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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this will result in serious price competition with AWS over time.

I also hope the various APIs of all these cloud-computing services (along with build-it-yourself alternatives like OpenStack) somehow coalesce or get meta-abstracted into a single API that works across all services -- akin to what Canonical is trying to accomplish with Project AWSOME[1] but across all major cloud environments. One can dream.

[1] http://www.canonical.com/content/canonical%E2%80%99s-awsome-...

UPDATE: Thank you commenters for all the suggestions!

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For competition, there are already other services backed by large companies: MS Azure added VMs recently, HP Cloud, IBM Smart Cloud, Rackspace obviously. And there are also many other providers. So competition is there already. You can compare prices with http://www.cloudorado.com/ and you may already find AWS is quite often not so cheap. So why Google is supposed to change the picture that much?

Well its not just about the cost. All those companies have limited features, or take forever to provision VMs, or have limited capacity, are still hammering out bugs, or are way inferior to AWS in numerous ways. In effect AWS doesn't have much serious competition right now in the public space, it really is vastly more mature than other offerings.

Google will at very likely least get all those implementation details right and be pretty rock solid at a good price point.

Do you mean like the Fog ruby library is an abstraction over several services' APIs?

Yes :-) but I mean at a lower level of abstraction than a ruby library.

Project Awesome is an HTTP proxy which means it's even a higher abstraction than a Ruby library :)

In any case, you should have a look at Libcloud (http://libcloud.apache.org/), jclouds (http://jclouds.org), deltacloud (http://deltacloud.apache.org/) and other libraries. Deltacloud exposes a similar functionality through an HTTP interface. We have recently also started working on "Libcloud REST" which will expose all the Libcloud functionality through an HTTP interface which means you will be able to talk to it through an arbitrary language which can speak HTTP.

Take a look on this as well: http://deltacloud.apache.org/

To add to the pile I'll give you a couple others that I know of. There's http://www.aeolusproject.org/ which is actually based off of Deltacloud which someone else already mentioned. It's basically a nice GUI/toolset for working with multiple clouds... and quietly backed by RedHat, so there is that.

There are of course also the application management tools like the recently announced CliQr and Rightscale. Both of those work with several different clouds (both private and public).

Can I launch an instance of Ubuntu from ubuntu.com without creating an account anywhere? Assume I just wanted to test out Desktop, or a Juju for something. (something like workspot.net was, but with stickiness through the cloud.)

There's no way it can compete with AWS at the prices they have. The cheapest option they have is

n1-standard-1-d - a single core at $0.145/hr = $105 per month (that's not counting any traffic or storage).

At that price I can get an absolutely kickass dedicated server from Hetzner with 32GB RAM, quad-core Xeon E3-1245, 6TB space, 6TB of disk space, unlimited traffic.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex6s

I think you must have lost your train of thought halfway through this comment. Did you just try to show how Google's cloud service is worse than Amazon's by comparing it with a dedicated server from Hetzner? AFAIK all cloud services are more expensive pound-for-pound than Hetzner's dedicated servers.

Yeah, the Compute Engine offerings are clearly lined up against EC2, and the pricing is a bit cheaper.

Still, it seems like a fairly niche product; Google suggests workloads like video encoding or scientific computing. By cutting out that lower ~$60/month tier, it's less attractive for many things people have used EC2 for.

I guess. AWS is still cheaper.

However, Hetzner beats both by a huge margin, even though it's not a cloud offer.

Not "even though" — it beats them by a huge margin because it's not a cloud plan. Cloud plans pretty much always cost more for the same amount of power. Cloud hosts take care of managing the actual server hardware for you, to the point where you can increase your capacity a thousandfold in seconds and you're shielded from most actual hardware failures. A cloud provider handles those headaches for you, and in return you pay more to be able to focus on the software side of your app.

Cloud plans can be cheaper, but AFAIK that's primarily when your capacity needs are bursty, because you can spin them up and down at will instead of maintaining a server farm that goes mostly unused half the time. (Or when your needs are very meager and the cloud is willing to sell you a tiny slice of capacity, because a cloud service's quantum of power it can sell is much smaller. On that end they compete more with traditional VPSes.)

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