back to article Google's head in the clouds: Cut, cut as fast as you can. You can't match us, AWS plan

Not to be outbid by AWS's latest price cut, Google has announced that it too is slashing the costs of its cloudy services. "In case you’ve been reading recent announcements and were wondering, rest assured: Google continues to be the price/performance leader in public cloud," it said in a blog post seemingly responding to AWS …

  1. ratfox
    Windows

    Pricing isn't everything

    A lot of businesses also compare the available support.

    As a general rule, Amazon's is considered excellent, while Google typically elicits the question: "What support?"

    Google used to be "one of the big three" cloud offering; it is now often considered below "the big two". My understanding is that support is one of the main reasons.

    1. Adam 52 Silver badge

      Re: Pricing isn't everything

      As an AWS Enterprise support customer (paying around $ 500,000/yr for the privilege) I have to disagree. Very few of my tickets last year were answered within SLA and even fewer answered usefully.

      Support is OK on ec2 and EBS but poorer on the higher level stuff and awful for things like Lamda. Architecture support is basically paid-for sales/lock-in.

      No idea what Google or MS are like. MS PSS used to be good, but that was old MS before they went evil (!)

      1. Skoorb

        Re: Pricing isn't everything

        Whilst a bit hearsay (we don't use standard public cloud - patient confidentiality and all) a friend at a company that does says that they much prefer Google's paid support to Amazon's support. I think they pay the extra for 24/7 phone support for serious issues though.

        However, I understand that even then questions from your developers are supposed to go to Stack Overflow.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Have to agree, AWS were prompt when answering sales inquiries and the voice on the phone seemed local enough that conversation was simple, we migrated with relative ease and the quotations we put together ended up being spot on. After sales support has been the same, prompt and couldnt ask for much more

    Google on the other hand made the first few steps very difficult - so we walked away.

    Azure was barely a footnote on our research document - used to fall over so often that even non-techies in our org. were dead against it.

    1. Andy Roid McUser

      Azure

      We've tried to love Azure we really have but the simplicity of the AWS and Google Compute offering when looking at scripted deployments and supportability by staff is by far the best.

      Compute is great until your want support but their instances seem far more responsive for our workloads.

    2. Naselus

      "Azure was barely a footnote on our research document - used to fall over so often that even non-techies in our org. were dead against it."

      Funny thing is, Google actually fell over way more often in 2015 - 71 Azure outages vs 167 for Google. MS really seem to be getting their cloud act together, adding a load of spare capacity and adding a ton of support into win 10/ server 2016, while Google... not so much.

      1. fishman

        "Funny thing is, Google actually fell over way more often in 2015 - 71 Azure outages vs 167 for Google. "

        The number of outages is important, but how long were they out for? And were they partial (and if partial, how much?), or complete outages?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Exponential growth

    <pedant>

    Even if Google's usage had grown by only 1%, that would still be exponential growth

    </pedant>

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ah, the usual game of chicken.

    This is exactly why I prefer a quality service over one that's bought because it fits an accountant's view of the world. A race to the bottom line for a service that costs basically the same to supply for all participants means he who cuts corners most wins - at least on pure cost.

    The problem is that you may end up with the illusion of savings, until the problems caused by underfunding start. At that point it becomes costly indeed.

    Not that I would ever even touch Google for storing anything sensitive, but I know plenty who would. Some of them even work for UK government...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "illusion of savings"? Isn't that what most outsouring, offshoring, right shoring, far shoring, near shoring promises?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "illusion of savings"? Isn't that what most outsouring, offshoring, right shoring, far shoring, near shoring promises?

      Yup, it's the second most corrosive force in IT, straight after incompetent management.

  6. Lou 2
    Alert

    Race to the bottom

    It comes to who reaches bottom first - its a race that nobody wins - supplier, user or share holder. But as long as the figures look good an the KPI's are something unrelated to the real core service as dreamt up by some accounting droid, great example number of new licenses sold - here we go - WHEEEEEEE!

    And then a few years down the line - we start all over again.

  7. Sirius Lee

    They maybe cheaper like-for-like but who chooses to use AWS in the way that makes Google look good? Google is a cost per service platform where on AWS you can pay for a machine and do what you like on the machine - which maybe offering yourself several services for the price of one. Sure, paying an hourly rate for a specific service - a database for example - is convenient but its also relatively expensive when you can host a database and other services on the same box. At the top end, perhaps service model works because there is enough work to fill any service purchased. At the lower end its a waste of money because machines are barely occupied leaving plenty of cycles to do other things.

    The original Azure platform was service only but had to change when anyone who gave it a moments throught realized that a bit of effort made Azure look ridiculously expensive - plus it didn't support Linux.

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