[HN Gopher] Updates to Google Cloud's infrastructure capabilitie...
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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:
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