
AWS Responds with Price Cuts: Google vs AWS Pricing Round 2 - singold
http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/aws-responds-price-cuts-google-vs-aws-pricing-round-2
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evan_
I'm surprised this is being cast as Amazon _responding_ to Google's price
cuts- the AWS conference was scheduled months in advance so if anything Google
heard about the price cuts and announced their own just ahead of the
conference as a (successful; apparently) attempt to take the wind out of
Amazon's announcement.

Interesting that they dropped by the same amount; either it was a lucky guess,
Amazon adjusted their adjustment at the last minute, or AWS has a mole.

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pdq
I'll go with Occam's Razor: Amazon just responded to Google's newly announced
pricing. To believe they guessed correctly or they have a "mole" is pretty far
fetched.

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awj
So your version of Occam's Razor is "Amazon hurriedly cut prices on a
profitable service without much time for evaluation" over "someone at Amazon
told Google about upcoming price changes while Google had time to decide they
could jump in early on it".

I'm not saying that either interpretation is _wrong_ , but I think your use of
Occam's Razor here says more about your assumptions than the nature of things.

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mcintyre1994
Could it be that Amazon had a less significant price drop planned, Google
announced theirs and Amazon decided to increase their drop to match? Amazon
would have already evaluated what they could drop to, so they'd know as soon
as Google announced they could match.

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awj
Yeah, that could be it too.

I'm really just responding to the idea that "a mole" is farfetched. There's a
reason that Apple is known for being incredibly paranoid about people leaking
business secrets: it happens, often.

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bowlofpetunias
I keep expecting Amazon to change their reserved instance policy. Who's going
to commit to reserved instances during an ongoing price-war?

Amazon themselves proudly announce it as their _42nd_ price drop. That's not
really a strong selling point for long term contracts.

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bdicasa
Kind of frustrating, really. I just bought 2 reserved instances about 6 weeks
ago. Would have saved a nice penny if I waited.

It's definitely nice to see the pricing become more affordable over time
though. Before this cut I really struggled going with AWS, but wouldn't even
need to think about choosing them after this reduction.

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avalaunch
You should contact support. I hear aws is really nice about offering price
reductions in situations like yours.

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bashcoder
Based on my experience today, I can attest to this. If you purchased recently,
they may very well accommodate you.

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akg_67
I am wondering how many and who in enterprises are using Google cloud? I
understand few startups, typically associated with Google in some way, are
using google cloud. I just can't imagine many enterprises putting up with poor
customer service and ego of Google.

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freehunter
I work for a large enterprise using Google's cloud. It's quite a different
experience from using our own servers to handle the same thing. We are now at
the whim of a company that doesn't always announce changes until they've
happened, and those changes don't always work within our business model.

Yes, it's a nightmare.

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akg_67
Just curious why did you chose Google cloud over AWS or Rackspace. Migrating
from internal servers to public cloud makes sense in some instances. Have you
looked at private cloud for example using OpenStack or vCloud?

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freehunter
The business moved to Google Apps for email and document editing. As soon as
that happened, development teams began to see an "in" to getting cloud
services (previously disallowed) because "it's just Google!" That escalated to
basically anything "Google" is allowed, so everyone is using Google.

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slattery
I wonder if Digital Ocean will even lower their rates?

For now, I've noticed their Competitor Pricing page is just redirecting to
their normal pricing page.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/competitor-
pricing/](https://www.digitalocean.com/competitor-pricing/) (just redirects)

Cached copy:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I33lI_P...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I33lI_PgDJ4J:https://www.digitalocean.com/competitor-
pricing+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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scragg
Now can they just lower the compute and storage outbound transfer rates? :)

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umsm
As I look at the pricing wars, I realized something: If you choose to use
"cloud" based in your projects or businesses, you will never know the long-
term costs associated with operating in the cloud.

The cloud provider can raise or lower prices as they see fit. What prevents
these for-profit companies to keep lowering prices and not raising them?

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ChuckMcM
Nothing really, although on the flip side if you've got machines in a co-
location data center that lease comes up for renewal and your prices are going
to change. Often they _will_ go up because the data center folks figure its
harder for you to move than negotiate. As long as AWS and Google prices are
10x the cost of self running for large deployments that won't be an issue, but
when they start getting closer to parity it is going to put the data center
guys in a world of hurt.

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lukasm
Heroku could give startups 20% discount for a year.

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beat
Heroku runs on AWS (as do other competing PaaS offerings). They'll probably
pass savings on to their customers, but they have to cover costs.

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lukaszg
We waiting on dropbox now

