[HN Gopher] Updates to Google Cloud's infrastructure capabilitie... ___________________________________________________________________ Updates to Google Cloud's infrastructure capabilities and pricing Author : TangerineDream Score : 291 points Date : 2022-03-14 13:11 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (cloud.google.com) (TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com) | 015a wrote: | > Will customers' bills increase? Decrease? The impact of the | pricing changes depends on customers' use cases and usage. While | some customers may see an increase in their bills, we're also | introducing new options for some services to better align with | usage, which could lower some customers' bills. In fact, many | customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to | decrease costs. We're working directly with customers to help | them understand which changes may impact them. | | There is a zero percent chance they haven't ran the analysis and | concluded what % of customers would see a bill increase. It's | high. If its low-to-zero, cloud companies are clear about how the | prices are changing, and usually outline how many customers are | would be negatively impacted. If it's high, they're ambiguous | about what is changing, and shift the blame onto customers; if | its still expensive for you, you're just not using it right. | dsr_ wrote: | More specifically: if the majority of customers were going to | see lower bills from Google, even if the top N% would see | higher bills, you can bet that the headline would be "New | pricing structure reduces bills for most customers". | ocdtrekkie wrote: | You can definitely lie with statistics here. | | The "Always Free" egress change is _probably_ going to mostly | affect the large pool of free and near-free cloud users. So a | very large number of people who "have Google Cloud accounts" | may see costs go down. | | But the costs will go up for all the customers heavily | investing in Google Cloud and using Google Cloud for storage | of a lot of data. So the overall outcome will be more money | for Google, in an update that claims a cost reduction for a | large number of users. | ec109685 wrote: | They are expecting behavior to change based on the new prices, | so that's why they have to be vague and can't precisely predict | what the final cost will be to customers. | acdha wrote: | That sounds like a PR statement: there's no way they don't | know what the impact would be now and could make that clear | by adding "at current usage" to any estimates. | | Put another way, if the cost was going down do you really | think they'd avoid saying that because people might start to | use more? | ec109685 wrote: | I agree, if the cost was going down in more ways, they'd be | more upfront about it. | bluedino wrote: | > we're also introducing new options for some services to | better align with usage, which could lower some customers' | bills. In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their | portfolios and usage to decrease costs. | | So, your bill is going up. | williamstein wrote: | > There is a zero percent chance they haven't ran the analysis | and concluded what % of customers would see a bill increase. | | Zero percent is correct. I'm a GCP customer, and today I | received an email from Google with a table explaining precisely | how my bill would have changed, with columns labeled, e.g., | "List Price $ increase in monthly bill due to data | replication", and a corresponding dollar amount. My bill will | increase by 5% overall if I don't make any changes. | maximilianroos wrote: | This seems to be the biggest deal, a few links away. | | > Reading data in a Cloud Storage bucket located in a multi- | region from a Google Cloud service located in a region on the | same continent will no longer be free; instead, such moves will | be priced the same as general data moves between different | locations on the same continent. | | If I understand correctly (do I?), this means that storing | frequently used data in a multi-region bucket is suddenly very | expensive -- we go from paying $0 to $0.02/GB. Reading 10TB / | hour goes from $0/year to $1.75M/year. | | We can switch to single-region buckets, but it's quite an effort | to move all the data. | NAHWheatCracker wrote: | I'd love to be on a team that's reading 10TB per hour and has | to explain that huge bill to executives! | atwebb wrote: | I'm no GCP user but if you've planned for "schema on read" | and throw a bunch of poorly indexed/partitioned/compressed | files in there you could probably get to it pretty quick... | Cyclenerd wrote: | The fire last year at OVH showed us impressively that it is not | a good idea to have your data only in one region. So don't do | it and stick to multi-region. | FBISurveillance wrote: | tl;dr: sorry folks, raising prices since electricity prices | skyrocketed, engineers want more money, and inflation is real. | mcintyre1994 wrote: | They're not in a market where that's normal though. AFAIK AWS | has never increased any price. | exyi wrote: | Except that HDD, SSD storage is getting cheaper quite fast. | CPUs and RAM also didn't get more expensive and continues to | eat less watts. | | So I think it's more like: sorry guys, we ran an analysis and | found that when we raise the price, most people won't migrate | away and we make more money :] | Ygg2 wrote: | > Except that HDD, SSD storage is getting cheaper quite fast. | | The pandemic has global chip manufacturing, but left SSD and | HDD untouched? | | How? | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | I don't know details - I don't even know that storage _is_ | getting cheaper, haven 't been paying attention - but flash | chips are, IIRC, _way_ easier to manufacture than current- | gen processors; it 's plausible that SSDs are escaping | being affected the way CPUs/GPUs are. | replygirl wrote: | Your car doesn't need 10 SSDs | acdha wrote: | Global chip manufacturing isn't a a single product. Most of | the headlines focus on the automakers because they slashed | orders at the start of the pandemic, disrupting all of | their vendors, and then twisted arms to get capacity back | when they saw business didn't evaporate. If you were | competing with that, it sounds like you have had a | miserable time. | | If you're not, however, things haven't been so bad - Apple, | AMD, Intel, etc. haven't had the equivalent of those Teslas | shipping with missing parts. There has been the pox of | cryptocurrency's ever higher demands for waste affecting | GPU buyers but that looks like it's far more an issue of | demand than supply. | cma wrote: | When there is a wafer shortage, flash devices can go to | more layers rather than more chips. Less cost effective | when wafers are cheap, but acts as a buffer as wafers get | expensive. | londons_explore wrote: | I'm really surprised they don't just cut to the chase... | | "Existing customers will see prices rise by 10% per year, | because we know leaving is hard, and new customers will get a | massive discount and loads of free credits. If you migrate in | from Amazon we'll pay your final AWS bill for all the data | transfer.". | whyoh wrote: | >SSD storage is getting cheaper quite fast | | I'm not seeing that. In the last 2-3 years prices haven't | changed much, when comparing drives of the same performance | and warranty. And the best price per TB are still 1TB SSDs, | large SSDs are still very expensive. | Gareth321 wrote: | Exactly. Prices aren't determined by costs. They're | determined by supply and demand. This might indicate demand | continues to increase relative to supply. | exyi wrote: | Or they figured out that demand is inflexible - so it will | stay the same even though they double the prize. | | If the price would be determined by costs, why would their | cloud be multiple times more expensive than Hetzner. | bithavoc wrote: | I don't understand this announcement. What changed? | hepinhei wrote: | It seems a soft strategy to announce some products and pricing | increase | ithkuil wrote: | when the messaging is unclear, assume bad news | detaro wrote: | Did you miss the links to the detailed per-product | announcements at the bottom? | bithavoc wrote: | Yeah pretty much, maybe they intent it to be as opaque as | possible | kemotep wrote: | It is announcement that: | | > Cloud storage and multi-region replication and inter-region | access are changing in pricing. | | > The introduction of a lower cost option in archive snapshots | for Persistent Disk pricing. | | > New pricing for Load Balancing (to bring it in line with | other providers. Read: very likely AWS pricing) | | > A new price for Network Topology, now included in the price | is Performance Dashboard and Network Intelligence Center. | | All without what the new prices will be so based on the fact | that it is several services with varying prices based on usage | it could be a substantial change or not much at all. | | Quite vague and unhelpful of a post by Google other than to | give you a heads up to not be surprised about your bill in | October. | [deleted] | detaro wrote: | The per-product announcements with numbers are linked at the | bottom. | Kelteseth wrote: | Is it this: https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce | ? | | > This page covers Cloud Storage pricing changes which will | become effective on October 1, 2022. See the Pricing page for | current prices. | | Search for "increase" and you will find 15 results. | kemotep wrote: | This is a much better page with a clearer picture of what | is changing then the linked announcement. Thanks for | sharing it. | ocdtrekkie wrote: | FWIW, one cost decrease actually also uses the word | "increase": The amount of Always Free Internet egress will | increase from 1 GB per month to 100 GB per month to each | qualifying egress destination. | | But I don't know if 100xing the free egress offsets all the | doubling storage costs... | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: | I skimmed the announcement, couldn't immediately understand | what is changing, and concluded from that that it's a price | increase. | | Judging by the comments here, I was right. | zitterbewegung wrote: | Has any other large cloud provider increase prices like this ? I | remember using Google App Engine awhile ago and switched to AWS | when they increased prices and I don't understand why you would | just have prices higher and eventually lower them once you get | more customers . Other than BigQuery and TPUs I'm not sure of the | advantages of Google cloud ... | bluedino wrote: | Not yet, but with Amazon increasing everyone's salaries, the | price of everything in general going up, you're likely to see | every large provider raise their prices. | | It seems like only the new players will lower prices. | acdha wrote: | How much revenue does Amazon generate per employee? This | comes up a lot in arguments about the minimum wage where | people talk like the price of a Big Mac will double because | they aren't accurately accounting for the percentage of cost | which isn't human time. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. pay | their people a lot more but they also typically can amortize | a developer's cost over many thousands of customers so I'd be | surprised if this drove a big increase -- especially compared | to the stress we're likely to see if China has an extended | Omicron lockdown. | staticassertion wrote: | Amazon and AWS function pretty independently. It would be | really odd to see Amazon raises impact AWS prices. | tedivm wrote: | AWS raised salaries, not Amazon. That said I don't expect | that to result in a raise in prices, as AWS is pretty | profitable. | neya wrote: | Holy crap! They're actually doubling the pricing (for some | important products)! | | I actually followed the links and found this: > | Coldline Storage Class B operations pricing will increase from | $0.05 per 10,000 operations to $0.10 per 10,000 operations. | > Coldline Storage Class A operations pricing in regions will | increase from $0.10 per 10,000 operations to $0.20 per 10,000 | operations. > Coldline Storage Class A operations | pricing in multi-regions and dual-regions will increase from | $0.10 per 10,000 operations to $0.40 per 10,000 operations. | > For all other storage classes, Class A operations pricing in | multi-regions and dual-regions will increase to be double the | Class A operations pricing in regions. For example, Standard | Storage Class A operations in multi-regions and dual-regions will | increase from $0.05 per 10,000 operations to $0.10 per 10,000 | operations. | | This announcement is just an eye wash to hide the fact that | they're doubling their pricing structure for some products. And | they claim most customers will see a cost decrease. | | Sigh, I was just thinking of moving all my stuff, projects and | even websites from cloud hosted solutions to my own home server | and slapping a cache like CloudFlare on top of it and calling it | a day. This is only pushing me in that direction, haha. | | Reference: https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce | sillysaurusx wrote: | I think you might be missing that this is an operation count | price tweak. How many ops could you possibly need for cold | storage? Zip up your files and you end up with one op. | | 40 cents per 10k ops is still so cheap. They probably tweaked | this to take advantage of their lazy enterprise customers that | don't care how much they're paying for op counts, so they use a | bajillion ops. | tyingq wrote: | >> Coldline Storage Class A operations pricing in multi-regions | and dual-regions will increase from $0.10 per 10,000 operations | to $0.40 per 10,000 operations. | | >>Default replication pricing in the us, nam4, eu, and eur4 | locations will increase from $0.00 per GB to $0.02 per GB. | >>Default replication pricing in the asia, and asia1 locations | will increase from $0.00 per GB to $0.08 per GB. | | Quadrupling pricing. And a couple of bumps up from "free". Wow. | grammers wrote: | Thanks for breaking it down, the overview doesn't help much. | badrabbit wrote: | You should for personal stuff. There are nicer VPS options too. | Cloud usually makes sense when considering onprem costs to do | the same thing which can add up for companies. | ineedasername wrote: | Hold on, they said in the announcement that some customers | could see a price decrease. Do you mean to imply that Google | used vague and imprecise language to hide substantial price | increases? If so, color me shocked! | pkulak wrote: | Do it! I just moved my stuff into my own home and it's been | great. Cloudflare's tunnel thing (Argo?) works a treat, but if | you'd prefer a setup a bit more complicated, you can use | something like Rathole (which is amazing, btw) to tunnel out to | the cheapest EC2/Droplet/etc you can buy. | LoveGracePeace wrote: | Same here, at least for self-hosting! Although I use a cheap | AWS Lightsail instance to route over Wireguard to my home | machine but it's the same idea. | oauea wrote: | > Rathole | | What is that? Not having much luck: | https://www.google.com/search?q=Rathole+software | web007 wrote: | Appears to be https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole | | "rathole proxy" search will find it, vs "rathole software". | [deleted] | lesuorac wrote: | Not actually answering your question but reverse SSH is | also an option. Port on a remote host (i.e. cheap vps) | forwards connections to your local machine. | | https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/46271 | MisterTea wrote: | Duckduckgo had https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole listed | half way down the first page. Google search results have | become jumbled garbage. | mavhc wrote: | Bing has it 3rd for [rathole software] | MisterTea wrote: | I searched for rathole by itself and it worked. | sangnoir wrote: | The signal from HNers searching and click on it may have | bumped-up its ranking.It's a long-tail(hah!) search term | it likely doesn't much to push it up the page. | manigandham wrote: | Rathole: https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole | | > _" A secure, stable and high-performance reverse proxy | for NAT traversal, written in Rust"_ | | It compares itself to these other big projects: | | frp: https://github.com/fatedier/frp | | ngrok: https://github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok | rr808 wrote: | I think its just Tunnel | https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/ | dewey wrote: | For anything that's not a hobby or personal website moving it | to your home isn't really an option, for most businesses the | pricing change is probably not going to make a big dent if | you think about how high salaries are compared to cloud | hosting costs. | immibis wrote: | It's plausible. But anyone who _has_ used cloud hosting for | a personal website knows how ridiculously expensive it is - | and it scales linearly! Mostly egress costs - they want to | hold your data hostage. | | Interesting technology though. | chaxor wrote: | I seriously doubt this. In what scenario is this actually | true? | tsimionescu wrote: | This is quite a myth. Maybe these prices are low compared | to US salaries, but in India or Romania or other big | outsourcing places, salaries in the 4-5k EUR/month (48-60k | EUR/year) are the norm, and it's easy to get even higher | bills from cloud services if you're not very careful, even | from testing and dev activities. | nivenkos wrote: | 60k would be a pretty good salary even in the UK, Germany | or Sweden. | | In Romania, etc. you're looking more at like 15-25k. | | Americans don't know how good they have it. | tsimionescu wrote: | I was going for the upper range, and including taxes - | so, company costs per employee, not what the employee | gets. | | Either way, it's easy to hire an extra mid-to-senior | engineer or two for the costs of many cloud services. | mistrial9 wrote: | brutal age discrimination in the USA though | afavour wrote: | Given that these price increases are for things like long | term storage I wouldn't start thinking about home hosting as | an alternative. The whole point is having a secure backup and | your home isn't going to cut it. | bpye wrote: | I've had pretty good luck with B2 for storage. In my case | it is as an online backup for my home hosted services | (storage + DB). | immibis wrote: | If it's just for your off-site backup, Glacier Deep | Archive is 1/5 the cost of B2... until you need to | restore it. | bpye wrote: | Yeah, I did the maths on that (and similar from GCP and | Azure) and deep archive could be less expensive, but the | cost of not only restore but also egress made me quite | apprehensive. | | The current monthly cost is totally affordable and in the | case I need to restore I'm not facing any additional | charge... Now, I'm backing up a bit over 1TB - depending | on the amount of data you might come to a different | conclusion. | chaxor wrote: | I wouldn't discourage anyone from home hosting really. It's | getting to be pretty clear that it's cheaper, far better | for privacy concerns, and gives you much more control. It | seems that companies are beginning to ramp up the prices | now - since once you've put your data with them, they can | increase charges whenever they like. They know they have a | large portion of the population using these data storage | solutions, and they're likely going to start abusing that | power. If you know what a desktop is, I would suggest | trying to self host - even if it's just dead simple raid10 | on OpenVPN with syncthing. Heck, put one at another family | members place and you probably have a more geographically | diverse setup for your data than Amazon does. | formvoltron wrote: | I'll store your stuff at my home if it makes you feel | better. | LoveGracePeace wrote: | C2C IaaS YMMV YHIHF | pkulak wrote: | My home _absolutely_ cuts it. All my data is stored locally | in Raid 1 and backed up once a day, immutably, to a remote | location. I trust my setup far more than I'll ever trust | Google Cloud, or whatever else. | seanlane wrote: | For a good tunneling option, Oracle Cloud has always-free | instances with 20TB/mo of outbound bandwidth. | jffry wrote: | Good luck actually provisioning such an instance though. At | least for the past month I have been unable to actually | provision one of the free-tier instances due to no | available capacity in the regions I tried. | eb0la wrote: | Be careful with that! You can launch free tier instances | anywhere you like in Oracle cloud, but unless they are in | your home region, Oracle will charge you full price. | Cyclenerd wrote: | Sounded exciting. I looked it up right away. Seems to be | only 10TB yet. But it is also great. Source: | https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free | cute_boi wrote: | Imagine, Oracle doing better than the current "BigTech" | InvaderFizz wrote: | If Larry wants to have one less yacht to subsidize me and | compete with the big boys, count me in. | | Oracle Cloud has serious issues around service and | feature pairity, but if you can work around those, it's a | lot cheaper. | jl6 wrote: | What service issues are you referring to? | thematrixturtle wrote: | As a Coldline user myself I'm not exactly happy about this, but | Coldline is also the cheapest class of archival storage that | Google offers. This means the increased costs will not kick in | unless you actually need to un-archive data, which for typical | archival cases like old logs happens quite rarely. | yelling_cat wrote: | And there's no gotcha there, Google's always been open that | retrieval fees are the tradeoff for Coldline being otherwise | so cheap. Nearline is the better option for data you'll | access more once a quarter. | gunapologist99 wrote: | "so cheap" might be a bit overly relative in this usage.. | immibis wrote: | I guess the only time you would use Coldline is if you | rarely access the data, but when you do access it, a | retrieval delay is unacceptable. If you access it | frequently, use a cheaper retrieval tier; if you can | tolerate a delay, use Glacier or GCP's Archive tier. | re wrote: | > if you can tolerate a delay, use Glacier | | S3 recently added a Coldline-like "Glacier Instant | Retrieval" class, FYI. Their "Deep Archive" class (the | cheapest) still does require restore operations that take | hours to complete, though. | | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage- | classes/glacier/instant-re... | | > or GCP's Archive tier | | AFAIK, the GCS Archive tier has the same availability | characteristics as Coldline and the same latency as all | GCS class (10s of milliseconds). It seems like the | primary factor for how you'd choose a GCS storage class | would be your cost projections based on how long you | store objects for and how frequently you access them. | | https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage- | classes#archiv... | 908B64B197 wrote: | Let's be real here: nobody pays sticker prices for GCP. The | only reason big customers use it is the deep discount Google | gave. | | Now this price hikes signals us two things: Alphabet is tired | of losing money on GCP or they are looking to drive customers | away so they can shut it down (it's not like a free chat app | they can just stop supporting, sunsetting GCP will have to take | a little longer). | thesandlord wrote: | GCP has had a ton of price hikes and price reductions. | | This change tells us one of two things: | | 1) they want to use price as a way to influence customer | behavior | | 2) A PM wants to get promoted and this is a way to hit | whatever arbitrary metrics they need. | | Or a combo. | | There is a zero chance alphabet as a parent company cares | about the specific pricing of super specific SKU. And there | is a zero percent chance they will shut down the fastest | growing non-ads business they have... | | GCP is extremely profitable, they are just reinvesting in | more growth. | | (I'm a Ex GCP employee) | | Edit: I want to make it clear I'm not supporting this | decision. Arbitrary (or what seem like arbitrary from a | customer viewpoint) price hikes is one of the reasons I left. | jlgaddis wrote: | > _Sigh, I was just thinking of moving all my stuff, projects | and even websites from cloud hosted solutions to my own home | server ..._ | | Good thing you didn't follow the other link to the changes in | pricing for (egress) network traffic! | Thaxll wrote: | But the increase is not about the storage price it's about the | API calls if I'm right? | nojito wrote: | It's been far easier and cheaper to just rent a dedicated | server for personal projects and websites. | nerdjon wrote: | Has AWS ever done this? | | To my knowledge they have not, and this is the third time (at | least) that google has done this. Managed Kubernetes and Google | Maps API are the other 2 that I know of. | | I only ever remember seeing AWS lowering prices but I am | curious if there are instances I am unaware of. | | This continues me wondering how anyone can think going with | google cloud is a good idea. | truffdog wrote: | AppEngine has redone its pricing model at least once, | possibly twice, in a way that upset people. | revel wrote: | Maps also has one of the most restrictive licenses I've ever | seen in the industry. If you stop using Maps you're required | to delete all data and all derived data. The only time I've | ever seen a more restrictive license was when using | Bloomberg. At least in that case it made some modicum of | sense given that there was a lot of manual data entry going | on in the background. | | The larger issue is that even though I would like to use | Google in some cases, I know that I can't trust them. As a | company they need to seriously rethink their approach to | fostering customer trust. | Spooky23 wrote: | I'm not defending them, but that's really an unfair assessment. | They are tweaking the model for how the cold storage tier is | priced, with some minor reductions on the storage component and | price increases on the "operational"/tasking side. | | I haven't managed a hyper cloud service, but I have managed 7-8 | figure enterprise services. Sometimes as a service and | ecosystem evolves, you need to tweak the business model. For a | service like this, I would guess a set of customers stumbled | into or found some loopholes that affected the economics of the | services. | | It is still a simpler model than Glacier, which is the AWS | service closest to this. | | As a customer, supplier risk is always something to factor. You | can't be religious about tech stacks for this reason and always | need to chase dollars. If you have the market power, sometimes | you can delay these sorts of actions with termed price | contracts. If you don't have lots of compliance requirements, | paying for them baked into GCP may not be a good idea! | | If your business (or bonus) is dependent on the beneficence of | AWS, Azure, GCP, etc, you need to make sure that you understand | that you are rolling the dice and someday the happy times will | end. | blip54321 wrote: | OP has a fair assessment. It's an unfair defense. Whenever | I've relied on Google, I eventually got !@#$%. | | I've never had that problem with Amazon. Microsoft also | doesn't do it much these days. This is really specific to | Google (and Oracle; but Oracle !@#$% in the wallet, but at | least realizes driving customers out-of-business is bad for | business). | | Not all GCP customers will be !@#$% here, but many will. | People who rely on Google inevitably regret it at some point. | Spooky23 wrote: | They will _all_ let you down. If you think you aren't | getting screwed by Microsoft, you either don't do a lot of | business with them or aren't paying attention. | | Oracle gets the reputation, but Microsoft probably | liberates more bullshit dollars from companies than anyone | else. They are like taxes, minus deductions. | adrianlmm wrote: | >I'm not defending them | | yes you are. | xyzzy123 wrote: | AFAIK AWS have never increased prices on any specific product | offering. | | Your overall point still stands, agree you have to have a | plan for the day your vendor decides to put the squeeze on | (and that can take many forms). | idunno246 wrote: | It's not never, but it's rare. They renamed to cloud map | and took a free product and started charging for it | | https://mobile.twitter.com/0xdabbad00/status/10681977055942 | 2... | Graphguy wrote: | I'm fairly confident they usually raise prices through new | generations of compute instances. | chockchocschoir wrote: | That's like saying Apple raises the prices of the iPhone | through new generation of iPhone models, which is not | true at all. If the same service gets a higher price, | then it's a praise raise. If a new service gets a higher | price, it's just a new service. | Spooky23 wrote: | Apple margins are pretty consistent. | | Assuming the assumption that intergenerational go up is | true, in general compute only gets cheaper over time, so | escalating prices implies increasing margin. | remus wrote: | > That's like saying Apple raises the prices of the | iPhone through new generation of iPhone models, which is | not true at all. If the same service gets a higher price, | then it's a praise raise. If a new service gets a higher | price, it's just a new service. | | I don't think the distinction is that clear: you could | just rebrand an existing service and raise the price. | "Try our new v2 APIs, guaranteed compatibility with our | v1 API and only 10% more expensive!" | | I think the reality is somewhere in between, where | companies will use new product launches to add stuff for | customers and raise prices to protect their margin. | sciurus wrote: | It's actually the opposite! To pick a representative | example Current generation: | m6i.large: $0.0960 m6a.large: $0.0864 | m6g.large: $0.0770 Previous | generations: m5.large: $0.0960 m4.large: | $0.1000 m3.large: $0.1330 m1.large: | $0.1750 | la64710 wrote: | Graphguy wrote: | https://rbranson.medium.com/rds-pricing-has-more-than- | double... is a good example of using the generation | abstraction to improve margins. Obviously, this source is | not a price increase. It's just increase in premium over | EC2. | | https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2021/12/17/iaas- | pricing-2021/ Is also great and shows a flatness in price | chrisandchris wrote: | They also don't discontinue any service as long as at | least 1 customer* uses it. Which means: you will have the | old (in your opinion probably lower) price forever, as | long as you don't upgrade. | | That's a very important distinction: increasing prices | for users who can't go away and increased prices for | users which migrate on their own to the new pricing | structure. As far as I know, Google does the former which | always has a "fader Beigeschmack" (DE; dulm aftertaste?) | IMHO. | | * = whatever that means :) | fencepost wrote: | _That 's a very important distinction: increasing prices | for users who can't go away_ [as an example of something | Amazon doesn't do] | | That's an important note for Glacier, where a significant | price increase could lead to a situation of "You can pay | punitive rates for retrieval of all the data to migrate | it or you can pay us a higher price every month going | forward." | _puk wrote: | "We are reaching out to inform you that we will be | retiring EC2-Classic on August 15, 2022. This message | contains important information about the retirement and | steps to take before the retirement date | | How does this impact you? Your AWS account currently has | EC2-Classic enabled for EU-WEST-1 Region".. | | To be fair, "EC2-Classic is a flat network that we | launched with EC2 in the summer of 2006", so I'm not | complaining, but thought it was an interesting | counterpoint. | deanCommie wrote: | It's not a counterpoint, though. | | They're retiring a product that's been deprecated for | half a decade. | | No prices are being raised... | | edit: I misunderstood, I thought we were still talking | about prices. | alasdair_ wrote: | The GP said " They also don't discontinue any service as | long as at least 1 customer* uses it." | | The person you are replying to gave the counterpoint that | AWS is discontinuing a service that the person is | currently using. | | This seems like a valid counterpoint to me. | ec109685 wrote: | That could also mean that AWS bakes in incredible margin, | so they can absorb underlying component price increases | without going upside down on margin. | SahAssar wrote: | Agreed, but in that case every AWS offering should always | be more expensive, right? Is that the case? | joebob42 wrote: | Probably not literally, but in my experience the answer | is more or less just "yes, aws is more expensive than | competitors" | tedivm wrote: | This is the opposite of my experience, although it does | depend on workload. | joebob42 wrote: | Thinking more, I guess I'm comparing to more creative / | niche competitors or different approaches, rather than | just doing the same thing on azure / gcp. | LoveGracePeace wrote: | This is not my experience with AWS, not at all. AWS | deserves huge praise for this. | Spooky23 wrote: | I don't follow AWS pricing closely enough to comment. | | But I would say that the AWS glacier pricing model | is/was... inscrutable to say the least. There's probably a | reason for that! :) | mdoms wrote: | Is this the first step to killing GCP? | bastardoperator wrote: | Oh Google, you were so much better when you were focused on | technology and not milking everything you touch. | didip wrote: | Usually a SaaS company jacks up the price when they struggle to | grow right? | | So, is GCP struggling for growth? | remus wrote: | I don't think that's the take home here. Viewed across their | entire offering I suspect this is a relatively minor pricing | change and won't have a big effect on the bottom line. Pure | speculation, but I suspect that since Thomas Kurian took over | there's been an increased focus on becoming profitable, so | there's been more focus on tying up those little areas that | were leaking money (e.g. legacy g suite free users). My guess | this is another change along those lines. | benlivengood wrote: | Even the automatic transcoding between the tiers of GCS requires | billable read/write OPs, so if you have a lot of data in Coldline | and now want it in Archive then do it now at the lower prices. | profmonocle wrote: | Google as an organization seems hellbent on teaching their users | not to rely on them. On the consumer side it's by rapidly | abandoning products, on the cloud side it's by dramatic price | increases. | | I think this is the third time we've been slapped with a new | charge for something that used to be free. (In this case, egress | from multi-region storage to a local region.) That's not going to | burn us super hard, but maybe it's only a matter of time before | they add a new charge that hikes our bill by 50%. | jl6 wrote: | When did the word "update" in a product announcement become a | euphemism for bad news? | [deleted] | [deleted] | jcoene wrote: | Very heavy Google Cloud Storage user here. | | According to Google's own calculations (in the email they sent | about the price changes), this will increase our GCS bill by | about 400% (and our entire Google Cloud bill by about 60%). | | It would seem that we have until October to move elsewhere... :( | dmw_ng wrote: | 22% increase in some per-GB costs and 50% increase in some per- | request costs of the most fungible, commodity service any cloud | offers. Really no idea what to make of this. At least it seems | reasonable to expect further pricing changes from other clouds in | the coming weeks (and knowing AWS, maybe even an announcement in | the coming day or two) | acdha wrote: | I'd be surprised if AWS announced increases: they LOVE to note | that they've never done that in their sales pitches and | enterprise customers value predictability more than the | absolute lowest cost. I'd guess that their margins on things | like network egress would cover most fluctuation but otherwise | I'd expect at most to see something like the EU data centers | getting a temporary Russian war energy surcharge while they | figure out how to buy a ton of green power contracts. | dmw_ng wrote: | Seems like a great time to discount some equivalent fees by a | token amount, even if only 1% | acdha wrote: | If AWS wants to be cut-throat, they'd cut the margin on NAT | Gateways down to, say, 20% and run a press release calling | attention to the increases on other providers. | drusepth wrote: | AFAICT they were a loss-leader with some of the cheapest cloud | storage prior to this update, and this brings them closer in | price to AWS/Azure (although still slightly cheaper). I | wouldn't expect price changes from other platforms in response | to this. | bluedino wrote: | Well, it was called 'updates to pricing', not 'lower prices | for' or 'double the memory/storage for our users' | oauea wrote: | > The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers' use | cases and usage. While some customers may see an increase in | their bills, we're also introducing new options for some services | to better align with usage, which could lower some customers' | bills. In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their | portfolios and usage to decrease costs. We're working directly | with customers to help them understand which changes may impact | them. | | So they're raising prices. | Jcampuzano2 wrote: | If they were decreasing prices, it would be in the opening | paragraph like essentially every other cloud providers price | decrease announcements. | | Whenever reading these announcements, if price decrease isn't | seen within the first few paragraphs (the earlier the better), | it's basically them trying to explain away price increases for | the vast majority. | | The fact that they even have to try to argue/explain whether | prices are decreasing/increasing is a worse sign. | notyourday wrote: | > So they're raising prices. | | But but but cloud prices only go down /s | kbutler wrote: | Sorry, that's AWS. | underyx wrote: | No, they're letting you unlock more choice with updates to | their pricing. | iskander wrote: | I want to store a few dozen TB of genomics data in a publicly | accessible way. Are there any better alternatives to S3 or Google | Cloud Storage? I've been waiting for Cloudflare's R2 but the beta | is not yet open yet and I'm not even sure it would work well for | me. | thallium205 wrote: | Spin up a GSuite Enterprise account and drop it all in Drive. | Unlimited storage in Drive for enterprise accounts. | foota wrote: | You could use requested pays with s3 or GCP, which requires the | reader to use their own project and pay for requests. | chockchocschoir wrote: | Better in terms of what? There are many variables to consider, | and some might be more important than others in your case. If | you "cost" is the top priority, get a dedicated instance with | unmetered connection and a 1 or 10gbps port, then you'll have a | static price/month that won't surprise you. If | latency/bandwidth is more important, throw a CDN in front of | that instance, but price will vary more then as you'll pay per | data served (in most cases). | AdrienPoupa wrote: | Wasabi [1] is admittedly up to 80% cheaper than S3. But it | forces you to keep your files for 90 days at least. I saw it | recommended several times as a cheaper alternative to S3-backed | storage for OwnCloud. | | [1] https://wasabi.com/ | fleddr wrote: | I think it's a mistake to call Google the most customer-hostile | company to have ever existed. This would require them to even | grasp the concept of what a customer is. I don't think anybody | working there has every seen or met a customer in their life. | | They are man-childs that during a lockdown can't even make a pot | of coffee of their own, that work on "cool stuff". | jacquesm wrote: | Google cloud has to be the most confusing product suite known to | mankind. What an unbelievable mess. | | After merging two companies I had to move a bunch of stuff over | to a new bankaccount. _three weeks_ later and I 'm still not 100% | sure that I got it all, the interfaces are so opaque and the | different ways in which you can get billed so confusing (never | mind the bills themselves) that it is nearly impossible to get a | clear picture. | | This does not feel like it is an accident, and this message is | very much in line with that. | | I always wonder how such systems come about. The number of | confusing error messages you have to deal with for pretty basic | stuff is off the scale. You can name anything, except of course | when it actually matters and then only some cryptic UID is shown. | Don't get me started on users and permission management, or how | it is perfectly possible to orphan an entire project[1] if a | person leaves your org. (Gsuite and GCP may superficially appear | to share a bunch of stuff but that just sets you up for some very | cute surprises, from which it can be extremely difficult to | recover.) | | [1] https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/project- | suspe... | admn2 wrote: | I can't believe how confusing all these cloud products are to | do the most basic things. It really makes me appreciate | Cloudflare, they seem to do a really great job with their UIs. | ethbr0 wrote: | My intuition, and some experience sitting in meetings with GCP | folks, is that their engineering teams don't dogfood their own | products end-to-end sufficiently (e.g. including billing) on a | daily basis, like their customers have to. | | The amount of blank stares and "Oh..."s that happened when | asked about relatively simple, everyone-would-need-it use cases | for management, visibility, etc was mind boggling. | | GCP feels like Google rediscovering being Microsoft of the | 1990s. If you have strong product teams, but no strong | overarching experience teams, your resulting system is going to | be a hash of well-polished but distinct products, with an | extremely ugly unification layer. | jacquesm wrote: | You may well be right about that. I can't imagine that if you | have the power to fix it that you would accept it the way it | is. | WYepQ4dNnG wrote: | It reflects the company culture. Unlike Amazon, where | customers experience is their top value, at BigG they seem to | build stuff for the sole gratification and ultimately | promotions of engineers and managers. They don't seem to care | much for their customers. | ethbr0 wrote: | It's easy to dogpile on BigCo, but this is selling the | employees and teams short. | | They _definitely_ care about their customers, and many | things were made better through subsequent fixes. | | But the larger point is that the processes and mid-high+ | level management structure at Google don't seem to | prioritize cohesive, customer-centric experience. Which | means teams will always miss things... because the process | doesn't ensure they're caught. | jsmith45 wrote: | Hardly a surprise. From what i have heard, it sounds like | Google's internal use of GCP is mostly automated, using | internal apis. I.e. it sounds like are not clicking through | the screens, or even using the external version of the APIs. | I question if the externally available screens are even | capable of handling some of the special permissions that | google internal workloads can be given. | | This is in contrast to say Azure, where plenty of Microsoft | employees are using the same resource manager APIs and even | using the portal. I think even the billing related features | get used as part of internal budgeting (they want teams to | try to keep resource utilization reasonable). While teams | developing parts of azure itself may be utilizing internal | APIs (for example Microsoft Graph is basically just a giant | wrapper around a variety of internal APIs), most of the rest | of the company sees and interacts with azure in the same way | we do. (Except that they also have access to dogfood/PPE | environments that we don't, such that endpoints for say | integration tests don't need to run on production azure). | chrisandchris wrote: | > This is in contrast to say Azure, where plenty of | Microsoft employees are using the same resource manager | APIs and even using the portal. [...] | | And still they don't have this incredible complicated and | not understandable IAM. Most user I know just give everyone | root because it's not possible to just allow some specific | API operations for a specific set of credentials. Or maybe | I am to AWS. | popinman322 wrote: | It's true enough, but it never really felt like teams | solicited feedback on their APIs or portal UX. Azure really | only made this jump to using all public products internally | recently; even the CI systems used by internal teams were | proprietary until recent pushes to move to an ADO-centric | model. | | I'm also not certain that Azure really has the right | internal pressures to produce great UX results. In my | experience Azure's culture internally is very lackadaisical | with only a few teams really pushing the platform forward. | kevinsundar wrote: | I really do think this dogfooding is why AWS is successful. | Amazon's businesses run a lot of their workloads on AWS. | Amazon is AWS's largest customer. So AWS has the benefit of | having thousands of heavy use customers internally to | discover bugs and edge cases and provide feedback. | | For example, I contributed a fix to AWS documentation as a | SDE in the Kindle org. This is the kind of improvements you | get with dogfooding. | light_hue_1 wrote: | You can tell which parts Amazon dogfoods! | | Billing is terrible, although it has gotten a bit better. | Cognito is probably one of the worst services on AWS, and | it's only getting worse (there are now two SDKs with | different APIs for no reason at all). While things like EC2 | and Lambda work pretty well. | petercooper wrote: | _You can tell which parts Amazon dogfoods! Billing is | terrible, although it has gotten a bit better._ | | I don't have much detail on Amazon's policy, but there | was an AWS devrel on Twitter a while back saying they had | to run and pay for their own AWS account as if they were | any regular user for their own playing | around/research/etc. | ducttapecrown wrote: | The AWS billing system probably grows in complexity in | response to internal Amazon politics in that case, unless | someone up top stopped that. | dvirsky wrote: | > You can tell which parts Amazon dogfoods! | | Same for Google. Everything that's in use by Googlers is | pretty dope - calendar, video conferencing, docs, search | obviously, maps, etc. Everything that's not - less so. | acdha wrote: | I was reminded of IBM trying to get them to show up and | actually sell things. It is _bizarre_ that you have to hound | sales people to actually make an effort -- it really seemed | like they assumed the Google brand was enough to guarantee | buyers and were surprised that anyone would question whether | their products were the best. | | (This was also the first time I heard Reader mentioned at the | C level as in "what will we do when you cancel it?") | htrp wrote: | > (This was also the first time I heard Reader mentioned at | the C level as in "what will we do when you cancel it?") | | Everybody who loved reader is now at the Director/VP/Csuite | Tier, the sunsetting of reader also burned so much goodwill | acdha wrote: | Well, not everyone but it tended towards influential | groups -- they burned so many tech journalists that it | really seemed to usher in an era where goodwill was no | longer assumed. | ssijak wrote: | I don't know if I am the only one but GCP console and tools is | the easiest and most logical to use for me compared to Amazon | and Azure. | tpmx wrote: | > Google cloud has to be the most confusing product suite known | to mankind. What an unbelievable mess. | | No, that's AWS. | [deleted] | latchkey wrote: | As an owner on the account, I kept getting an error that I | didn't have permissions to see the billing pages. | | I contacted support and the first thing they asked is which | browser I'm using. Brave. | | Turned off the shield and everything magically worked. I got a | small laugh out of that one. | drewda wrote: | A fair amount of my own confusion with GCP's offerings comes | from their decision not to use proper names for their services. | | AWS may have arbitrary names that don't follow any patterns, | and Azure may have names that are grandiose, but at least you | know with both of those clouds that they will always capitalize | the name of all their service/product in documentation. There's | no confusion if they are talking about a load balancer in the | abstract, or their specific managed offerings. | kccqzy wrote: | Google does call their own balancer GCLB though. | lima wrote: | > _how it is perfectly possible to orphan an entire project[1] | if a person leaves your org_ | | Maybe not the best example since this (unlike other IAM | oddities) actually makes sense - it can only happen when you | don't have a top-level org tied to a project, like when you do | something like using a gmail.com account to spin up GCP | resources. Inside a GSuite org, this is not the default and I | can't imagine how it'd happen by accident. | | If your project is not attached to an org, and all the accounts | tied to are gone, then what else do you expect? | | > _Gsuite and GCP may superficially appear to share a bunch of | stuff but that just sets you up for some very cute surprises, | from which it can be extremely difficult to recover_ | | The way it's implemented is actually quite nice for complex | scenarios/defense in depth - for instance, you can set it up | such that whoever owns the GSuite org does not automatically | get access to all GCP resources. Of course, any security | measures good enough to restrict an org admin's privileges also | have the potential of locking yourself out in a way that's | semi-irrecoverable. | politelemon wrote: | While everyone else is able to discuss the announcement, the | contents aren't even loading for me on FF98. The OP URL redirects | me to https://cloud.google.com/blog/. I just see the | header/footer estate, and a forever progress bar right at the | top. Cache cleared, private window. The middle is just blank. | https://i.imgur.com/WpyxwqB.png | hankman86 wrote: | This seems like GCP is shifting its strategy away from trying to | win more market share and catch up with Azure, AWS, Tencent. | Perhaps they realised that this is futile and not are now | focussing on revenue, milking their existing customer base. | rainboiboi wrote: | I do expect AWS to capitalize on this and persuade GCP customers | to switch. I have no idea why GCP thinks that their customers are | sticky enough to stay with them through the price increase. | rr808 wrote: | My corporation is on Google Cloud and its taken 3 years, | trained thousands of engineers and jumped through hundreds of | FTE-years of bureaucracy to get a few applications set up. Its | very hard to use cloud, and to switch to save a bit of money | isn't going to happen. | acdha wrote: | The difference is that GCP is a distant #3 (going on 4). It's | much easier to find engineers and tools for AWS and a fair | amount of the cost historically was working around gaps. That | doesn't mean there are no reasons to use it, of course, but | it undercuts the amount of pressure they can apply. Given the | well-known internal deadline for profitability, I'd be | surprised if didn't give some current or potential customers | pause. | bombcar wrote: | This is it exactly. Google has decided that the bait has been | taken, and now it's time to "set the hook" - this is the | first pull. | gorjusborg wrote: | I know of a few applications that target AppEngine and | Datastore. | | You'd have to rewrite the entire application to port it to | another cloud provider. | jacquesm wrote: | I do. There is a substantial cost to switching stuff like this. | We use Gsuite and a very minimal GC setup so from a financial | perspective it doesn't really matter all that much. But clearly | GC is set up for huge enterprises and for an SME customer all | that flexibility translates into considerable overhead. Having | a 'single supplier' is a risk because it puts all of your eggs | in one basket, at the same time it should normally simplify | things. But in the case of GC it probably doesn't. | | That said: neither AWS nor MS are particularly attractive | either, none of these companies really have my sympathy, it is | choosing the least bad rather than choosing the best. Technical | merits, pricing, cost to switch, company image, it all factors | into decisions like these. | lmkg wrote: | I agree the number of customers outright switching cloud | platforms will be low. But some of them might start small | explorations of multi-cloud, even if it's just at the level | of "my team wants to use an AWS product for this internal | project" isn't auto-denied. Long-term, that chips away at | GCP's leverage on their existing customers. | johndfsgdgdfg wrote: | Yes, I always tell people to use AWS because of the nature of | Google. What can you expect from a company that makes money by | spying on people and forcing people to see ads? | syshum wrote: | Looking at just the storage pricing, it looks like GCP was | already priced lower than AWS and Azure, this increase brings | them either to on par, just just slightly below AWS and Azure. | | GCP was trying to "loss lead" in to dominance, does not look | like that was working out since even being more expensive AWS | and Azure were still killing them. | | Of course if you only choose GCP because of cost you have | little reason to stay so... | dillondoyle wrote: | It seems like the increases are also focused on | egress/bandwidth which people gripe about aws gauging on all | the time? | marcinzm wrote: | Many enterprise care more about the risk of prices changing | than the absolute prices. The later you can account for in | budgets more easily than the former. Especially if the price | increase is one that goes from $0 to $non-zero since that | could be a massive increase in absolute dollars. | | AWS has never afaik increased prices which is a pretty strong | selling point even if specific services likely are a loss for | them perpetually as a result if mis-priced initially. | syshum wrote: | >AWS has never afaik increased prices which is a pretty | strong selling point even if specific services | | Technically true, but they do it a little different, where | by they add different SKU;s with higher prices, and | discontinue the old SKU's forcing you to move to a "new | product" instead of just increasing the prices. | | Not all services are like that but they just did that with | compute instances, I believe this is the second time they | have killed off a "generation" of compute | acdha wrote: | Do you have any examples of this? It makes sense that old | hardware be replaced but it's usually over a LONG | lifecycle and the new instance type pricing is often | lower than the previous generation. | wejick wrote: | How to introduce price hike to look like an improvement | ushakov wrote: | we moved off Google Cloud functions after they become 10x more | expensive for us | | they first introduced container registry, which made us pay for | the storage (before you only paid for invocation and egress) | | > If your functions are stored in Container Registry, you'll see | small charges after you deploy because Container Registry has no | free tier. Container Registry's regional storage costs are | currently about $0.026 per GB per month. | | recently they sent an email telling us new functions are going to | use to "Artifact Registry" and prompting to migrate our old | functions | | > Cloud Functions (2nd gen) exclusively uses Artifact Registry. | | Artifact Registry price: $0.10 per GB per month | flycatcha wrote: | I'm using Cloud Functions as well - where did you move them to? | Lambda? | ushakov wrote: | luckily we started migrating before the announcement | | i'd recommend checking serverless framework (serverless.com) | or openfaas (openfaas.com) | | best thing you can do is not get involved with provider- | specific APIs: use Docker/Kubernetes for building and | executing your code, Postgres-compatible database (Hasura if | you want Firebase experience) and S3 for object storage, send | e-mails using SMTP | | again, don't use provider-specific API's | seabrookmx wrote: | Wanted to add another option to ushakov's comment: KNative | (which is actually what CloudRun is built on). | | If you run k8s clusters anywhere, OpenFaaS and KNative are | both solid options. OpenFaaS is seems better suited for short | running, less compute intensive things. Whereas KNative is a | great fit for API's.. it just removed a bunch of the | complexity around deployment (like writing a helm chart, | configuring an HPA, etc). | [deleted] | deanCommie wrote: | > While some customers may see an increase in their bills | | Said Amazon never. | lukeaf wrote: | It'd be great if, rather than just sending an email to a somewhat | confusing calculator or pricing sheet, they'd show the potential | cost increases alongside your actual bill so that you have 6 | months to tweak, negotiate or move off the service if you really | can't afford the price increases. | | I don't get why it's not just "easier" to make the effects super | obvious. If people are going to leave, they're going to leave. | zbjornson wrote: | They did. We got personalized emails for each account showing | the effect on each project. | staticassertion wrote: | I actually got excited, thinking that this would be another drop | to egress in order to compete with Cloudflare and AWS. AWS just | significantly improved pricing on egress to compete with | Cloudflare, so it seemed like an obvious next step for other | clouds to do so. | | Instead, huge price increases? That's... confusing. I honestly | wonder if Google wants to kill off Cloud, given how much money | they lose on it every year. | derekdb wrote: | Having worked on both AWS and GCP, my experience was that AWS | had a much better organizational grasp on how to price | services. They track the predicted revenue/costs compared to | the observed, and expect each team to have roadmap projects to | improve that ratio over time (or at least to keep the ratio the | same as they drive down prices). When I was there, Google has | not such process for tracking their costs. Engineering teams | had much less understanding of their costs as well. I never | worked on Azure, but I heard similar stories there to my | experience at GCP; that there was no institutional process for | reducing costs. | | Building top down process to improve costs to enable price | drops is one of Amazon's core strengths. It is core to how they | run all their businesses. | pier25 wrote: | Maybe they want to focus on compute and start pushing users out | of storage. | | I wonder if CF will be able to satisfy the storage demand once | they release R2. | staticassertion wrote: | That sounds like a horrible idea, if so. Storage is sticky. | You can migrate compute easily, it's databases that keep | people in your cloud. | pier25 wrote: | I don't know but for the past 2-3 years Google has been on | some crusade to reduce its storage usage/customers. | | For me it started in 2020 when Google announced my Firebase | storage usage would go from maybe $20 per year to something | like $800 per year, for a single app. Apparently they had | forgotten to charge Firebase users for egress, for years. | | But then also Gmail stopped adding more storage at some | point so I was forced to get a Google One subscription or | migrate 15 years of emails to some other service. | | Etc. | | I suspect Google has realized it's better to reduce its | storage customers and just keep the ones that are ready to | pay more, instead of expanding their storage capabilities | _ad infinitum_. | sklargh wrote: | Actually lol'd at "unlock more choice," - if it's truly a | commodity product we'd expect basically zero margin. Clearly | Azure, AWS and GCP are not zero margin, which implies | oligopolistic (does Oracle even count?) price coordination for | enterprise cloud. (Edited, forgot Azure) | dralley wrote: | >if it's truly a commodity product | | Cloud is not a commodity product. Commodities are easily | interchangable. For the most part, a banana is a banana, a | pound of corn is a pound of corn, a ton of steel is a ton of | steel. There can be quality variations of course, but at any | given level of quality there are still multiple suppliers, and | the costs of switching between them are fairly low. | | That is not true of the cloud. Every cloud is unique in their | own special snowflake ways, the APIs are often fairly | different, the switching costs are high and there is a small | number of suppliers. | immibis wrote: | They are _mostly_ interchangeable. They all store data; they | all run Linux VMs. Switching costs are high though. | | It's surprising that vendors make their custom cloud features | (e.g. SQS) more expensive than running the same thing | yourself - because those have the _most_ vendor lock-in. | rodgerd wrote: | Cloud is like changing cars, if changing cars meant that a | Toyota had pedals and a steering wheel but a Mercedes had a | joystick and a throttle lever. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | MSFT is a much bigger player than Oracle. | [deleted] | sklargh wrote: | Oooof big miss. Fixed. | napoleon_thepig wrote: | While I agree that there's a lot of marketing speak here, I | have to note that: | | 1) You wouldn't expect zero margin, you would expect normal | margin, that is, these companies should have around the same | margin as the average of the rest of the economy. | | 2) Commodity markets don't have to be low margin, because a | commodity market with high market concentration will be a high | margin market. | lotsofpulp wrote: | What does market concentration mean? | meragrin_ wrote: | I pretty sure it refers to how the market share is spread | between the competitors in a market. In a market with low | concentration, you have say 20 competitors and no one has | more than 10% of the market. When there is high market | concentration, 3 of those 20 competitors might have 80% of | the market. | [deleted] | gnfargbl wrote: | A little surprise hidden away in here: it is currently possible | to exfiltrate data from a Cloud Storage bucket at standard tier | ($0.085+/GB) instead of premium tier network rates ($0.12+/GB). | This is achieved by making the bucket a backend for an external | HTTP(S) load balancer [1] ($18/month). | | This announcement adds an additional $0.008+/GB for the cost of | outbound data moving through the load balancer, so effectively | that's a 9% increase on the standard tier bandwidth pricing. | | [1] https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/docs/overview | daenz wrote: | Now to make a decision: pay in engineering time to optimize your | engineering workflows to reduce cloud costs, or pay GCP instead? | pbiggar wrote: | My $10,000/month bill just went up by $4.41 from "List Price $ | increase in monthly bill due to multi-region egress" | Havoc wrote: | This is in part why I like using cloud but only as very basic | building blocks. Else the lock-in is too intense | metadat wrote: ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-14 23:00 UTC)