
Google Announces Massive Price Drops for Cloud Computing Services, Storage - westonh
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/03/google-cloud-platform-live-blending-iaas-and-paas-moores-law-for-the-cloud.html
======
mjibson
I run goread ([http://goread.io](http://goread.io)) on App Engine. Doing the
math by hand, I'll get a 25% reduction in costs. This comes from cost
reduction of instance hours and datastore writes, and free SSL and datastore
small ops. I didn't get the advertised 30% because my largest single cost is
datastore storage, which didn't drop. I'm happy with how this all went.

I saw another comment asking about app engine pricing. It is priced based on
many different usages: instance hours (where instances are automatically added
and removed by app engine itself), writes, reads, and storage to their NoSQL
datastore (far and away its best feature, which no other provider in the world
offers). They charged small amounts for other things, too. I was paying
$9/month for SSL and other small one-offs. This new pricing basically
eliminated all the other one-offs, making them free. It reduced the number of
kinds of things that are billed. Before the datastore had 3 pricing tiers
depending on the operation. They made the cheapest free and the other two the
same price (reducing the price of the more expensive). Overall things got much
simpler and cheaper.

------
blantonl
The Google Storage pricing of $0.026/GB (or $0.020/GB for reduced durability)
made my jaw drop.

I spend over $6k/month on Amazon S3, and this pricing from Google has me
flabbergasted. Our architecture just uses S3 as a pluggable commodity, so a
few hours of coding is going to result in a new $4000/month in savings from
this announcement. Wow!

Edit: misplaced decimal!

~~~
darkarmani
As long as you don't need to use the external network with that data. The
network costs dominate the price if you need to serve up any of that data.

~~~
rsync
Yes, what is that price ?

That is, what does 1 GB cost to upload and then store for one month ?

~~~
netcraft
[https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-
storage/#pricing](https://cloud.google.com/products/cloud-storage/#pricing)

Almost all of these services have ingress free, its egress that costs.

------
bcantrill
Full disclosure: I work for a competitor to both GCE and AWS.

tl;dr: Until the fundamental issue of trust is addressed, customers will
applaud the price drops only because they look forward to AWS responding in
kind, not because they plan to actually deploy on GCE.

In my experience, GCE has not been a factor in the public cloud market to
date. They seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding in that they
(apparently) believe their problem in the market is price when it's actually
something much more basic: trust. After the abrupt deaths of services like
Google Reader and Wave and surprises like the GAE repricing nightmare,
customers simply don't trust that Google won't wake up one morning and decide
that self-driving cars are actually a lot more interesting than running
infrastructure-as-a-service -- and announce the death (or repricing) of GCE.
AWS, by contrast, generates no such doubts: one can say what one will about
Amazon (and there are certainly many reasons why I believe the future is not
AWS's alone), but AWS services do not have a trust issue. (Or, to recast it in
the aphorism once said of previous giants like IBM and Microsoft, no one gets
fired for deploying on AWS.)

It will be interesting to watch the GCE announcement unfold, but previous
Google announcements have lacked a critical ingredient: IaaS customers.
(Amazingly, journalists don't seem to notice or demand this; smaller companies
can't get away with this, but the aura of Google seems to give them a free
pass.) If Google wants to really compete in this space, they should pull
across a marquis commercial AWS IaaS customer -- at any cost. In doing this,
they would probably learn both how profound the trust issue is -- and at the
same time learn any remaining technical hurdles that they need to clear to
really compete with AWS. There are several high profile AWS customers to pick
from, but the obvious customer to start with is Netflix: they care about GCE's
putative differentiators of price and performance -- and Amazon is a mortal
threat to Netflix as a competitor, which should give some boardroom-level
urgency to the discussion. Until Google gets Netflix (or an equivalent) on
GCE, I don't think that the price drops will move the needle because they
don't address the fundamental issue of trust. (Indeed, one could make the
argument that they exacerbate it: if GCE is a money loser for Google, the
feared slaying of GCE may actually be more likely, not less.)

Finally, if GCE can't get a marquis AWS IaaS customer, how about just a
marquis Google customer? Knowing that new Google services are being deployed
exclusively on GCE (by executive fiat if needed) may itself go a long way to
make Google much more competitive in the space by knowing that GCE at least
has the trust of Google, even if no one else...

~~~
salimmadjd
This announcement make me even trust Google less.

First GAE was one price. We attended Google I/O session and learned about the
virtues of fully using BigTable, so we wrote our application to be tightly
integrated into GAE (stupid mistake). Then GAE got a 10X (1000% percent) price
increase. Effectively removing the service if you based your business on the
initial pricing structure. Now, google is talking about Moore's law and how
the service should be cheaper.

Why do I trust google less? Because I don't get a feeling Google has any long-
term strategy here. It seems like they're winging it every 6-12 months. In
contrast Amazon and AWS have been steadily marching in one direction.

I want to like GCE/GAE, I still run services from it, it's good for some use
cases. But in back of my mind, I know google can pull the rug at any moment,
depending on the popular flavor of the month.

So what am I saying? Use it at your own risk. It's good for somethings but
there are other solutions and there are businesses where cloud services is
their main or only business. You know those guys will steadily innovate and
build up their services.

~~~
joebar
I would not touch this with a 10-foot pole. A few weeks ago Larry Page was
asked about "putting the user first" at TGIF. His solution to this problem is
to go mobile only and dedicate 80% of the company's resources to mobile (at
the expense of everything else)

Do you think Google is going to care about things like this with there new
strategy? If you're business depends on any cloud provider do yourself a favor
and go with AWS, you'll end up in a much better position then if you went with
Google.

Disclaimer: I work for Google.

~~~
gnufied
Am I odd in seeing a Google engineer discrediting Google's own product?

~~~
RyanZAG
Probably not - Google is a big company and there are bound to be a number of
employees not pleased with current direction at any time. It could be entirely
personal reasons such as wanting to move to the GCE team but being denied
because of a push towards mobile - maybe now he's forced to develop for
Android and he likes iOS (if what he says is true, who knows?).

~~~
massev
No need to go out of your way to provide rationales, this person is most
likely misrepresenting himself.

Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't. I mean even at face
value his logic is unsound: all mobile services are cloud supported, there is
no conflict between being mostly about mobile and providing developers with a
backend on which to build their wares, which in any case are also increasingly
mobile.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Google employees are usually smart, this person isn't.

I don't mean to sound crass, but if Google employees are so smart why is
Google so collectively bad at doing anything right for an end user experience?
Adwords does awesome, Google X has a mind of its own, but the rest of Google?
The only thing somewhat decent that comes to mind is Calendar, Gmail, and the
latest versions of Android.

Mind you, I'm a huge Google fan, but it (as an org) makes some pretty terrible
decisions collectively.

~~~
niketdesai
It's not an individual that is making these decisions, it's a complicated set
of groups, technologies, and directions.

Does that mean having bad user experiences is justified? No. But it's
incredibly complicated to tie together such large projects (at a complexity
most people won't fathom) and do it well.

I would look at it the other way and be amazed how good some of the things
work.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Okay, so turn into an incubator. Divest all of your groups except Adwords, and
create a holding company for your cash for investing in startups.

The only way for Google to innovate now is through acquisitions and
acquihires.

~~~
niketdesai
I think that's a viable option.

Also, it's perfectly acceptable to enter new markets through acquisitions and
apply Google's innovations there. That is a form of innovation in my opinion.

------
boundlessdreamz
For anyone planning to use google cloud storage as an s3/cloudfront
alternative to host public content, pay close attention to request pricing.
Retrieving an object through its HTTP url is considered a class B XML request
type by Google Cloud Storage. That is 1.3x - 2.5x times more expensive than
cloudfront and s3 respectively.

~~~
Kudos
I don't understand why people expose files they expect to receive significant
traffic on public buckets, instead of using a caching reverse proxy from
somewhere with cheaper data transfer rates.

~~~
CoffeeDregs
Agreed. Especially when they can get a giant Google-sized, caching reverse
proxy (CDN) simply by setting cache headers appropriately.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable-
cac...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5617322/how-to-enable-caching-with-
gae)

~~~
boundlessdreamz
How does that help when your content is in Cloud Storage? Is there an app
which serves content out of Cloud Storage and runs on app engine? (I haven't
worked with app engine)

You can set caching headers on Cloud Storage also. But that doesn't help when
1\. you have a large number of requests with cold cache 2\. want the
flexibility to keep cache time small. Unlike cloudfront there is no purge
method in GCS. GCS doesn't guarantee to serve new versions until the old one's
cache time has expired.

------
hatred
Oh Boy ! This is quite a steep decrease.. So if I am reading it reading right,
this makes S3 ~300 percent more expensive ( 2.6 vs 8.5 ).

Sounded more like a April 1 hoax ad to me at first ( too good to be true ). It
will be also interesting to see how much this drives down S3 prices.

------
ChuckMcM
Its an interesting choice of battlegrounds. I find the infrastructure vs
infrastructure wars fascinating by how Google and Amazon invested in them for
their own businesses and are now productizing the 'remainders' and getting
less and less for it.

~~~
jedberg
> Google and Amazon invested in them for their own businesses and are now
> productizing the 'remainders'

This is a myth. Both companies created their infrastructure businesses as
separate entities by leveraging their datacenter expertise, but they were not
'remainders'.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Very interesting, this doesn't match my experience, can you say more about how
you reason to the claim that Google created a separate 'infrastructure
business entity' ?

~~~
SpikeGronim
I am an ex-AWS employee. I can verify that AWS was founded as a new line of
business using new servers purchased for AWS. The idea that AWS was started
using Amazon's spare capacity is widely repeated but false. Amazon is
definitely leveraging their expertise and not their physical machines. Source:
I've seen the original pitch deck for Amazon S3.

~~~
cperciva
AWS may not have used Amazon's spare _hardware_ , but it certainly used
Amazon's spare _code_.

------
sazpaz
I've been wanting to build a quick side project for a couple weeks, so decided
to give it a try today and put it up in App Engine instead of heroku.

Put simply, App Engine has a higher learning curve. I remember using heroku
for the first time a couple years ago, and it was smooth and seamless. Can't
say the same about App Engine. Installation isn't a blink, docs are scattered
around, and even a simple Flask app isn't straightforward.

I understand they might offer more features, better prices, so side-projects
are unlikely their target audience, but nevertheless if they want developers
love, it should "just work".

~~~
foxylad
Long-time Appengine developer here. I'm glad that GCE is here now, because a
lot of the criticism of GAE came down to people expecting infrastructure (and
infrastructure prices) instead of a platform. A massively and seamlessly
scalable platform.

Which brings me to my point: yes, GAE does have a steeper learning curve, but
almost all of that is due to scalability constraints. If you think you will
ever need to scale past one server, it's well worth the initial pain.

Or put another way, you get to choose between a small development learning
curve at the start for a pretty scary sysadmin learning curve when you need to
scale your app.

~~~
aiiane
Yep. AppEngine is a platform, not a pure infrastructure offering. GCE is the
pure infra offering.

------
westonh
From @clstokes

With today’s Google Cloud price cuts: \- an n1-standard-1 on #GCE is $
$35.38/month \- an m3.medium on #AWS is $82.72/month

~~~
tnuc
Digital Ocean is still cheaper.

Amazing how competition works.

~~~
gtaylor
DO is a completely different service. It's Apples to Oranges. You don't go
with GC or AWS just for a bare-bones VM, you use them if you already use (or
want to use) their greater portfolio of services.

If you are just using EC2 or GC for VM hosting, you are doing it wrong and are
throwing away a lot of money.

------
agwa
Does anyone here have experience using Google's compute engine? In particular,
I'm curious to know what the reliability is like, and how performant the
storage is.

~~~
enneff
(I'm a Google employee, so take what I say with a grain of salt.)

I just took ownership of the godoc.org documentation service, and am running
it on Compute Engine. It's been a great experience so far.

I've noticed a few benefits that Compute Engine has over EC2 (the other
virtual machine service that I have used). The "gcutil" command line tool is
more intuitive, Google's Cloud Console is more responsive than the AWS
console, the general performance is better (especially disk and startup time),
Compute supports live migration of running VMs (avoid downtime), and finally
Compute bills by the minute, not the hour, so you can spin up a bunch of high-
spec VMs for a quick test without running up big charges (I got a little
burned by this with EC2, in the past).

------
bdcravens
Nice - it looks like for the Compute Engine, you essentially get "AWS Reserved
Instance"-like pricing without requiring an up-front payment.

------
bananas
This should drive Azure pricing down as well which is good for those of us
using it!

------
hkh
I did the comparison with AWS On-Demand and RIs, and I have to admit, very
impressive! Here is the blog: [http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-
analysis/google-sl...](http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-
analysis/google-slashes-cloud-prices-google-vs-aws-price-comparison)

------
nickconfer
My startup is probably going to use Google storage at this point. We are
hosting video that only gets accessed a couple times, but needs to be
available for 1 year, so the reduced storage cost is going to be big for us.

------
mark_l_watson
Nice to see support for both their free git private repo's and github.

There are probably use cases of just using free Google private repo's that
might take some business away from github.

------
ballard
Google is about 2 years too late. Many startups switched to AWS in droves and
never looked back. The failure is that Google would have to give away GAE, GCE
and friends in order for folks to switch because the work to change stack
tooling would be very costly.

------
ycaspirant
Does Google Drive support symlinks (symbolic links) on OS X like Dropbox does?
If so, I will immediately stop using Dropbox and switch to Google Drive,
because it's now five times cheaper than Dropbox.

~~~
netcraft
I didn't see anything that mentioned this affecting google drive - did I miss
something?

~~~
ycaspirant
Sorry, it may not be directly related, but Google also slashed prices for
Google Drive about ten days ago.

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/google-drive-gets-a-big-
pri...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/google-drive-gets-a-big-price-
drop-100gb-now-costs-1-99-a-month/)

------
asharpe
If and when AWS responds will be quite interesting. GCE launched with lockstep
product offering and pricing with AWS. This is the first real movement away
from that lockstep position. On one hand it is competitive, on the other hand
does it speak to other underlying issues: maybe GCE uptake has not been as
expected and needs to do something drastic to compete with AWS?

~~~
dragonwriter
You always need to do something drastic to compete with a widely perceived
market leader; its the cost of being late to the party.

------
jrnkntl
"Prices are effective April 1, 2014". Unfortunate date for such unbelievable
price drops.

~~~
shrikant
Exactly 10 years from when Gmail was launched to the public, with its massive
1 GB of storage.

------
mark_l_watson
I didn't see the automatic price reduction for AppEngine. Did I just miss
that?

~~~
notatallcorrect
From the Google announcement, regarding AppEngine: "We've lowered pricing for
instance-hours by 37.5%, dedicated memcache by 50% and Datastore writes by
33%. In addition, many services, including SNI SSL and PageSpeed are now
offered to all applications at no extra cost."

Pricing is here: [https://cloud.google.com/products/app-
engine/#pricing](https://cloud.google.com/products/app-engine/#pricing)

------
eie
I hope there's comparison chart for cost per computation/memory of cloud
services, based on benchmarking.

------
simon_
Is this partially an attempt to throw a wrench in the gears of the Box IPO? If
there's going to be a price war anyway, better to start it now and prevent a
competitor from amassing a big war chest.

I don't understand how much Box is a (potential) competitor in this market, so
could be way off base.

~~~
thrownaway2424
How does losing > $100e6 per year result in "amassing a big war chest"?

~~~
simon_
Raising a $250MM IPO is amassing a war chest. If that becomes harder, they
become less competitive.

~~~
debacle
They're not competitive right now, from the sounds of it - they're losing a
lot of money, very fast.

~~~
amaks
I don't see how Box could possibly compete on pricing with Google storage,
considering the high volume of hardware purchases Google is doing and high
volume discounts it's getting.

------
geekbri
Maybe I'm the only one but the lack of ability for me to use GCE for a
personal server to become familiar with the service is a huge deal.

AWS offers a free tier. This let me play with AWS on my own time gratis. I
think GCE needs this... unless they have it and I'm just not aware.

~~~
TheMagicHorsey
I built stuff on Google App Engine for free, for years.

~~~
geekbri
I'm not as concerned with the app engine as I am with the compute engine.

app engine is more like AWS beanstalk where as compute engine is more like
ec2?

Maybe I'm wrong here.

------
asb
Now if only Google would announce spot pricing for the cloud compute instances
much like EC2 has...

------
drawkbox
This is great news for all cloud platforms and product development, amazon,
azure and now google, repeat.

Don't you which there were multiple broadband providers like this that could
continue commoditizing bandwidth rather than trying to limit supply?

------
suyash
Can anyone explain the "App Engine Pricing" in layman terms?

------
frade33
this is where, Google should keep focusing than going after and pursuing
things which other people can do better. I meant I am a die-hard Apple fanboi,
But If they launch a search engine, I am definitely not gonna switch at once.

Google is essentially a web-services company a SaaS at its best. Stay focused
on these services, and keeping bringing awesome things like this.

PS: I'd love if they would drop Google apps pricing too ($5/user). Please
Larry/Brin? and let's put a final nail into office coffin.

------
sudhirj
Does the managed VM feature mean we can finally run any language / framework
on it?

------
BaconJuice
Can you deploy and host websites like Microsoft Azure on this?

~~~
Sami_Lehtinen
Yes

------
copergi
Has there been any talk of getting some of the holes in google's cloud
offering filled? I would switch to google in a heart beat but I am using
route53, SQS, cloudfront, glacier and VPC. That is a lot to be giving up. I
also didn't see anything about any sort of health/service checking/alerting
support, but I probably just missed it.

------
imthatguyama
Wow. I'd drop AWS like it's hot if I was Dropbox.

------
jgalt212
Hi Larry,

Thanks for crapping on my IPO plans.

-Aaron

