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back to article Google slashes cloud storage to $0.026 per GB. Your move, Amazon

Google has dramatically lowered its cloud prices far below those of its rivals – as the search kingpin seeks to eradicate the fat profit margins of the cloud industry. The web giant announced today at its Google Cloud Platform event in San Francisco a 68 per cent price drop across the board for Google Cloud Storage – as El Reg …

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  1. An0n C0w4rd

    Winners?

    Customers win from a race-to-the-bottom in the short term, but long term? I'm not so sure. To many other industries have suffered from consolidation and significant supplier failure rates in the race to the bottom, leading (in the end) to only a few big suppliers and less competition.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Winners?

      Welcome to capitalism where the end game is a monopoly or cartel.

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      1. Eddy Ito
        Reply Icon

        Re: Winners?

        Monopolies and cartels only happen when the entry barriers are too high for new companies. It doesn't matter whether the barriers are because economies of scale favor large entities, government regulations creating legal obstacles, capital equipment cost or any number of other problems including Louie who would "hate for anything to happen to a nice business such as this".

        Capitalism, for all its flaws, has nothing to do with it. China's Great Leap Forward in which the state made itself the monopoly in most every aspect of production had little to do with capitalism.

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      2. DagMurphy
        Reply Icon
        Go

        Re: Winners?

        it would seem capitalism has brought us three big players adding more and more features for lower and lower cost every day... is this a bad thing?

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Winners?

      It's surely better to have three big suppliers battling on price and features than to have just one defacto supplier who has no reason to stay competitive on price and likely to grow complacent on features.

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    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Winners?

      Because Google are basically irrelevant in this space. It's a battle between Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3.

      My money is on Microsoft eventually prevailing.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Winners?

        > Because Google are basically irrelevant in this space. It's a battle between

        > Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3.

        Really? What's your reasoning?

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      2. fredesmite
        Reply Icon

        Re: Winners?

        Amazon is light years of ahead of the turd MS is trying to peddle.

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    4. Steve Knox
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Re: Winners?

      Long-term, Google and the NSA win.

      1 6
      1. Thorne
        Reply Icon

        Re: Winners?

        Long-term, Google and the NSA win.

        FIFY

        9 1
    5. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Winners?

      I'm not sure it's necessarily a race to the bottom - sure, storage and cpu will always get cheaper, but there's enough innovation coming out of Google with products like Big Query (100k writes/sec announced today) that price isn't the only way to compete. They just need to convince CIO types that shoving PB of data in the cloud is better than running Oracle on a room full of Dells.

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    6. James 100
      Reply Icon

      Re: Winners?

      This is something I've hated about UK broadband in the last few years, with lots of "ISPs" competing to offer "broadband" for 50p a year, free with a tin of beans etc - hacking investment to the bone or beyond, and now comparison shopping sites listing ISPs by price so you can make sure you're getting the bare minimum.

      We do see this in low-end web hosting ("unlimited" space and bandwidth! Only 5p/year! May collapse if your site is actually visited...) but I think it's unlikely in this market - hard to oversubscribe RAM or storage, and any shortage of network bandwidth would quickly be well-known.

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  2. NoneSuch Silver badge

    There are no winners when all the entrants are American.

    Whats the nearest Euro equivalent?

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    1. WibbleMe
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      https://www.openshift.com

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  3. WibbleMe

    Recently I set up a small WP blog, I tried Googles' Apps first, I found that they had only recently started to allow PHP/WP to run on there system and was still in beat stage. The setup and interface was very orited arround how much resourses you were using and getting the site online... it was painfull mostly due to the fact that I had to use Googles own software instead of an FTP software to put my files on the web and navigating arround the locations of different Apps were a bit confusing, too many homepages. Eventually I went for an AWS through a 3'd party that handled the complex stuff very well so I am now paying 0.002p an hour or about $10 a month for a ubuntu 500mb server, one that I can do what I want with even re-install in a few mins. I did keep Googles Gmail business App, very good but from my opion Google may have the hardware but not the software. I guess Google could use the hand of a more friendly 3'd party like I used for AWS

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    1. Tom Wood
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      Not sure a small Wordpress blog

      is really the target market for this service...

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      1. NoneSuch Silver badge
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        Re: Not sure a small Wordpress blog

        WP Blogs turn into big things sometimes. If it's this easy to set up then bonus points to them. I wish all computing was this accessible. And $10 a month for a server ain't bad either.

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        1. James Cooke
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          Re: Not sure a small Wordpress blog

          Compared to a cheap VPS I would say it is.

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        2. Jamie Jones Silver badge
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          WTF?

          Re: Not sure a small Wordpress blog

          " And $10 a month for a server ain't bad either."

          $10 for a 500mb server?

          One of my backup servers is a FreeBSD jail - 5GB for less than $5 a month (from joinvps.com - i've nothing to do with them, just a customer etc. I think they also do the Linux equivalent at the same price)

          Another is only $10 a month for a KVM VPS with native ip6 and 5 ip4's ...

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          1. Tom Wood
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            Re: Not sure a small Wordpress blog

            I'm now not sure whether you meant 500 MB of RAM or storage. I has assumed RAM - in which case that's not too bad (though overkill for a small blog) but if storage then you can definitely get a VPS cheaper, and probably easier to set up.

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            1. WibbleMe
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              Re: Not sure a small Wordpress blog

              Yess 500m RAM for this "droplet", the mimimum size as well.

              0 0
  4. Phil Endecott

    Mobility

    How easily can users move between e.g. Amazon and Google services?

    Unless that "friction" is low, people will tend to stick with what they have despite the lower prices elsewhere.

    1 0
    1. Nate Amsden
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      Re: Mobility

      amazon tries to make their services as much of a roach motel as possible. Really depends on the customer and what level they build to. At the two companies I have been at which used amazon services neither integrated very closely with the APIs so it wasn't difficult to move to our own hosted solution(though in one case they are still using SQS even 2 years after we moved out, they've wanted to replace it with something better, hosted in house but they haven't had the time to complete a project to that extent yet - the way they use SQS is quite horrible as well it's a severe bottleneck at times).

      Some folks really like those APIs though and they'll probably stay and hope amazon matches the prices in the future.

      2 0
    2. fredesmite
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      Re: Mobility

      AFAIK - users are locked into one or the other. Just like openstack implementations.

      0 0
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Such a Choice!

    Between Der Ubermenschen and Walmart-on-the-Puget. I guess there's always Cisco and their advanced Indian technology to save us.

    0 1
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IBM

    Where is IBM in this space ? They don't feature on any of the graphs...

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  7. Lostintranslation

    And what exactly could you store on Google's cloud that you didn't want rifling through, sold or otherwise exploited?

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  8. zero_sum

    Cloud might get cheaper and cheaper, but it still doesn't solve the fundamental issues: security, privacy, NSA invigilation, crazy contracts that state cloud providers can do pretty much everything with your data...

    Call me a luddite, but for syncing folders and data I'd rather use BitTorrent Sync or a similar P2P solution. And if I want to share something with someone, it is always faster and more secure to use Filemail (30 GB for free) or some other service rather than a cloud drive.

    People will soon start discovering how many strings are attached to cloud storage.

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    1. LosD
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      We are not talking Google Drive. This is not really about file sync, but about services for running your backend on.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    and you'll get what you pay for

    there's a direct relationship between price and the quality of services one receives. It's much more than just capacity.

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