Google Storage Now Available To Developers

[jcampbell1]

5 years, 1 month and 28 days after S3 is publicly launched. It is just a reminder that the threat by incumbents to startups is hardly worth worrying about.

[StavrosK]

Wait, who's the incumbent and who's the startup? Amazon was founded four years before Google...

[jggube]

Amazon was hardly a startup 5 years ago. And we're talking about a service and a space that's difficult to replicate and get into. S3 had resources most startups won't have to get that 5-year lead.

[peteforde]

The pricing is far less interesting to me than the differences between GS and S3. In some significant ways, GS appears to be a much more technically sophisticated product. And there are some arguably less used functionality like BitTorrent which are removed from the picture.

The ACL scheme is significantly more flexible on GS. In fact, one of the two major problems I have with S3 is a non-issue on GS:

1. All files on S3 are not world-readable when they are first uploaded. You cannot change the default permission for a file uploaded to a bucket. On GS you can set the default ACL on a bucket to world-readable.

2. For me, the most incredible thing GS could do right now is add a callback API. I want it to notify my application when my bucket is updated, webhooks style.

With both 1 & 2 in place, you can build storage driven applications in the cloud that don't require constant polling. Man, that would sure be something.

[zbailey]

A compelling reason for our use case to switch from S3 is their support for lots of buckets coupled with CNAME support:

http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html

Due to Amazon's limitation of 100 buckets per account and the coupling between bucket name and CNAME, hosting files for our clients and supporting custom CNAMEs has not been possible for us. If we were to move to Google Storage, it would be.

[joeyh]

Another good reason for certain use cases is its support for resumable uploads:

http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/developer-guide.htm...

Afaik S3 can't do that.

[ceejayoz]

I just wish either one would support SSL for CNAMEd buckets.

[jbyers]

It's really nice to see that boto (python AWS library) supports S3 and Google Storage side-by-side. Being able to pick and choose providers behind the same API is how the cloud should be.

[spullara]

It probably wouldn't have worked out that way if Google didnt clone S3's API.

[gburt]

Can someone explain why I would choose this over S3, when S3's starting rate is 0.14 / GB and goes down from there?

[akshat]

At Google's scale I would have guessed that they would have had no difficulty in matching and even beating Amazon's pricing. This is surprising. Why so?

[bdonlan]

Perhaps they're looking to grow the service slowly initially? If they announced pricing significantly lower than amazon's right at launch they'd get a flood of new traffic that could overload however much resources they provisioned for launch. By starting out with a slightly higher pricing model, they can test out the service with production customers, and slowly reduce prices to attract more business when they're confident they can handle the load.

[orijing]

Even if they could, why should they, if they don't have to?

[ASUmusicMAN]

No more invites required to use, but at first glance it appears to be more expensive than S3.

[stumm]

Cost of storing data:

S3: $0.140 per GB (at the most expensive rate) vs. Google: $0.17 per GB (at their only listed rate)

The rest seems to be the same though.

[brucehart]

Google's pricing is pretty close to Amazon's for low-end users, but high-end users will still find S3 to be much cheaper. I was hoping Google would be the competitor that would pressure Amazon to reduce the cost of S3. S3's prices have been pretty constant over the last few years even though I would assume that Amazon's expenses have decreased due to lower storage and hardware costs.

[riobard]

Download data: $0.15 to Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa $0.30 to Asia-Pacific

So if a bunch of people from Japan decide to download from your app, you are screwed.

[SkyMarshal]

You're screwed if a bunch of people download from your app from anywhere, for sufficiently large values of 'bunch'.

[lzm]

A bucket in Latin America would be a killer feature. Doesn't Google already have a data center in São Paulo?

[MatthewB]

I am a little confused about Google Storage Manager. Is this supposed to be a consumer facing product? AKA dropbox killer?

[ceejayoz]

No, it's an Amazon S3 competitor.

[tybris]

Only 5 years, 1 month, and 28 days after Amazon made S3 available to developers.

[bane]

meh, in 3 years they'll probably just announce a new pricing structure where every reasonable use of this ends up with 1000%-2000% price hike (GAE user here, grumble grumble)

[neworbit]

Damn, I was hoping this was going to spur Amazon to cut prices.

[reedlaw]

Anyone know how to copy an S3 bucket to Google Storage?

[michaelbuckbee]

The quickest/cheapest thing would probably be to startup an ec2 instance, install the GSUtils [1] and then pull from S3 and push to GS.

1 - http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/gsutil.html#install

[epynonymous]

does anyone know if s3 is profitable?

[elithrar]

Only the same people who know how many Kindles they've sold. Amazon is pretty tight-lipped about their financials, at least at a granular level.

[zackattack]

i thought this was just an auxiliary service to other google services.. not really a competitor to s3?