
Google Drops Pricing On Cloud Storage by 20% - pajju
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/google-drops-pricing-on-cloud-storage-20-adds-new-features-in-advance-of-rival-amazons-first-big-cloud-summit/
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jtchang
Does anyone else have a bad taste in their mouth from Google App Engine and as
such is wary of using Google services over Amazon?

It is probably irrational since App Engine has come a long way but I remember
how Google generally treated their customers early on who were trying to adopt
to their platform.

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gecko
The bigger complaint I've got with App Engine, which I don't have with this,
is that it's complete lock-in.

If I write my app against Heroku, I can pick up and move to AWS, Rackspace,
Azure, or even a local cloud such as vSphere, VMware Fusion, or Hyper-V, quite
easily. That's because the PostgreSQL/Unicorn/Redis/whatever that's on Heroku
is the same as what I can run on any of those other services. Even if I use
Microsoft's technologies, it's generally not that hard to move form a pure
Windows stack to a Mono/PostgreSQL one these days.

That's not true for App Engine. Their database engine exists nowhere else.
Their general web stack exists nowhere else. Yes, I know about Appscale, but
it hasn't been updated in forever, and empirically, I don't think that HBase's
performance is a real replacement for Google's data storage. As a result, if
Google radically alters their pricing--as they've done before--then you just
have to shut up and take it.

I don't want that kind of lock-in, no matter how awesome the product is.

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foxylad
Ironically Appscale just released version 1.6.4 just a few days ago, although
that doesn't necessarily void your argument.

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rgarcia
The competition Google is putting up in this space reminds me of a Ben
Horowitz quote from Startup School (paraphrased):

 _You have to have a 10x better product to beat established competition._

Compute Engine has a long way to go to be 10x better than AWS. For most
(including me) it's not just about storage and CPU units, it's things like
VPC, SES, IAM, etc.

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oh_sigh
Their competition looks even less stellar when you see that amazon just
dropped their storage prices by 25%

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hosay123
It seems Google's sole contribution to the PAAS wars is to keep Amazon's
pricing in check. Does anyone here actually use Compute Engine? With Google's
customer support story, I couldn't touch it with a barge pole.

I was an early convert to App Engine, ran screaming from that mess after 2
years of waiting to see the light, there was no light.

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IheartApplesDix
Apparently a lot of people are embracing CE, personally, I'd rather not
participate in their second-stage beta trial.

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daniel-cussen
Yeah? Like who?

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IheartApplesDix
Like everyone who wants to pay slightly less for cloud drives?

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stephengillie
Is this a reactionary move in response to Amazon's new service and lower S3
pricing?

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ChuckMcM
One would assume now that they are priced nearly identically.

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stephengillie
Any economist would.

Could Google be leveraging their grasp of the world's free information to
predict their competitors' pricing changes?

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skinnyarms
According to the re:Invent keynote Amazon has dropped aws prices 20+ times
over it's 6.5 year lifespan. Google doesn't need to tap into it's records to
know Amazon is playing the high volume\low margin game.

Edit: typo

