

Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O - thiele
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/google-to-launch-amazon-s3-competitor-google-storage-at-io/

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psranga
Btw, Google already has a BlobStore API which is in beta. Maybe they're
releasing it at the conf. If so, not big news. It's the exact same price as
Amazon and has a clunkier API (IMHO).

Competition is sorely needed in this space. I hope Google undercuts Amazon
pricing. IIRC, Amazon has maintained the 15c per GB-Month pricing for 4+
years. I would have expected them to pass along at least some of the price
reductions of bare HDDs.

I'm hoping for something like the $5 for 20 gig they offer for photos. I'll
keep dreaming. :)

~~~
TY
$5/20 GB = 25c/GB - that's more than 15c/GB at Amazon. Are you dreaming about
price increases? :-)

~~~
zhyder
That's 25c/GB/year compared to 15c/GB/month.

~~~
detst
Isn't that also with free bandwidth? ~$0.02/GB/month with free transfer. I'm
in.

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cmelbye
It's an App Engine API, so unless you're running your application on App
Engine you're out of luck. Of course, you could write a wrapper around it to
make it accessible over a RESTful API, but what's the point now that Google
Storage has been announced?

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MikeCapone
This can only be good. More competition will probably mean better prices, more
features, higher reliability and more innovation. And if someone can compete
with Amazon on this, it's certainly Google.

~~~
aditya
The only question is - why did it take them so long?

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MikeCapone
My first guess would be that Google has a lot more cool things to do with its
datacenters than Amazon, so up to now any extra capacity was used for a new
product/project. Only now did they have enough spare to start leasing it to
outsiders (which either says something about Moore's Law, or about a decline
in the rate of innovation at Google).

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johns
I hope the bit about easy migration from S3 means a compatible API, just
change the base URL. Would that make the S3 API the de facto standard for
cloud storage APIs?

~~~
detst
Eucalyptus also uses this interface. It would seem that it is becoming the de
facto standard. Being able to immediately use all of the existing tools would
go a long way for adoption.

<http://open.eucalyptus.com/>

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prs
"Google To Buy Dropbox For An Undisclosed Amount" does not sound far-fetched
to me given this announcement. From a strategic viewpoint it makes perfect
sense.

It would provide their new storage service with the necessary intial momentum
at the expense of S3.

~~~
whakojacko
Yep. I mentioned that Amazon should buy Dropbox recently for similar reasons.

Of course it remains to be seen if the Dropbox people would be interested in
selling out.

~~~
pchristensen
They've taken investment. They are by definition interested in either a)
selling or b) going public. While I would happily buy shares in a DropBox IPO,
I'm afraid option a is much more likely.

EDIT: taken _VC investment from Sequoia_.

~~~
neilc
_They've taken investment. They are by definition interested in either a)
selling or b) going public._

That doesn't follow "by definition" -- although I agree that the former
generally implies the latter.

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ph0rque
Now what needs to happen is Heroku seamlessly using Google Storage
concurrently with S3.

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marketer
I hope they get the interface right this time. App Engine has an awkward
interface that's not nearly as flexible and powerful as EC2.

~~~
stanleydrew
App Engine and EC2 don't really compete in my mind for this reason. App Engine
seems to compete more with things like Heroku, although the interface
complaint certainly applies there too.

~~~
samstokes
I find App Engine and Heroku to be in stark contrast in this respect.

App Engine requires you to code your app in a particular way to work on their
platform, and that way will (to a large extent) _only_ work on App Engine.

Heroku, on the other hand, requires you to code your app in what is pretty
much the recommended way to do Rails apps anyway. While they do impose a few
_limitations_ that aren't present on other platforms (e.g. no local writable
storage), accommodating those limitations wouldn't prevent you from moving to
another platform. There's no proprietary Heroku Database API that you'd have
to reimplement in order to move to a physical-server-colo setup, for example.

~~~
tow21
_App Engine requires you to code your app in a particular way to work on their
platform, and that way will (to a large extent) only work on App Engine._

This is true, but it does make for a very nice deployment story; and Ian
Bicking's silver lining (<http://cloudsilverlining.org/>) is (I think) a very
interesting attempt to tell that story in a more generic way.

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grandalf
Interesting! It had just occurred to me that I could write a competitor to s3
using app engine and blobstore. I guess someone at Google realized that too.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
This is what I had thought about. If you don't care that the API is
published/sorta-standard, it's not a big deal to deploy a lightweight pass-
thru app to AppEngine.

The pricing model is what will be most interesting about the announcement.

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balac
I'm excited about this, especially the possibility of including other services
(like video encoding).

~~~
bdickason
Could not agree more. Video encoding is still damn expensive. We're using
encoding.com and although they have great customer support, we're still paying
roughly $1/video to encode. 5% of these videos will account for 95% of the
views.

Why pay $1 to encode an unpopular video then $0.001 for the bandwidth?

Encoding is the only piece of our video model that currently doesn't scale
directly.

~~~
wizard_2
A hacker I know (who has I team I believe - the debuggable.com guys - both
successful bloggers and core teamembers of the cakephp community) has been
working on transload.it for a while, it's a pretty good service despite still
being in beta, but I haven't put it through its paces like I'm sure you would.
(I was working on a wordpress plugin.) It sits on ec2 and will save right into
your s3.

<http://transloadit.com>

I don't know their plans for the full release, but they could be a way to
break out of your lock in with encoding.com.

~~~
bdickason
Thanks! I'll check them out :)

We actually offload right to Akamai so the s3 integration isn't a big deal for
us, but anything to drop the price of bandwidth or encoding is a win these
days :(

Tho I must say the encoding guys are awesome so it will take a damn good
product to make me leave them.

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mark_l_watson
That is great. I'll alternate backups between S3 and GS.

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gasull
This reminds me of "Googlezon": <http://robinsloan.com/epic/>

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zh
The previous time there were rumours about Google Storage, we've got AppEngine
instead. Hm, what we've get how?...

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aresant
From a business WHY are they doing this?

The vast majority of their revenue comes from selling advertising on Google
OWNED sites eg google.com:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-
you-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-had-any-
doubts-about-where-googles-revenue-comes-from-2010-2)

Google is the industry leader at monetizing search, but nothing else they do
comes close.

I am truly curious - is the reason that Google keeps investing time and money
in "line-extension" businesses to distract competitors, keep the antitrust
police away, what?

~~~
run4yourlives
_Google is the industry leader at monetizing search_

Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information".

There is tremendous power in information. Not so much in your own, but on the
correlation of your data to everyone else's; the collective statistics about
anything is where the power lies.

In gmail, google reading my email tells them to sell me product x and we think
that's the end of it. But there is so much more available in terms of how the
aggregate masses behave with regards to product x and its correlated points.

This extends right into file storage. Yes I am saying that Google will "read"
your data. Even better, I'm saying that Amazon more than likely is already
doing this.

They're doing it not because they give a damn about you, but because they want
the data points that come from the analysis of many separate instances of
unrelated bits and bytes. That analysis is worth a fortune. It's a modern day
gold rush.

This makes perfect sense for Google.

~~~
panacea
"In gmail, google reading my email tells them to sell me product x and we
think that's the end of it."

I don't want to put on a tin-foil beret, but how much revenue do they actually
make from ad-words on the side of GMail? I can't imagine it's much, but then
I'm probably biased in that I don't even notice they're there.

The pragmatic part of me realizes GMail is a service that improves 'lock-in'
to the 'Google Ecosystem'... the paranoid part of me thinks about how valuable
a "search everyone's inbox" rather than a "search my inbox" feature would be.

~~~
inerte
It's not about getting clicks while you're reading gmail (the adwords on the
side), it's about mass gathering data about you and others.

Re-read run4yourlives message. He does not say gmail tries to sell you product
X, but gmail tells Google you might be in a buying mood for product X.

