At the original price cut last year, I remember them saying
that they will continue to cut prices as storage and CPU prices continue to
drop. This is just proof of that commitment.

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asb
Yet still, Amazon is the only one with spot pricing. Nothing else comes close
in on-demand cost to the ~$0.14 for an hour on a c3.4xlarge (16 vCPU, 30GiB
RAM, 2x160GB SSD).

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kolev
How about reserved instances? Does GCE offer equivalent of it? To us, reserved
instances is giving us significant saving, well, some of eaten by the 10%
surcharge from the support plan, unfortunately.

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iforapsy
Google Compute Engine has sustained use discounts: the longer you run an
instance, the lower the price per minute that you pay. If you run an instance
for a full month, you end up being charged only 70% of that instance's price.
Essentially, it's like AWS's reserved instances except you don't have to plan
for it ahead of time.

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use)

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kolev
That's actually a good idea and something that removes the need to create a
marketplace for reserved instances you no longer need. Thanks for the info!

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crazy1van
Interesting to see such direct evidence of competition and markets driving
prices lower.

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petervandijck
It's more Moore's law than competition.

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diltonm
It's interesting to note but bandwidth is going to be expensive for me
compared to Linode's no charge for the first 2 TB. With Google this would come
to $240 if I'm calculating it right.

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Someone1234
Linode likely over-sells their bandwidth. They also have a "fair use clause"
in the terms of service that covers network consumption.

Try to use the full 2 TB every single month on the $10/month tier and see how
long before you get a polite email asking you to stop.

Which isn't to say the $240 price tag isn't high, because it is. But they're
likely matching Amazon AWS/Azure which charges a similar amount for outgoing
data (2 TB is $235-255).

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opendais
No, Linode just uses HE.net, Cogent, etc..

[http://he.net/](http://he.net/) "Get BGP+IPv6+IPv4 for $0.45/Mbps!"

Hurricane Electric is pretty cheap. You can hit 2TB a month on 10mbps. That is
only ~$4.50 a month.

There are a couple tricks with it:

1) On a $10 Linode, you aren't going to upload 2TB a month unless you are
acting as a file server. Any kind of application [say, wordpress] isn't going
to do it.

2) The majority of people won't max out their bandwidth usage because they are
running app/database servers on Linode.

They probably take a small loss on the people maxing out their 2TB a month
_but on average_ they aren't. It isn't worth the bad PR to kick a small
percentage of small net loss customers.

[http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1292091](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1292091)

fyi, back in 2013 Cogent was doing sub $1/Mbps as well.

Bandwidth from the cheap providers _is_ cheap. The difference is AWS & Google
are making their margins on what they charge for bandwidth is my guess.

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Igglyboo
I've seen Hurricane Electric before but I didn't understand what they were.

Can you explain how they are different from a traditional ISP like Comcast?

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derefr
They're an ISP that provides service to data centres, not offices/residences.
(And some of those client data centres are run by other ISPs—thus making them
a "transit provider" for those ISPs.)

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ghoul2
does anyone know if Google Compute Engine also had to do unplanned reboots to
patch the recent xen vulnerability, like AWS and Rackspace etc did? I did not
hear anything about it. Does google use Xen or something homegrown?

I my mind, googles' infrastructure being so different from all the others in
its internal functioning is one of their primary differentiators.

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wmf
Google uses KVM instead of Xen. Google also has live migration which makes
certain kinds of maintenance non-disruptive.

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SEJeff
And how long before we see price drops from both EC2 and Azure I wonder?

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taylorbuley
Loving this price war.

EC2 and Azure would be silly to think that's all it is, however. Managed VMs
(w/push to deploy) cloud debugging of mobile apps.. it's not just prices but a
full-on feature assault.

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cmelbye
Yep. Google Cloud Platform has some really great things in the pipeline, as
previewed at I/O and elsewhere. Managed VMs in particular will be great,
especially with support for custom Docker runtimes.

