AWS’ basic model is to charge very, very high sticker prices, and then make deals to discount them aggressively for customers who can negotiate (or for startups, or for spot instances, etc). GCP mostly charges sticker prices. I’m sure they would like to get to an AWS-like model, but they’re still pretty small and don’t have that much market power yet.
This is one of my least favorite qualities of AWS, but it is a really important discussion point for cloud pricing. No customer of significant volume is paying sticker price for AWS services. GCP is looking for names to give discounts to so they can put you in their marketing. AWS will give discounts to just about anybody with more than $100k in annual cloud spend (and also put you in their marketing). Not sure where Azure falls on the pricing negotiation spectrum.
It’s actually been quite funny to see everything come full circle. A la carte pricing was a huge original selling point for cloud. Pay for what you use was seen as much more transparent, but that’s proven not to be the case since most orgs have no clue how much they use. Seeing more and more services pop up with flat monthly charges and how that’s now being claimed as more transparent than pay-as-you-go pricing has been an amusing 180.
It’s better than the status quo before where everything was about getting on the phone with a sales rep and then a sales engineer and you had no idea what other companies/netops were getting unless you talked to them. But that’s not saying it’s a good situation. I wonder if there’s room for a cloud provider that is actually upfront about their costs with none of the behind-the-scenes negotiation silliness, but I’m hard-pressed to find how that would earn them money unless they either charge absurd prices for egress bandwidth or they end up hosting a unicorn which brings in some serious revenue.
If you’re spending millions a year with GCP you can get discounts on various things. Especially if you’re spending millions per year with AWS and are willing to move millions of that to GCP and can show fast growth in spend.
I’ve also seen 90% (yes 90%) discounts on GCP egress charges. But not sure if they are now backing away from that.
As the article points out, AWS gouges you an insane amount on egress and are quite unwilling to discount it. I have seen some discounts on cross AZ traffic costs though.
And they’ll never get there, given that the entire company is built around the goal of never actually talking to customers. Goes against the grain of manual discounting.
The charging for personal Google Workspace accounts one is an important point. I am the admin of an ancient GSuite account that is mostly the email addresses of old people on fixed incomes who have had them for 20+ years. So now I either get a special pricing dispensation from Google or go find a low cost email provider and migrate many GB of mail.
I also watched a friend’s company get shut down entirely because Google messed up their records and thought they didn’t have a credit card on file. No access to user data, not even a way to post a message to customers about what was going on. It took several days and legal threats to get Google support to take them seriously, and their fix, in the end, was to have them go add another credit card so their system would think they had a valid means of payment again.
So, no, I have no interest in dealing with Google Cloud unless it’s as the point person for a customer big enough that I get Thomas Kurian’s cellphone number.
A really incisive look at something I don’t interact with all that much. We’re not currently using cloud platforms where I work (NRAO) owing to decades of internal infrastructure build-up. For the next-generation VLA, we will find ourselves investigating cloud providers, but Google’s history of capriciousness is a major turn-off to me personally. It’s absolutely true that the architecture is the hardest thing to change, and the place where you are most likely to find yourself stuck. These pricing changes show that Google Cloud doesn’t really understand their customers. I guess this is kind of par for the course with Google though.
The pricing changes to Google Maps a few years ago were so steep they essentially killed off the trend of remix maps. Seems like a bad choice in terms of branding.
I don’t care for cloud providers for my own stuff, regardless of whether or not it would benefit from it. I like to get a service for a price, not a rate - as I don’t know where it will end. My scale is quite smaller.
Same, I don’t need multi-region redundancy for which I then have to write stuff according to the AWS framework. I just get some box for a fixed price with a guaranteed performance and move on. (It’s still backed by redundant server hardware, 24/7 hotline, raid 10, so it’s not like you need AWS for that.)
As someone who doesn’t use gcp/aws at all (I run bare metal or fixed price boxes), the change from cross-region + strong consistency to? region + eventual consistency is hard. That is a feature I’d pay for if I had to scale up that much..
AWS’ basic model is to charge very, very high sticker prices, and then make deals to discount them aggressively for customers who can negotiate (or for startups, or for spot instances, etc). GCP mostly charges sticker prices. I’m sure they would like to get to an AWS-like model, but they’re still pretty small and don’t have that much market power yet.
This is one of my least favorite qualities of AWS, but it is a really important discussion point for cloud pricing. No customer of significant volume is paying sticker price for AWS services. GCP is looking for names to give discounts to so they can put you in their marketing. AWS will give discounts to just about anybody with more than $100k in annual cloud spend (and also put you in their marketing). Not sure where Azure falls on the pricing negotiation spectrum.
It’s frustrating since one of the original promises of cloud was simple, transparent pricing. It hasn’t been that way for at least 5 years though.
It’s actually been quite funny to see everything come full circle. A la carte pricing was a huge original selling point for cloud. Pay for what you use was seen as much more transparent, but that’s proven not to be the case since most orgs have no clue how much they use. Seeing more and more services pop up with flat monthly charges and how that’s now being claimed as more transparent than pay-as-you-go pricing has been an amusing 180.
It’s better than the status quo before where everything was about getting on the phone with a sales rep and then a sales engineer and you had no idea what other companies/netops were getting unless you talked to them. But that’s not saying it’s a good situation. I wonder if there’s room for a cloud provider that is actually upfront about their costs with none of the behind-the-scenes negotiation silliness, but I’m hard-pressed to find how that would earn them money unless they either charge absurd prices for egress bandwidth or they end up hosting a unicorn which brings in some serious revenue.
If you’re spending millions a year with GCP you can get discounts on various things. Especially if you’re spending millions per year with AWS and are willing to move millions of that to GCP and can show fast growth in spend.
I’ve also seen 90% (yes 90%) discounts on GCP egress charges. But not sure if they are now backing away from that.
As the article points out, AWS gouges you an insane amount on egress and are quite unwilling to discount it. I have seen some discounts on cross AZ traffic costs though.
There are definitely some paying special price for GCP. You gotta be pretty big.
And they’ll never get there, given that the entire company is built around the goal of never actually talking to customers. Goes against the grain of manual discounting.
The charging for personal Google Workspace accounts one is an important point. I am the admin of an ancient GSuite account that is mostly the email addresses of old people on fixed incomes who have had them for 20+ years. So now I either get a special pricing dispensation from Google or go find a low cost email provider and migrate many GB of mail.
I also watched a friend’s company get shut down entirely because Google messed up their records and thought they didn’t have a credit card on file. No access to user data, not even a way to post a message to customers about what was going on. It took several days and legal threats to get Google support to take them seriously, and their fix, in the end, was to have them go add another credit card so their system would think they had a valid means of payment again.
So, no, I have no interest in dealing with Google Cloud unless it’s as the point person for a customer big enough that I get Thomas Kurian’s cellphone number.
A really incisive look at something I don’t interact with all that much. We’re not currently using cloud platforms where I work (NRAO) owing to decades of internal infrastructure build-up. For the next-generation VLA, we will find ourselves investigating cloud providers, but Google’s history of capriciousness is a major turn-off to me personally. It’s absolutely true that the architecture is the hardest thing to change, and the place where you are most likely to find yourself stuck. These pricing changes show that Google Cloud doesn’t really understand their customers. I guess this is kind of par for the course with Google though.
The pricing changes to Google Maps a few years ago were so steep they essentially killed off the trend of remix maps. Seems like a bad choice in terms of branding.
I migrated my beta of managed bupstash.io repositories away from google because of this.
His “Cloud Cost and Cloud Architecture” is very insightful….
One definition of “Architecture” is “those things about your system that are most difficult to change”.
I don’t care for cloud providers for my own stuff, regardless of whether or not it would benefit from it. I like to get a service for a price, not a rate - as I don’t know where it will end. My scale is quite smaller.
Same, I don’t need multi-region redundancy for which I then have to write stuff according to the AWS framework. I just get some box for a fixed price with a guaranteed performance and move on. (It’s still backed by redundant server hardware, 24/7 hotline, raid 10, so it’s not like you need AWS for that.)
As someone who doesn’t use gcp/aws at all (I run bare metal or fixed price boxes), the change from cross-region + strong consistency to? region + eventual consistency is hard. That is a feature I’d pay for if I had to scale up that much..