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Comment by rainboiboi | Hacker News Reader

I do expect AWS to capitalize on this and persuade GCP customers to switch. I have no idea why GCP thinks that their customers are sticky enough to stay with them through the price increase.

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I do. There is a substantial cost to switching stuff like this. We use Gsuite and a very minimal GC setup so from a financial perspective it doesn't really matter all that much. But clearly GC is set up for huge enterprises and for an SME customer all that flexibility translates into considerable overhead. Having a 'single supplier' is a risk because it puts all of your eggs in one basket, at the same time it should normally simplify things. But in the case of GC it probably doesn't.

That said: neither AWS nor MS are particularly attractive either, none of these companies really have my sympathy, it is choosing the least bad rather than choosing the best. Technical merits, pricing, cost to switch, company image, it all factors into decisions like these.

I agree the number of customers outright switching cloud platforms will be low. But some of them might start small explorations of multi-cloud, even if it's just at the level of "my team wants to use an AWS product for this internal project" isn't auto-denied. Long-term, that chips away at GCP's leverage on their existing customers.

My corporation is on Google Cloud and its taken 3 years, trained thousands of engineers and jumped through hundreds of FTE-years of bureaucracy to get a few applications set up. Its very hard to use cloud, and to switch to save a bit of money isn't going to happen.

This is it exactly. Google has decided that the bait has been taken, and now it's time to "set the hook" - this is the first pull.

The difference is that GCP is a distant #3 (going on 4). It’s much easier to find engineers and tools for AWS and a fair amount of the cost historically was working around gaps. That doesn’t mean there are no reasons to use it, of course, but it undercuts the amount of pressure they can apply. Given the well-known internal deadline for profitability, I’d be surprised if didn’t give some current or potential customers pause.

Who will become #3 if GCP is going on #4?

Alibaba is not far behind them:

https://www.statista.com/chart/18819/worldwide-market-share-...

It's not hard to imagine some customers jumping to AWS or Azure, which most large organizations are likely to already be familiar with[1] moves like this & that looming mandate causing C-level concerns since everyone knows GCP is not profitable at the current pricing but is expected to become so soon. A lot of big organizations prefer to pay a predictable amount of money than run the risk of price increases blowing their budget.

The other possibility I was thinking about is consolidation in the less popular providers — e.g. what happens if IBM sells their cloud service to Oracle or Salesforce, or a major customer switches a lot of volume to them. Oracle comes to mind since their bandwidth pricing is like an order of magnitude lower than AWS — I'm sure Zoom negotiated hefty discounts but they still picked Oracle for a reason and I'd bet it's the fact that their business is largely network egress.

1. e.g. if you use Office 365 and GCP, there is a valid argument for consolidating on a single vendor and I'd be surprised if that didn't work on a few customers since there's approximately a 0% chance that the Microsoft reps aren't going to toss some discounts around to encourage it.

I know of a few applications that target AppEngine and Datastore.

You'd have to rewrite the entire application to port it to another cloud provider.

Yes, I always tell people to use AWS because of the nature of Google. What can you expect from a company that makes money by spying on people and forcing people to see ads?

Looking at just the storage pricing, it looks like GCP was already priced lower than AWS and Azure, this increase brings them either to on par, just just slightly below AWS and Azure.

GCP was trying to "loss lead" in to dominance, does not look like that was working out since even being more expensive AWS and Azure were still killing them.

Of course if you only choose GCP because of cost you have little reason to stay so...

Many enterprise care more about the risk of prices changing than the absolute prices. The later you can account for in budgets more easily than the former. Especially if the price increase is one that goes from $0 to $non-zero since that could be a massive increase in absolute dollars.

AWS has never afaik increased prices which is a pretty strong selling point even if specific services likely are a loss for them perpetually as a result if mis-priced initially.

>AWS has never afaik increased prices which is a pretty strong selling point even if specific services

Technically true, but they do it a little different, where by they add different SKU;s with higher prices, and discontinue the old SKU's forcing you to move to a "new product" instead of just increasing the prices.

Not all services are like that but they just did that with compute instances, I believe this is the second time they have killed off a "generation" of compute

Do you have any examples of this? It makes sense that old hardware be replaced but it's usually over a LONG lifecycle and the new instance type pricing is often lower than the previous generation.

It seems like the increases are also focused on egress/bandwidth which people gripe about aws gauging on all the time?

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