
Google Storage Now Available To Developers - ASUmusicMAN
http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/getting-started.html
======
jcampbell1
5 years, 1 month and 28 days after S3 is publicly launched. It is just a
reminder that the threat by incumbents to startups is hardly worth worrying
about.

~~~
jggube
Amazon was hardly a startup 5 years ago. And we're talking about a service and
a space that's difficult to replicate and get into. S3 had resources most
startups won't have to get that 5-year lead.

~~~
gburt
Amazon wasn't the "startup" in his example. His point was the 5 year wait time
for a "giant"* to get a product out the door...

* who, even worse for their case, already had the infrastructure, resources, engineers, etc. to get it done.

~~~
jggube
The point still stands; this isn't an example of why startups shouldn't fear
giants/incumbents. Just because Google couldn't/chose not to get a product
like Amazon S3 out the door to compete with Amazon, doesn't mean incumbents
can't replicate and dominate a bootstrapped start-up's low-cost, innovative
web app or mobile app.

The statement should say that startups with innovative, hard-to-reproduce
products have nothing to fear; you'll either produce a product that they'll
choose not to compete with/can't compete with (Twitter, Facebook) or get
bought by them.

How many startups get killed because they can't compete with the big guys,
though? Here's an example: <http://family.go.com/assets/bubbleshare/>

~~~
true_religion
I'm trying to innovate in the same field that Bubbleshare was in. I only
learned about them recently via reading old techcrunch posts. What killed
them? Did they go through a prolonged period of difficulty?

~~~
peteforde
Founder greed and bad timing.

~~~
true_religion
Ah can you elaborate please? To me it looks like Bubbleshare was the best
thing ever---till it suddenly shut down.

I find glowing reports about it from TechCrunch, then.... nothing, it just
dies.

So what happened?

~~~
peteforde
Disclaimer: I was not involved, but several people that were are friends.
These friends did not inform my answer here, which is just my opinion based on
many sources.

BubbleShare was a Toronto tech darling started by the always brilliant Albert
Lai. They were WAY ahead of their time.

All I'm comfortable sharing here is that they received buyout Offer A, which
Albert rejected in favour of doubling down for a better deal. Unfortunately
fortune did not smile and BubbleShare ultimately accepted Offer B, which was
significantly smaller than Offer A.

The site was sold to Kaboose, which is a Canadian family content company. As
usually happens when startups are acquired, the key talent left (Albert
started Kontagent) and innovation on the site halted.

I'm not an analyst, but these things usually distill down to "too early / too
early / too late". I'm not sure that people were ever lining up to pay them
money to use the service, and that might give you pause before going down the
same road. Many products are cool but aren't solving a problem causing paying
customers real pain.

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peteforde
The pricing is far less interesting to me than the differences between GS and
S3. In some significant ways, GS appears to be a much more technically
sophisticated product. And there are some arguably less used functionality
like BitTorrent which are removed from the picture.

The ACL scheme is significantly more flexible on GS. In fact, one of the two
major problems I have with S3 is a non-issue on GS:

1\. All files on S3 are not world-readable when they are first uploaded. You
cannot change the default permission for a file uploaded to a bucket. On GS
you can set the default ACL on a bucket to world-readable.

2\. For me, the most incredible thing GS could do right now is add a callback
API. I want it to notify my application when my bucket is updated, webhooks
style.

With both 1 & 2 in place, you can build storage driven applications in the
cloud that don't require constant polling. Man, that would sure be something.

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zbailey
A compelling reason for our use case to switch from S3 is their support for
lots of buckets coupled with CNAME support:

<http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html>

Due to Amazon's limitation of 100 buckets per account and the coupling between
bucket name and CNAME, hosting files for our clients and supporting custom
CNAMEs has not been possible for us. If we were to move to Google Storage, it
would be.

~~~
joeyh
Another good reason for certain use cases is its support for resumable
uploads:

[http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/developer-
guide.htm...](http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/developer-
guide.html#resumable)

Afaik S3 can't do that.

~~~
spicyj
No, S3 (essentially) can as well:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/amazon-s3-multipart-
uploa...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/11/amazon-s3-multipart-upload.html)

~~~
snewman
Multipart uploads only sort-of address this. For one thing, the minimum "part"
size is 5MB, so you can only resume at 5MB boundaries (or whatever part size
you use). You also have to manage more state yourself.

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jbyers
It's really nice to see that boto (python AWS library) supports S3 and Google
Storage side-by-side. Being able to pick and choose providers behind the same
API is how the cloud should be.

~~~
spullara
It probably wouldn't have worked out that way if Google didnt clone S3's API.

~~~
weavejester
To be fair to Google, most of the S3 REST API is pretty obvious. Even if you'd
never seen S3, you'd likely come up with an API that was 80% similar.

~~~
samuel1604
not the openstack storage api..

~~~
weavejester
What do you mean? I haven't looked into Openstack in great deal, but my
impression of the storage API was that it was very similar to S3, aside from
how it handles authentication.

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gburt
Can someone explain why I would choose this over S3, when S3's starting rate
is 0.14 / GB and goes down from there?

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akshat
At Google's scale I would have guessed that they would have had no difficulty
in matching and even beating Amazon's pricing. This is surprising. Why so?

~~~
bdonlan
Perhaps they're looking to grow the service slowly initially? If they
announced pricing significantly lower than amazon's right at launch they'd get
a flood of new traffic that could overload however much resources they
provisioned for launch. By starting out with a slightly higher pricing model,
they can test out the service with production customers, and slowly reduce
prices to attract more business when they're confident they can handle the
load.

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ASUmusicMAN
No more invites required to use, but at first glance it appears to be more
expensive than S3.

~~~
stumm
Cost of storing data:

S3: $0.140 per GB (at the most expensive rate) vs. Google: $0.17 per GB (at
their only listed rate)

The rest seems to be the same though.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Fascinating, so a 1TB sata drive is $70 [1] these days and that equates to
about 7 cents per GB, if you made three copies to insure your backups had a
'good' copy that would be 21 cents/gB so its cheaper than using your own hard
drives.

The whole 'we've decided to kill that product, you've got 30 days to get your
stuff back' and the 'we lost a switch or something and we'll be back online
day after tomorrow' kinds of things are still concerns of course.

I've always been impressed at the prices Amazon could charge for S3 and keep
it a going concern. I'd love to see the breakout on that revenue but I'm sure
that isn't going to happen any time soon.

[1]
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014%20103530090%201035313496&name=1TB&nm_mc=KNC-
GoogleAdwords&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-_-HardDrives-_-NA-_-NA)

~~~
mrshoe
Your comparison assumes that the average lifetime of a hard drive is 1 month.
I sure hope that's not the case!

Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not
come from ec2.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Oh it gets much worse if you assume that you replace your hard drives every 3
years (their warranty period) which would add a $1.94/month depreciation cost.

You could add into the cost / GB of bandwidth to access the files, not as easy
to factor into a TCO model in the personal use case.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The way I was accounting for it you have to replace the drive in 3 years, you
have 3 drives. So you've got a cost of $210 that recurs every three years
(purchasing the drives). If you distribute that cost across the 36 months that
is a $5.83/month fixed cost (doesn't vary by storage usage because you have to
replace the entire drive). Unlike Google which can amortize depreciation on a
per-GB basis because they are spreading out the replacements amongst many
thousands of drives, as an individual you're on the hook for your own drives
regardless.

~~~
AlisdairO
right, but the point being made was that the storage fee Google/S3 charge is
not a one-time thing - it recurs monthly.

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riobard
Download data: $0.15 to Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa $0.30 to
Asia-Pacific

So if a bunch of people from Japan decide to download from your app, you are
screwed.

~~~
SkyMarshal
You're screwed if a bunch of people download from your app from anywhere, for
sufficiently large values of 'bunch'.

~~~
netnichols
Not if they paid you a sufficiently large sum of money for the privilege of
downloading your app. :-)

~~~
SkyMarshal
Truth. My comment was quite negatively off-base, considering lots of downloads
is what everybody strives for. I almost deleted it. Funny it got so many
upvotes, should have been downvoted to oblivion.

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lzm
A bucket in Latin America would be a killer feature. Doesn't Google already
have a data center in São Paulo?

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MatthewB
I am a little confused about Google Storage Manager. Is this supposed to be a
consumer facing product? AKA dropbox killer?

~~~
ceejayoz
No, it's an Amazon S3 competitor.

~~~
MatthewB
Then what is the point of the frontend app?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
S3 has a web based access application as well. It is nice if you need to just
manipulate a few files, check that a backup actually did make it to S3, etc.

Dropbox isn't really a storage company (they're built on top of S3) their
secret sauce is in the syncing.

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tybris
Only 5 years, 1 month, and 28 days after Amazon made S3 available to
developers.

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bane
meh, in 3 years they'll probably just announce a new pricing structure where
every reasonable use of this ends up with 1000%-2000% price hike (GAE user
here, grumble grumble)

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neworbit
Damn, I was hoping this was going to spur Amazon to cut prices.

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reedlaw
Anyone know how to copy an S3 bucket to Google Storage?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
The quickest/cheapest thing would probably be to startup an ec2 instance,
install the GSUtils [1] and then pull from S3 and push to GS.

1 - <http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/gsutil.html#install>

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epynonymous
does anyone know if s3 is profitable?

~~~
elithrar
Only the same people who know how many Kindles they've sold. Amazon is pretty
tight-lipped about their financials, at least at a granular level.

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zackattack
i thought this was just an auxiliary service to other google services.. not
really a competitor to s3?

