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Comment by crop_rotation | Hacker News Reader

So they have decided that the growth period for GCP is over and now it needs to squeeze all the profits it can. I thought with all that search money pouring down, they would bet a little longer on GCP growth.

I remember many large companies that migrated to GCP explicitly cited BigQuery cost effective performance. This should change that calculation significantly.

But if GCP loses all cost effectiveness, why would companies chose it, knowing that unlike AWS, GCP products might be priced like a loss leader for some time and can increase any day.

Also, if Google becomes content to be just a small cloud provider, do they just bet their entire future on search. What if search gets disrupted (by something like a next gen LLM).

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I'm no expert here, but I absolutely guarantee that nobody there decided "the growth period for GCP is over."

All of the big cloud providers are still seeing 20-40% growth annually, and there's still a huge pile of not-yet-on-cloud customers to fight over. Are things doubling annually? No. But there's still a lot of growth left. The bad financial results from Google last quarter were that its cloud revenue growth dropped down to just 32% year-over-year. AWS's last update was a "disappointing" 20% revenue growth (on their $80 billion revenue). Nobody's giving up on growth anytime soon.

This isn't the 1st time GCP has re-evaluated pricing. I wouldn't conclude that it's "over". Seems to just be how they work.

E.g. a few months ago pricing of cloud storage was "changed".

Yes and before that GKE engine pricing.

Once you do it enough times it removes any pretence that these increases were one off and establishes it clearly that products are not sensibly priced and prices would increase when the time to drop the hammer comes.

I still am getting a better value than I would at AWS.. and in my view, those are currently the only two games in town.

Agree - "only two games in town".

Tell us more - what specifically is better value and by how much?

Yeah, Google Cloud Storage pricing increases were a meaningful (negative) change.

AWS and Azure storage costs are roughly the same at the list prices. Some SKU unit costs are a bit cheaper on Azure, but you could also probably realize the same difference through other means using slightly different AWS SKUs. Overall, they feel pretty comparable. (Disclaimer: I haven't run the full price comparison. This is only based on comparing the most common SKUs at list price)

But GCP now feels significantly higher in storage costs than both AWS and Azure. I mean significant more in the statistical sense -- the difference might be small for many use-cases, but it's very likely that GCP storage is more expensive for almost all users and all use-cases now.

I would personally try Snowflake before BigQuery unless I knew BigQuery was cheaper. They do store things in some other cloud but you can choose between the big three.

Being sort of integrated with the rest of Google workspace is nice.

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