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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
jacquesm|4 years ago
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
rr808|4 years ago
acdha|4 years ago
bombcar|4 years ago
gorjusborg|4 years ago
You'd have to rewrite the entire application to port it to another cloud provider.
johndfsgdgdfg|4 years ago
syshum|4 years ago
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
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