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Comment by questionr | Hacker News Reader

Google is making their cloud offering very attractive compared to AWS.

The issue with Glacier is the convoluted retrieval pricing. I understand they want to dissuade people from using it as a primary storage, but the potential for a surprise bill is hard to swallow.

Interesting how they still offer unlimited storage through their consumer Amazon Drive service.

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The AWS web console is a pain point. I had a particularly frustrating experience once where attempting to restore a Glacier storage class file in S3 silently failed due to permission issues (I had forgotten to assign permissions to the bucket owner in my automated upload script), but the console told me that the file would be "available in 3-5 hours". I wasted days due to this.

Meanwhile other competitors (e.g. Nearline) promise to have your file available within seconds...

Yep. Nearline is great. Just so we're clear though: milliseconds ;). There's no latency penalty to get your bytes back, even with Coldline. We do charge a retrieval fee because the pricing is determined by a "promise" that you won't touch the data frequently (roughly once a month for Nearline and once a quarter for Coldline), otherwise you should use our regular flavors.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and am a happy GCS customer.

The issue is not limited to Glacier. The "Infrequent Access" is a nightmare as well.

Paying for storage, read and writes per GB and per request, rounded to 128kB blocks. WTF.

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