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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Or, Google thought the publicity was worth a gigantic discount.

(EDIT: The provided quote from a Twitter employee hints at this directly: "the savings")

I did a gig for <huge content producer/delivery company> and at the time mostly did AWS implementations (I work at AWS now full time, for what it's worth). The client was really interested in going with Google Cloud because they were promised essentially free storage, with no limit.

This is a company with more petabytes of video footage in their data lake than I've seen before and GCP wanted to give them free storage for the prestige (and possible upside, longterm) of having Big Company on their list.

"savings" does not imply discounts, mind you. GCP is actually cheaper on most fronts compared to AWS, Azure.

Quote from reply above: "Derek’s point about savings is about list price differences that result from total system performance (and not any sort of special discounting)"

Google may be playing the long game. I've seen an effect on my team after moving from physical hardware and centralized capacity provisioning to GCP with immediate gratification hardware. It's easier to spend money so we ask for more stuff more often.

it is The Jevons paradox [1]. I have seen it as well happening when I migrated a client from a standard cloud architecture to a serverless architecture.

>>> In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

A comment from a Google Cloud employee seems to suggest otherwise.

> Derek’s point about savings is about list price differences that result from total system performance (and not any sort of special discounting).

There's a lot of ways that both can be true. For example, metering variables that are friendly to how Google does things.

This is an interesting case, sorta like Amazon going to NYC. If you give discounts and lower your profit you get something, plus PR. If you don't you loose it all.

But if all ask for the Twitter discount, you're screwed. However, by by next year no one can compare the offerings side by side. Better machines, cheaper offerings etc.

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