- An unmentioned alternative to this pricing is that GCP has a deal with Cloudflare that gives you a 50% discount to what is now called Premium pricing for traffic that egresses GCP through Cloudflare. This is cheaper for Google because GCP and Cloudflare have a peering arrangement. Of course, you also have to pay Cloudflare for bandwidth.
- This announcement is actually a small price cut compared to existing network egress prices for the 1-10 TiB/month and 150+ TiB/month buckets.
- The biggest advantage of using private networks is often client latency, since packets avoid points of congestion on the open internet. They don't really highlight this, instead showing a chart of throughput to a single client, which only matters for a subset of GCP customers. The throughput chart is also a little bit deceptive because of the y-axis they've chosen.
- Other important things to consider if you're optimizing a website for latency are CDN and where SSL negotiation takes place. For a single small HTTPS request doing SSL negotiation on the network edge can make a pretty big latency difference.
- Interesting number: Google capex (excluding other Alphabet capex) in both 2015 and 2016 was around $10B, at least part of that going to the networking tech discussed in the post. I expect they're continuing to invest in this space.
- A common trend with GCP products is moving away from flat-rate pricing models to models which incentivize users in ways that reflect underlying costs. For example, BigQuery users are priced per-query, which is uncommon for analytical databases. It's possible that network pricing could reflect that in the future. For example, there is probably more slack network capacity at 3am than 8am.