Google Nearline is a much better option IMO. Seconds of retrieval time and still the same low price, and much easier to calculate your costs when looking into large downloads.
Their pricing is great (0.5c/month) but I'm a little worried about their single DC.
This makes their offer very interesting.
Considering though that before that you couldn't even upload a directory, only files, this is a huge step. :)
Is there any source for the single DC?
EDIT: Nevermind. I did some more googling & found one:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-frequent-que...
It's almost as cheap as Glacier, but requires no waiting and has no complicated hidden costs, just simply somewhat higher request pricing, a minimum 30 days of storage and an extra $0.01 per GB for data retrievals.
> Standard - IA has a minimum object size of 128KB. Smaller objects will be charged for 128KB of storage.
Rounding up all small files to 128 KB can be a huge deal. I for example use Nearline to directly "rsync" my NAS box for offsite backup (yeah I know, I should use something that turns it into a real archive or something, but I'm lazy and Synology has this built in). If those hundreds of thousands of (often) small files were rounded up, S3-IA would easily be more expensive than S3/GCS.
Disclaimer: I work at Google on Compute Engine and am a happy Nearline customer myself.
Glacier, as the article points out, is difficult to grok because there are provisioned bandwidth costs.
Nearline is difficult to grok because it simply caps your bandwidth at 4 MB/s per TB stored. It starts at 1 MB/s.
Basically, both are optimized to make retrieval slow and/or expensive because the cost optimizations they're doing internally are incentivizing very cold data, very big data, or both.
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine (GCE) but not Cloud Storage (GCS).
It does go against their slogan "only pay for what you use", though. You're not using that 15GB/hour for 744 hours, and haven't explicitly selected provisioned IOPs.
Not a problem all you can get is a crappy 8 Mbps ADSL. Oh well, let me whine... ;)
This write up is a pretty good summary of our differences on the compute side: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10922105
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, and specific to that article launched Preemptible VMs.
Since I can't find a way to set my account status to "personal" I'm somehow personally responsible to pay VAT (I wouldn't even know how to do that) if I don't want to risk getting problems with our version of the IRS. That doesn't sound like a nice way to do my personal backups.
On AWS that's not a problem, Amazon bills and pays the VAT for me.
That's all any of us on Google Cloud can usefully say about the damn VAT issue. We've got people working on it, but it's a Google wide issue (and I honestly don't understand the last mile enough to know why we don't do exactly what you describe AWS doing).
As a side reply to the poster below, it's not true that we're trying to exclude individuals. There are lots of happy, individual customers all over the world. We unfortunately just didn't get out ahead of this personal service / VAT thing as a company. So again, Sorry! And someone is working on it, but don't expect any immediate fixes when taxes/regulations/laws are involved.
From that same page: "Google Cloud Platform services can be used only for business purposes in the European Union."
That said, Google (like most businesses?) hasn't cancelled any product that is making lots of money. At Google, that means Ads, Apps, and yes Cloud. We're here to stay, and unlike on the consumer side Cloud has an explicit deprecation policy for products that have "gone GA" (graduated from Beta).
Big picture items like Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, etc. aren't going anywhere. We might deprecate our v1 API after we're on v2 of course, but we're not cancelling the product (again, it makes us money, and that's a pretty key distinction from the consumer products Google has historically shuttered).
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine and haven't personally cancelled anything yet ;).
Deleted comment
Your comment doesn't really relate to the parent, to this thread and is a question that is trivially easy to answer. There's no point in hundreds-to-thousands of HN readers seeing your comment which can be answered in under a second and anyone who's used GCE already knows the answer to.
Please considering querying Google, or a relevant knowledge base, before querying a tangentially related HN comment chain.
[0]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/operating-systems/linu...
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine.