Always Free Usage Limits
cloud.google.com
cloud.google.com
The new non expiring free tier in GCP (aka Always Free Usage Limits) also offers a f1-micro instance while AWS does not offer a VM as part of their non expiring free tier.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-question...
I totally failed to understand that (I'm not very cloudy) and had to go to their sign-up page to figure out what was up.
However in order to do this you have to enable billing, unlike with the free tier of App Engine. I'm always wary of these things because I fear I'll screw up and run into a huge bill somehow. I currently have a pre-paid 1€/month VPS with $european_competitor to prevent this.
Would you mind sharing the VPS provider?
Well, well, well, turns out they offer FreeBSD 10. If it upgrades nicely to FreeBSD 11 then I think they've earned themselves a customer and Vultr will have lost one customer due to Vultr no longer giving best bang for the buck. Moving to ArubaCloud would give me 1GB RAM + 20GB SSD instead of the 768MB RAM + 15GB SSD my current Vultr VPS has, and it'd do so at a lower price. Meanwhile it seems also that the VPS configuration I have at Vultr for 5 USD per month is no longer available for new VPSes, instead Vultr now has 512MB RAM + 20GB SSD for 2.50 USD (which is about 2.35 EUR) per month and 1GB RAM + 25GB SSD for 5 USD (about 4.71 EUR) per month. And how much is ArubaCloud charging for 1GB RAM + 20GB SSD? 1 EUR per month, it says!
But the ArubaCloud prices are excluding VAT, it says. Does that mean they will bill me, who lives in Norway, slightly more than 1 EUR per month? Either way it'll be cheaper than Vultr.
Yes, I pay 1.21€ because general VAT is 21% in Spain. In any case it is almost inexpensive and so far the service is good. Virtualization is through VMware, you can script daily images, etc.
Also there are no performance guarantees, no SAN for the SSDs (no redundancy so much lower cost), limited bandwidth and a lower SLA.
I'd guess that since there are no performance guarantees, they're likely overcommitting substantially.
Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023
I signed up about a year ago. However I only used about three bucks and change over the 90 days because I was looking at using it for a side project and never had time to get far. Can I get the remaining $296.xx for 9 more months?
I'd recommend to see if there's any way for you to contact support and ask them to restart your free trial, while this announcement is still fresh.
Then I found this article (written 3 years ago):
https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
Bandwidth to Australia cost 20x that of EU or US because of Telstra :(
Good news though, Google are planning a Compute Engine zone in Sydney this year :)
I guess I'll just have to keep using AWS/Azure/$competitorX :(
I can't seem to select "Individual" when I sign up, it permanently selects "Business" and asks for a VAT number. I don't want to lie and get in trouble with the tax authorities or whatever.
I only plan to use it for tinkering at home!
AWS doesn't do this, why Google?
Today I got an email saying that my free trial was extended to 12 months.
This is what worries me the most, plus Google stipulate that your usage of the cloud platform must be for economic benefit, not for personal use.
AWS don't seem to have this restriction and they will collect and pay VAT on your behalf. Why doesn't Google? Is it some sort of tax dodge?
It seems that if they offer accounts to non-business users, they have to pay VAT themselves in every country in the EU. If they only offer accounts to businesses, they can have the business pay the VAT instead, saving themselves some accounting.
I've been meaning to try GCP for a while. I've only ever used AWS, so want to try another cloud.
But it seems like I can't legally use GCP?
If so, does that mean I can have a personal server running in the cloud, for free, forever? There's a hell of a lot you can do with a tiny server these days.
I signed up pretending to be a business, but I assume the VAT on the $3/mth I spend isn't worth anyone's time to account for. £0.20/year?
See https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/4g50uu/t...
So I signed up as indicated - but perhaps this free tier thing doesn't really work for accounts outside the USA either - as when trying to fire up an f1.micro instance it still says it's going to charge me (albeit out of the $300 free credit), so maybe I misunderstood something about the article.
Might sign up as business too.
I did look on the website but I couldn't find the information. I have to say on a mobile device the GCP pages are very poor IMO. Too big a font, too much spacing, intrusive sticky header and too many scrolling effects where content magically appears or disappears. And even worse - when I click the pricing calculator it doesn't fit on the iOS safari screen so it is unusable. It does feel that some CSS and JS wizard got given far too much free reign.
I get mine from LetsEncrypt using a process somewhat automated similar to [1].
It is still a pain in the ass semi-manual job I have to do every few months but I get SSL for free.
I hope they launch some better integration with LetsEncrypt in the future.
[1]: http://blog.seafuj.com/lets-encrypt-on-google-app-engine
Yeah, I don't think that really counts.
while true; do sleep 1; doneA CRUD app in language that doesn't smash the CPU (i.e. closer to Go net/http than WordPress) would probably perform adequately as well.
I don't know how they're going to give out 100k ips tho
Make sure they changed / fixed this before trusting GAE
If anyone could confirm this is still the case please say
Edit - is GAE usage == GCP ? If not I will remove this comment immediately sorry
From what I understand based on the docs, you have to run an AppEngine instance just for the cron functionality.
No news here, just the usual business model of the "cloud": cheap in, expensive out. They rope you in with a fee tier then charge you 9-18x more for egress than you pay for it running your own hardware with IP transit (or going with a VPS provider like Vultr that charges you the correct prices for it).
Have fun scaling your company economically, hope you don't need to send any data to your customers.
I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we were putting everything on Vultr. And fwiw, we're not cloud based for the exact reasons you mention (some spot usage). It makes sense for our business model, we have predictable computing growth needs, so we go bare metal. But I understand why that doesn't make sense for other people.
For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC marketing spam all day.
I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for all price tiers, access to actual networking power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot. Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to mobile phone CPUs.
Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at: giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on.
I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.
Not everyone. I've had plenty of discussions with people who had no idea.
Events like these (whether Google, Microsoft, AWS, etc.) always have multiple big announcements which are worth discussing and it seems many people agree.
There are numerous benefits with using a major cloud provider so while the outbound bandwidth is expensive, surely you can see how every business has it's own needs and should weigh the costs for themselves. As a GCP startup, we're scaling very economically on their platform and wouldn't give it up even if the bandwidth was free elsewhere.
I believe there's some kind of Google event happening in San Francisco at the moment.
Cloud Hosting Showdown: DO vs. Linode vs. Vultr vs. OVH vs. Scaleway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798023
They are giving you free computing resources.
You could enjoy using it for something that makes no sense economically but people might enjoy. Or host your open source application on it. But I guess open source would be uneconomic too.
Or you could complain.
I ask because since 2010, Amazon.com has been running on AWS.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo&t=7m32s
(Around 7m30s into video)
Source: work at google, but on search, not cloud.
I'm hesitate to use GCP, given that technically Google itself isn't using GCP (totally understanding that a lift and shift of this size takes times, but it would speak volumes if you can tout that Google itself is on GCP)
Quoting the page: "Always Free Usage Limits. Included products and usage limits are subject to change."
Why they don't write a truth: "Current Free Usage Limits, which are subject to change." ?
This used to be fine print (which is still wrong). These days I call it bullshit print.
That's a very broad statement which I think is not even remotely true.
Then again, all my friends are Westerners, so it could be that they do this sort of thing in the East too.
People seem to be blaming the US because the US is leading the way with false advertising.
The best ad I've seen so far was an cut out of old Indian newspaper advertising genital cream with magical radioactive ingredients that are 100% safe and work wonders, signed by doctors.
The fact that Google might terminate the contract is another story.
Now, if Google could change the price without giving you the option to cancel, that would be a scandal. But I don't think that's the case.
The way I see it if Google intends the service to be always free, that's enough for me. After all, I don't think any rational observer would expect 'always' to include e.g. Google going out of business, all their data centers being blown up by terrorists, etc so to me it seems pretty obvious that it's contingent on all sorts of conditions that can change in the future, some of which might be at Google's discretion and others not.
As someone who's reasonably well-traveled, I've hardly found shifty marketing language to be unique to any particular locale.
And I'm not even sure that THIS marketing language is all that shifty. You want an iron-clad assurance that NOTHING will change between now and the next 100 years? The Sun going supernova? Heat death of the universe? I'm pretty sure that reasonable people understand that "always" or "forever" mean, "Open-ended and not subject to change without adequate notice".
While many people seem to agree that the platform itself works very well, if you are developing on GCP, free credits or not, doesn't this mean you are knowingly getting into a platform that will be hard to leave?
Can someone who has worked with GCP address if these concerns are still ongoing? Also, are there some positives which are not easy to see from the outside which might have helped you choose them/stick with them?
You mean App Engine?
At some point they realised that maintaining their own parallel forks of the runtimes was a loser's game and now gently push you toward the "Flexible Environment", which maps more transparently onto GCE (their equivalent to EC2) instances (which is better for them since you're billed much more directly according to your resource use), and has much more up to date runtimes, and you can supply your own docker image if none of them fit.
The only people I know of who actively use the Standard Env anymore for new projects are trying to have a hobby project run for free in the free tier.
Are you talking about Postgres support? Because they also announced that today. Or are you talking about something else?
> 2) Only a subset of language features are supported for Java and Python
The new "App Engine Flexible Environment" seems to support most things, including Python 3 and libraries with C extensions. Are you perhaps talking about the old App Engine environment?