

Google Launches Compute Engine To Take On Amazon Web Services - DanBlake
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/google-compute-engine/

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r3m6
Somehow... with the Google product price changes (price hikes!) in maps and
app engine, I am not sure if they have enough credibility left to pull this
off.

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justinsb
I believe there was a decision that each Google product should be priced at
least at cost. So, products that were under-priced had to raise their prices.
I'm more comfortable knowing that these products aren't loss leaders.

That said, it was definitely painful, particularly for people that had
optimized specifically for the pricing quirks of the old AppEngine pricing
model and really got hurt by the new model.

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vladd
The problem is that you don't know if this cloud offering is priced at-cost,
or it has promotional pricing to kill the competition (AWS) and a pending
increase is coming once they get scale.

People assume cloud servers are a commodity, but at $150'000+ company cost per
software engineer, there's a lot of API and development that is happening to
support the initial roll-out of cloud infrastructure, and we're not yet at the
stage where such development costs are negligible compared to the total costs
(Amazon is getting there, Google is just starting out...).

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Fizzer
Actually Google's new pricing page explicitly says which of their prices are
promotional ones and will increase.

<http://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine.html>

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herval
IMHO, THAT market is something Google has the "DNA" to compete ostensibly on:
they have the know-how and infrastructure to go heads on with AWS...

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timClicks
The Compute Engine is hitting a much different segment of the market to Amazon
AWS. There are no 256MB RAM instances available. This product is aimed higher
in the market: <http://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine.html>

_Edit:_ added link

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1qaz2wsx3edc
They have newer metal (Sandy bridge), that's all I see right now. I think
seeing smaller instance slices may appear later, they probably just want to
ensure it's stable right now.

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dkhenry
I initially thought this was a competitor to The Elastic Beanstalk, I would
have been much happier with that kind of service then another Cloud hosting
service.

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drawkbox
The Elastic Beanstalk is really more of an AppEngine competitive
product/response. More customizable and only Java focused but automated
instances the way AppEngine is. Now Google Compute equals EC2 somewhat (more
focused, less options right now) but similar. Google Cloud Storage = S3.

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ChuckMcM
I'll add the silly comment that given their costing, what is the price per
mined bitcoin? Granted using a botnet will be cheaper but I'm wondering about
'floors' in that space. What is the cost of a 3DES key? what is the cost of an
MD5 collision? etc.

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wmf
Mining Bitcoins on any CPU is incredibly expensive. The largest VM would
generate about $11/month.

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pjscott
It's also not good as a benchmark, since Bitcoin mining is a very unusual
workload for servers.

