
Amazon’s New Cloud Prices Show That Google Is Now a Threat - kevbin
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-aws-cloud/
======
smwht
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
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.

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tschellenbach
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))

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josephv
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
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
Good point, but to counter it: Google has a fairly generous AppEngine free
tier.

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zenocon
The problem with AWS reserved instances is their limitations on modification
later [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-
modify...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-
modifying.html#ri-modification-limits) \-- 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
If you have a US bank account you can sell it and buy another that fit your
needs.

~~~
meritt
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
Oh, sorry, I did not know about that! It need some extra planning before
buying it.

~~~
brianwawok
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
You can choose on-demand instances till calibrate your growth. You can also
use load balancing, starting new servers as need.

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emidln
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
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.

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Someone1234
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
I'm pretty sure you went into this article looking for excuses to call it a
paid Google placement. If I were reading your comment through a similar lens,
I would call you an Amazon shill but I don't think either of these posts were
paid for by Amazon or Google.

>> “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!

Uh, they announced a change related to pricing, not a reduction:
[http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-reserved-
instance...](http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-reserved-instances/)

>> 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.

They don't work for Google. They work for a company that works with Google.
That could be one of thousands (?) that are hosted on Compute Engine.

~~~
jusben1369
My biggest issue with the article is no mention of MSFT or Azure. MSFT is a
public company and by all accounts their hosted business appears to be growing
very rapidly. So to not even mention what they're doing and how AMZN would
also be concerned about them as competition makes the article kind of weak.

~~~
silverbax88
Azure is growing like mad, and in most corporations it's listed as 'AWS',
'Azure' and 'everyone else' when discussing the cloud. I've had multiple
meetings where I was the only person who'd even heard that Google had an
option...RackSpace comes up more often than Google. This article is pretty
clearly paid for by Google, in a battle that they are _really_ late in
arriving to.

And given Google's reputation for support (fully warranted in my experience),
it's going to take a lot for corporations to shift away from AWS. It's
actually astounding how much market share Azure has gotten already in spite of
AWS.

~~~
imanaccount247
Your experience is not universal. Every single person I've talked to their
company is deciding between amazon and google. Neither MS nor rackspace even
come up.

~~~
silverbax88
I didn't say my experience was universal.

 _In my experience_ the only times I've heard Google mentioned by companies as
an option are small start ups.

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javaistheworst
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.

------
mmastrac
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?).

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

~~~
valarauca1
Amazon DNS is done via their Route 53 service I believe.

~~~
chimeracoder
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
Indeed that was my question.

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glynjackson
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!

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melling
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
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.

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_dayum_dayum
Great article to read with the CloudToButt chrome extension

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higherpurpose
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
So you run workloads on clusters of Commodore-64's?

