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Upcoming price increases for Cloud Storage

100 points| gotmedium | 3 years ago |cloud.google.com | reply

59 comments

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[+] nisa|3 years ago|reply
If you don't need all the cloud stuff - Hetzner has also storage server i.e. SX134 with 10x16TB for 250€/month. For 50€/month you can order a 10Gbit upgrade and after 20TB free traffic it's 1€/TB egress. It's an ordner of magnitude cheaper. Of course that's because you are responsible for checking the disks, setting everything up and keeping it up to date - but at least for the problems we have where I work there is absolutely no need to use Google or any other cloud and Hetzner is more than good enough.
[+] acdha|3 years ago|reply
You need to multiply those numbers by 3 to reflect that the cloud storage service has geographic redundancy, and you need a software stack which provides the same replication and bitrot protection, etc.
[+] jmugan|3 years ago|reply
People say you should manage your own data. That's great until you have to demonstrate compliance with security regulations. If I'm a big cloud provider, the more regulations and requirements there are the better it is for my business.
[+] dilyevsky|3 years ago|reply
If you run petabyte size storage clusters, engineering for compliance should still be small fraction of dollars saved compared to what you’d be paying in cloud (even with old pricing).
[+] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
If you mom and pops shop sure, but if you have like... enough people to cover for 24/7, you have enough people for that.

Managing compliance within the app itself is much more work to that.

[+] acchow|3 years ago|reply
Aren't storage drives and networking costs getting cheaper?

Are rising prices like this a result of the market being an oligopoly?

[+] acdha|3 years ago|reply
My guess is that it's more along the lines of GCP being expected to be profitable. They're a distant #3, possibly #4 in the market so it seems unlikely that they're trying to exploit market position when that'll just give customers another reason to switch to AWS.
[+] idunno246|3 years ago|reply
in the last round of storage price increases, the biggest change for us was reading multi-region storage, like five or six figures a month increase. 'just rearchitect your application.' it seemed to really be a punishment(sin tax if you will) on a behavior they want people not to do. or align revenue with costs i guess. it really sucks working with a partner that thinks punitive actions are ok.

the whole but youre on a contract so it doesnt apply yet is such bs, it just delays the pain, and we lost track of the many places we saw price increases.

[+] chrismeller|3 years ago|reply
I was thinking it’s just relative to energy prices keeping all this infrastructure plugged in, but that only makes sense (kinda) for storage.
[+] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
Yes, yes, and storage in cloud was always much more expensive than just "amount of hardware for that amount of redundancy".

Bandwidth price to datacenter is below $1/Mbit at bulk rate. That is either sold in form of whole link (say 10Gbit) or per 95th percentile (essentially "peak transfer rate") not "per MB sent"

[+] lossolo|3 years ago|reply
Cloud pricing is insane, we are handling around 3 billion dynamic requests a month and serving 100+ TBs of static content a month for a few hundred euros, all rented/dedicated servers, with zero problems. So we would pay like 10-100x times more in the cloud for the same hardware and traffic.
[+] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
We had bosses come few times to price the cloud migration and every single time it ends up being few times as expensive.

"What about extra work to keep the physical hardware running" - for 7 racks we have maybe a dying drive every month or two. Installing a rack of servers takes about a day with all preparations.

"What about setting up software" - we have automation and paid it off long time ago. Genuine concern for company that starts up but not really for one that needs at least few racks worth of servers.

[+] cl0ckt0wer|3 years ago|reply
Latin America egress is going from one cent to fourteen cents? Is that a typo?
[+] htrp|3 years ago|reply
a PM at google is trying to get promoted.
[+] belltaco|3 years ago|reply
Network egress doubling from 0.01 to 0.02? Seems a bit much.
[+] zxspectrum1982|3 years ago|reply
It's worse in Asia (x8), Oceania (x8) and Latin America (x14). Wow.

Asia $0.01/GB => $0.08/GB Oceania $0.01/GB => $0.08/GB Latin America $0.01/GB => $0.14/GB

[+] FredPret|3 years ago|reply
Egress is why I own a back end server for my projects rather than rent one from AWS/GCP. Unfortunately you still need at least a small instance to host a website.
[+] rektide|3 years ago|reply
Hot on the heels of CloudFlare raising prices 25% (and offering an annual plan to drop prices back down). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33795808 https://blog.cloudflare.com/adjusting-pricing-introducing-an...
[+] tebbers|3 years ago|reply
Cloudflare is ludicrously good value for money, even on the $25 a month plan. Even on the free plan you get a huge amount for $0.
[+] dhdgrygev|3 years ago|reply
However, using Cloudflare R2 to distribute content is still thousands of times cheaper than GCP.
[+] jqpabc123|3 years ago|reply
This is why you should manage your own data storage if possible.
[+] Terretta|3 years ago|reply
Preferably far far away from the cloud servers that perform workloads on that storage, so you can enjoy high latency plus ingress and egress costs to access it?

None of these costs are valid in isolation. The DIY savings is probably not a savings for most use cases.

// Disclosure: 10+ years back, our company undersold S3 at 1/10th the cost and much higher performance, but only for multi hundred megabyte up to multi gigabyte files. S3 does the generalized object store shape of work extremely well, likely better than anyone, and is worth it -- even before adding IAM, local querying, and all the other S3 goodies when native AWS. While underselling them for storage we operated, we also used them for our own storage needs.

[+] lee101|3 years ago|reply
Best to Checkout alternatives e.g. https://text-generator.io does text to speech over 8x cheaper which is crazy, cloud storage costs going up a lot but compute costs have always been high esp for managed services/ml so shop around and on a code level, ideally use a wrapper around your Cloud usage to make switching easier
[+] depole12|3 years ago|reply
I actually think this is the sign of GCP growing up, and trying to become a profitable business. Long gone are the days where pricing was set by a PM throwing shit against the wall, with little attention paid to cost structure or margins (who remembers free GKE clusters?)
[+] cypress66|3 years ago|reply
I know people hate oracle, and its features and polish is much lower than AWS. But you should check out oracle Cloud pricing, it's really good. And its free tier is absurdly good.
[+] gazby|3 years ago|reply
When Oracle decides it's time to start making money instead of gathering market share with a loss leader, it's gonna hurt a lot more than the adjustment from Google here.
[+] dilyevsky|3 years ago|reply
I hope you read those ULAs very carefully - you may owe your firstborn to lary if it’s that cheap
[+] qwertyuiop_|3 years ago|reply
This is expected. First they offer multi year free usage contracts. Bring customers onboard and then raise prices because they were a loss leader.
[+] metalspot|3 years ago|reply
raising prices by 50% on a steadily depreciating asset