Updates to Google Cloud’s infrastructure capabilities and pricing

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/updates-to-google-clouds-infrastructure-pricing

by TangerineDream • 4 years ago

369 279 4 years ago

cloud.google.com

bithavoc2• 4 years ago

I don’t understand this announcement. What changed?

hepinhei• 4 years ago

It seems a soft strategy to announce some products and pricing increase

ithkuil• 4 years ago

when the messaging is unclear, assume bad news

detaro2• 4 years ago

Did you miss the links to the detailed per-product announcements at the bottom?

bithavoc2• 4 years ago

Yeah pretty much, maybe they intent it to be as opaque as possible

kemotep2• 4 years ago

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.

Kelteseth• 4 years ago

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.

detaro2• 4 years ago

The per-product announcements with numbers are linked at the bottom.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 4 years ago

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.

oauea2• 4 years ago

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.

notyourday• 4 years ago

So they're raising prices.

But but but cloud prices only go down /s

kbutler• 4 years ago

Sorry, that's AWS.

Jcampuzano2• 4 years ago

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.

underyx• 4 years ago

No, they're letting you unlock more choice with updates to their pricing.

jacquesm3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

ethbr02• 4 years ago

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.

acdha10• 4 years ago

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?”)

kevinsundar• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

jsmith45• 4 years ago

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).

latchkey• 4 years ago

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.

tempnow9872• 4 years ago

I ran into this in chrome. The org entity had billing, but I was project admin but not billing, but could give myself billing permission?

Shutdown project also needed some billing permissions maybe? Cryptic messages.

I actually like the "project" permissions model, but I don't like how often I have to figure out why clicking around in the admin page as the "admin" causes problems.

On AWS side the admin policy is pretty broad, and the root account seems to really work as root.

Admin policy (AWS):

        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "*",
            "Resource": "*"
        }

drewda3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

Google does call their own balancer GCLB though.

twistedpair9• 4 years ago

Much the opposite. GCP's names are painfully transparent and banal. No need to look them up, you can tell what they do from their names (which are proper nouns, so it's clear they're a service name)

- Cloud Logging - stores logs

- Google Compute Engine - VMs, compute

- Cloud Monitoring - stores metrics, monitors stuff

- Cloud Storage - stores stuff

- Google Kubernetes Engine - runs Kubernetes clusters

- BigQuery - runs multi-billion row queries with ease

- Cloud Functions - FaaS run time

Now sure, Cloud Spanner is a DB, without DB in the name, so you'll have to read the docs for a few seconds, but let's compare that to Cognito (brains?), X-ray (medical imaging?), Kinesis (something to do with mitosis?).

lima• 4 years ago

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.

ssijak• 4 years ago

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.

manigandham2• 4 years ago

Same here. GCP is far more logical and consistent compared to the others. There's just a level of complexity at some point that you have to deal with or use a simpler provider.

DangitBobby3• 4 years ago

Seriously. I don't know what GCP these guys are using. Compared to AWS, using the cloud console is like ordering a pizza online.

tpmx• 4 years ago

Google cloud has to be the most confusing product suite known to mankind. What an unbelievable mess.

No, that's AWS.

twistedpair9• 4 years ago

It would be nice if most of Google ran off GCP, but alas, few marquee Google properties run on GCP. Ever notice how Google search, GMail, etc are usually just fine during a GCP outage?

seiryth3• 4 years ago

Well this is just untrue. Read the docs. Gcp uses lots of the same infra as other Google services. The whole global load balancer infra is one and the same. Spanner is used by maps, Gmail etc. In fact, that's where the service spawned from.

mekster4• 4 years ago

I'd say Azure is the worst. It's like Windows control panel with 10 times more items except you don't have the muscle memory from older Windows to navigate it through.

And then some edge case where I was charged on an account I closed because some subscription was still left open while I could no longer login...

015a• 4 years ago

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_• 4 years ago

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".

ocdtrekkie2• 4 years ago

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.

ec1096853• 4 years ago

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.

acdha10• 4 years ago

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?

bluedino3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

twistedpair9• 4 years ago

To be clear, looks like GCP is disincentivizing:

- Using multi-regional storage (used to be a 30% premium, now much more)

- Making lots of object writes (Class A) vs lots of reads (Class B)

So, if you can:

- Move to regional or dual-region (NAM4) storage

- Snowball your writes into bigger overall objects, <3 immutability

- Keep your data in the same region as access

Then you can reduce the impact here.

They are also closing the Coldline/Nearline loophole, where you could use a bucket lifecycle policy to keep your objects in Standard (cheap access) for a few weeks/months, and then move them to a cheap long term storage tier (Nearline/Coldline), because that move is another Class operation, that just got a lot more expensive. This is inline with two years ago when they quietly moved lifecycle operation pricing from the origin service tier (e.g. cheap Standard storage) to the destination tier (e.g. much more expensive Coldline), cutting down on the savings of tier jockeying.

seiryth3• 4 years ago

This. It's using pricing as a user behaviour mechanism.

I don't like the price increases either, but it's kind of clear they're trying to make sure multi region buckets aren't the default a user uses just because it's there. It costs gcp more to run this, and for most users multi regional doesn't make sense.

Lots of enterprise orgs don't even use multi region because of either gdpr, or regional laws. The data has to either be classified as public/not sensitive for a real use case of it.

FBISurveillance• 4 years ago

tl;dr: sorry folks, raising prices since electricity prices skyrocketed, engineers want more money, and inflation is real.

exyi3• 4 years ago

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 :]

Gareth321• 4 years ago

Exactly. Prices aren't determined by costs. They're determined by supply and demand. This might indicate demand continues to increase relative to supply.

Ygg2• 4 years ago

Except that HDD, SSD storage is getting cheaper quite fast.

The pandemic has global chip manufacturing, but left SSD and HDD untouched?

How?

whyoh• 4 years ago

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.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

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.".

mcintyre1994• 4 years ago

They're not in a market where that's normal though. AFAIK AWS has never increased any price.

zitterbewegung• 4 years ago

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 …

bluedino3• 4 years ago

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.

acdha10• 4 years ago

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.

staticassertion3• 4 years ago

Amazon and AWS function pretty independently. It would be really odd to see Amazon raises impact AWS prices.

neya• 4 years ago

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

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

pkulak2• 4 years ago

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.

oauea2• 4 years ago

Rathole

What is that? Not having much luck: https://www.google.com/search?q=Rathole+software

dewey• 4 years ago

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.

seanlane3• 4 years ago

For a good tunneling option, Oracle Cloud has always-free instances with 20TB/mo of outbound bandwidth.

afavour• 4 years ago

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.

LoveGracePeace3• 4 years ago

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.

tyingq• 4 years ago

> 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.

Thaxll• 4 years ago

But the increase is not about the storage price it's about the API calls if I'm right?

badrabbit• 4 years ago

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.

Spooky234• 4 years ago

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.

xyzzy123• 4 years ago

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).

adrianlmm• 4 years ago

I’m not defending them

yes you are.

blip54321• 4 years ago

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.

nojito• 4 years ago

It’s been far easier and cheaper to just rent a dedicated server for personal projects and websites.

nerdjon• 4 years ago

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.

revel• 4 years ago

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.

truffdog• 4 years ago

AppEngine has redone its pricing model at least once, possibly twice, in a way that upset people.

Aeolun• 4 years ago

I’ve seen parameter store (free) ”switch” to secrets manager (paid). But old parameter store is still there.

That’s the closest I’ve seen.

908B64B197• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

DangitBobby3• 4 years ago

We pay sticker price for GCP by choice over other cloud providers quite happily.

jlgaddis• 4 years ago

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!

sillysaurusx• 4 years ago

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.

ineedasername• 4 years ago

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!

grammers• 4 years ago

Thanks for breaking it down, the overview doesn't help much.

twistedpair9• 4 years ago

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.

This is the real impactful change. This is for ALL STORAGE CLASSES, not just Coldline. As someone who manages billions of objects in GCP, I know very well that each of those object write is a Class A operation, so 2x in price.

Also keep in mind that anyone storing objects durably (DR, anyone?), e.g. your customer data, is using multi-region, so this is a notable cost impact.

Note that there is a curious inflection point where, the Class A/B operations on an object cost _more_ than the (bytes) storage cost, depending how long you retain the data. That's where this is very impactful.

Annual multi-regional Standard _storage_ cost for a 19MiB object

e.g. 0.026 $/(GiBmo) 12 mo/yr * 19 MiB/yr = 5.95E-06 $/yr/obj

Annual multi-regional Standard storage cost for an object that you 1x write (A), and 2x read (B).

e.g. 0.05/1e4 $/A req + 2 * 0.004/1e4 $/ B req = 5.80E-06 $/yr/object

Here we see that the old annual "storage" carrying cost for this 19MiB object was less than the "request" cost. Now double the cost of the operations and you should consider storing fewer, bigger objects.

thematrixturtle2• 4 years ago

All data on GCS is stored durably (14 9s or something ridiculous like that). The only reason to use dual/multiregion is for lower latency, you're basically paying for geo replication.

Of course, I'm sure many users are not aware of this, and it's not helped by the GCP console defaulting to multi when creating new buckets.

rainboiboi• 4 years ago

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.

jacquesm3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

syshum2• 4 years ago

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...

marcinzm• 4 years ago

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.

dillondoyle• 4 years ago

It seems like the increases are also focused on egress/bandwidth which people gripe about aws gauging on all the time?

rr8082• 4 years ago

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.

bombcar• 4 years ago

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.

acdha10• 4 years ago

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.

gorjusborg• 4 years ago

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.

johndfsgdgdfg• 4 years ago

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?

sklargh2• 4 years ago

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)

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

MSFT is a much bigger player than Oracle.

sklargh2• 4 years ago

Oooof big miss. Fixed.

napoleon_thepig• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

What does market concentration mean?

dralley• 4 years ago

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.

immibis5• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

dmw_ng2• 4 years ago

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)

bluedino3• 4 years ago

Well, it was called 'updates to pricing', not 'lower prices for' or 'double the memory/storage for our users'

acdha10• 4 years ago

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_ng2• 4 years ago

Seems like a great time to discount some equivalent fees by a token amount, even if only 1%

drusepth• 4 years ago

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.

wejick• 4 years ago

How to introduce price hike to look like an improvement

ushakov2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I'm using Cloud Functions as well - where did you move them to? Lambda?

ushakov2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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).

staticassertion3• 4 years ago

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.

pier252• 4 years ago

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.

staticassertion3• 4 years ago

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.

derekdb• 4 years ago

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.

pbiggar• 4 years ago

My $10,000/month bill just went up by $4.41 from "List Price $ increase in monthly bill due to multi-region egress"

maximilianroos• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

I'd love to be on a team that's reading 10TB per hour and has to explain that huge bill to executives!

atwebb• 4 years ago

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...

Cyclenerd2• 4 years ago

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.

fomine33• 4 years ago

For the case, data on one zone is a problem but one region (multiple zone) isn't a problem, isn't it?

twistedpair9• 4 years ago

Just gunning for the enterprise.

Who cares about DR, and having 3x copies of your data 100mi apart from each other? Small startups, or Enterprises? Enterprises can just push those costs to their DR budget.

bastardoperator• 4 years ago

Oh Google, you were so much better when you were focused on technology and not milking everything you touch.

jcoene• 4 years ago

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... :(

zmmmmm3• 4 years ago

It would seem that we have until October to move elsewhere

the biggest fear especially with this class of infrastructure (long term cold storage) is that they can make it too expensive to leave at any time by upping the retrieval / egress costs. How expensive is that move going to be?

twistedpair9• 4 years ago

Not sure about your usage model, but if you have a defined retention for customer data (e.g. 1 year), then you can start pushing new data to a different tier/cloud provider, as the old data drops off, and a year later, you're completely "migrated", without having to stage a stop the world migration between services.

seiryth3• 4 years ago

First real question would be do you actually need multi region buckets? If so, look elsewhere.. if not, time to reassess the architecture.

lukeaf• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

They did. We got personalized emails for each account showing the effect on each project.

didip• 4 years ago

Usually a SaaS company jacks up the price when they struggle to grow right?

So, is GCP struggling for growth?

remus2• 4 years ago

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.

politelemon• 4 years ago

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

deanCommie2• 4 years ago

While some customers may see an increase in their bills

Said Amazon never.

benlivengood• 4 years ago

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.

iskander2• 4 years ago

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.

chockchocschoir2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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/

kondro• 4 years ago

Wasabi's policy prevents reading more than you write. They're designed for backup, not publication.

thallium205• 4 years ago

Spin up a GSuite Enterprise account and drop it all in Drive. Unlimited storage in Drive for enterprise accounts.

iskander2• 4 years ago

They really don't cut you off if you put 10TB of FASTQs in there and let strangers download them?

foota• 4 years ago

You could use requested pays with s3 or GCP, which requires the reader to use their own project and pay for requests.

Dylan168079• 4 years ago

If you just want to beat the big providers, use B2.

If you expect to use many terabytes of bandwidth, then it's time to rent a server or VPS and probably set up a torrent too.

welkie• 4 years ago

How about B2 combined with Cloudflare? Egress from B2 to Cloudflare is free and egress from Cloudflare to the internet is free for their free plan, and perhaps competitive on their not free plan?

Quokkacalypse• 4 years ago

There's always ftp.

gnfargbl• 4 years ago

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

Dylan168079• 4 years ago

Charging that much money for specifically "non-premium" bandwidth is just insulting.

daenz• 4 years ago

Now to make a decision: pay in engineering time to optimize your engineering workflows to reduce cloud costs, or pay GCP instead?

mdoms• 4 years ago

Is this the first step to killing GCP?

profmonocle• 4 years ago

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%.

jl62• 4 years ago

When did the word “update” in a product announcement become a euphemism for bad news?

fleddr• 4 years ago

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".

rrdharan• 4 years ago

I’m a software engineer at Google, working on Cloud Bigtable, which I personally think is pretty “cool stuff”.

I speak to different prospective and existing customers multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, over chat, email, video conference and occasionally in-person (pre-pandemic).

I worked from home and made two pots of coffee today - one pour-over and one drip.

hankman86• 4 years ago

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.

Havoc• 4 years ago

This is in part why I like using cloud but only as very basic building blocks. Else the lock-in is too intense

zmmmmm3• 4 years ago

In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs.

Sounds like a sneaky way to win some quick revenue because they know a huge number of customers are not going to be able to go back and re-engineer their storage use in time, so will end up out-of-pocket even while Google gets to pretend they are saving everyone money.

It seems particularly problematic to increase prices on anything to do with long term cold storage. That is where customers are placing the most trust in their vendor since much of this data is held for mandatory compliance reasons and retrieval costs are sufficient that it is completely infeasible to migrate out.

Storage Transfer Service will be available free-of-cost for transfers within Cloud Storage, starting April 2 until the end of the year

Is this a loophole to get free retrieval of data from cold storage that we could exploit for other reasons?

tedk-42• 4 years ago

Once again this proves Google is NOT a customer focused company. These price increases are driven by accounting and are short term calculations.

As someone who's used AWS for most of my professional career, I've only ever seen prices being reduced to be more competitive rather than increased to 'align' with offerings of other vendors.

Newer generations of compute and storage are often cheaper and faster than previous generations which shows they are able to invest in technology to make things cheaper for the customer and lower cost for them to maintain which is impressive.

nerdyadventurer• 4 years ago

How is the AWS pricing compared to GCP in general?

Does AWS have anything similar to Cloud Run?

anirudhmurali• 4 years ago

Setting object lifecycle policies is now more important than ever because of the changes to the pricing in Google Cloud Storage. If anyone's interested to optimize their Cloud Storage costs - check out https://www.economize.cloud. We are launching support for Cloud Storage this week.

Updates to Google Cloud’s infrastructure capabilities and pricing

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