GCP arrives in India with launch of Mumbai region
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
cloudplatform.googleblog.com
Somewhat related: I was forced to switch to GCP for hosting my static website because of lack of payment options. AWS doesn't allow you to prepay. The only way to settle your dues is using a credit card. My international debit card usually works everywhere but it didn't in case of AWS. I never felt the need to get a credit card. I had to waste many hours in moving to GCP because there wasn't a way I could use to pay.
It's funny how I have failed often to buy something online because payment options are not international friendly. Latest in this case was New Yorker subscription. Every address combination I tried said the same thing: "Address is invalid", even though I had ticked the option for International subscription. Support was hopeless and in the end, I had to go without it. It's like I am saying, "Shut up and take my money" and people at the other end are tone-deaf to it.
IMO, credit cards are less damaging to you in case of misuse.
If your debit card is stolen or its details are stolen from websites, you are at risk of losing your money directly from your bank account and recovering it may not be easy. You're at the mercy of the bank to compensate you, and most banks insist on formalities such as filing a police complaint. Good luck with that if the misuse happens from some other country.
If the same happens with a credit card, you can dispute it without actually losing any money.
(Additionaly, if my debit card is stolen it's of limited use without my PIN.)
Other reasons is limiting credit exposure/can't get credit for it
Debit cards work online in some places or you have a different way of paying
I know of other examples where it is, but credit card is probably not one if them besides chip and pin vs chip and signature.
* Easy to use, you always carry your phone.
* Never expire.
* Password protected, card number and CVV are fragile.
* Works without a POS. Basically in China QR-codes on paper are everywhere.
* Online payment is super easy, you won't need to type billing addresses, etc.
What you say is pretty much similar to credit card.
2. They're more prone to abuse: if somebody gets hold of the numbers on your card (whether by a leak or hack or by old-fashioned pickpocketing), no further PIN, password or 2FA token is required
3. The only use for them is online spending outside Europe, and even then the number of websites that require them is rapidly shrinking (PayPal can work with bank accounts, and Stripe now supports SEPA direct debit and local payment methods such as SOFORT (Germany), iDEAL (Netherlands) and Bancontact (Belgium))
4. They cost money (see point 3, people don't like paying for things they don't use)
2. In the US at least, fraud isn’t the responsibility of the card owner
3. That’s true
4. There are plenty of cards with no annual fee and net negative cost through rewards
The cost of the risk of fraud is bundled into the ~2-3% transaction fee.
1. As for 1, it's self control. 3. The only use is not for online shopping, it's for every day use. Cash can get stolen, credit card can, but you can then cancel it. 4. Plenty of cards are free.
3. For every day use, there is your bank card which comes for free with your bank account. (A growing number of people don't use cash daily, and there are even people who have ditched cash altogether and gone card-only.)
4. I have not run into any free CCs offered in my country (Netherlands). If you have, please point me to them.
As for fraud, it's not only about the risk, but also about the hassle. I have heard of people who had their credit card suddenly cancelled because of fraudulent transactions, and the banks will only send a replacement to your home address, even when you are travelling! The risk that this happens with a bank card is much lower, as entering your PIN proves that you authorize the transaction.
I guess a bunch of countries are behind USA in credit card offerings. I am from Turkey, and situation in Turkey is very similar to united states - credit cards are very very common.
With AWS a region has more than one availability zone.
aws ec2 describe-availability-zones --region ap-south-1 for example shows two datacenters in mumbai.
Across physical site security, to power to network to just hard drive and system decommissioning, more than 6 staff.
I wonder if this is partly why AWS has done so well. I've used colo and hosted providers who do seem to have basically no one actually on site.
As of November 2015, Maharashtra had 38 Gigawatts of generation to Tamil Nadu's 23 [1]. Maharashtra and Gujarat jointly produce a quarter of India's 100 GW; Tamil Nadu 8%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_India_by_installed_p...
(Disclaimer: I work in GCP.)
(Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, but totally not working on datacenter stuff.)
I agree with you, I'm not seeing the big draw of California, especially given the much more expensive electricity plus greater earthquake risk.
That said, I'm curious about why they choose Mumbai (similar to @amiturk) - is it cable access, politics, land cost, ...?
If you have a notable amount of data, they all have pretty hard lock in.
Avoiding lock-in, where reasonable (you're never going to be able to carry out something like big query as far as I can tell, and I don't work on those products or have special knowledge there) is something close to our hearts and is an important topic during design discussions of new products.
(I work for Google, on cloud, on the containerized developer workflow)
AWS does a lot of things right, and we're more than happy to go toe-to-toe with them in the areas they have us beat. Competition is a sign of a healthy economy where everyone benefits. How can you compete if you don't even try to match the people you are competing against?
Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.
Look, both Google and AWS have areas where each excels over the other, but to say that Google isn’t innovating is to say you are basically ignorant of their offering.
In terms of paid usage, I believe AWS still has the better pricing and aggressively cuts prices for existing offerings.
I personally have seen S3 prices drop multiple times over the years I've used it.
The default pricing mechanism in AWS for on-demand instances in particular for companies that can’t afford to rewrite their non-cloud native software with tons of state and no CI/CD infrastructure or process is a boon for AWS and even at six figure monthly spend you could certainly use a 40%+ discount on your instances.
EMR is basically hosted Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of a system Google created and made famous.
Docker is based on cgroups, which was largely contributed by Google engineers. And anyone deploying docker for distributed systems will tell you that you need some kind of scheduler/orchestrator.
Amazon excels at packaging and bundling the work of others, and provides a fairly robust enterprise management layer on top of it. CloudFormation, for example, is much better than GCP’s Deployment Manager. Google is quickly catching up in the enterprise management space as well, as they take on larger customers who demand these abilities, but I still feel like AWS has a bit more capability there.
You probably should have listed Lambda, which was a nice idea out of AMZN.
Disclaimer: Google employee, not working on cloud stuff, but admire how cloud has evolved over time.