from Hacker News

Introducing Network Service Tiers

by ropiku on 8/23/17, 4:25 PM with 204 comments

  • by _7iun on 8/23/17, 6:02 PM

    A long standing complaint of mine is that Cloud egress pricing severely limits the usefulness of compute. If I want to say process some visual effects on a large (1TB) ProRes video, I might spend $1 on the compute but $100 on the egress getting it back.

    Unfortunately these changes don't really resolve that problem. "Standard" pricing is a paltry 20% less. That 1TB video egress still costs $80 and for that price I can rent a beefy server with a dedicated gigabit pipe for a month.

    Why is "Cloud" bandwidth so damned expensive?

    I'd love a "best effort" or "off peak" tier. I imagine Google's pipes are pretty empty when NA is asleep and my batch jobs aren't really going to care.

  • by pbbakkum on 8/23/17, 6:13 PM

    A few notes here:

    - An unmentioned alternative to this pricing is that GCP has a deal with Cloudflare that gives you a 50% discount to what is now called Premium pricing for traffic that egresses GCP through Cloudflare. This is cheaper for Google because GCP and Cloudflare have a peering arrangement. Of course, you also have to pay Cloudflare for bandwidth.

    - This announcement is actually a small price cut compared to existing network egress prices for the 1-10 TiB/month and 150+ TiB/month buckets.

    - The biggest advantage of using private networks is often client latency, since packets avoid points of congestion on the open internet. They don't really highlight this, instead showing a chart of throughput to a single client, which only matters for a subset of GCP customers. The throughput chart is also a little bit deceptive because of the y-axis they've chosen.

    - Other important things to consider if you're optimizing a website for latency are CDN and where SSL negotiation takes place. For a single small HTTPS request doing SSL negotiation on the network edge can make a pretty big latency difference.

    - Interesting number: Google capex (excluding other Alphabet capex) in both 2015 and 2016 was around $10B, at least part of that going to the networking tech discussed in the post. I expect they're continuing to invest in this space.

    - A common trend with GCP products is moving away from flat-rate pricing models to models which incentivize users in ways that reflect underlying costs. For example, BigQuery users are priced per-query, which is uncommon for analytical databases. It's possible that network pricing could reflect that in the future. For example, there is probably more slack network capacity at 3am than 8am.

  • by brunoTbear on 8/23/17, 6:16 PM

    I quite like the way Google has drawn the map here-since no cables reach from India to Europe, they've split the map there making the paths easier to trace between Asia and NA. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QvF57n-55Cs/WZypui8H8zI/AAAAAAAAE...

    Compare with the difficulties of https://cloud.google.com/images/locations/edgepoint.png

    Elegant and subtle work. Just like the networking.

  • by jstapels on 8/23/17, 5:05 PM

    Egress pricing for Google and AWS (sans Lightsail) continues to be one of the biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean.

    I think Google missed an opportunity here. They should have cut the prices more significantly for standard tier (sacrificing performance) to make this more competitive.

    Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would cost $85.00 on Google's new standard plan.

  • by idorosen on 8/23/17, 4:53 PM

    TL;DR: New Standard tier level is hot potato routing while existing (now called Premium) tier is cold potato routing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-potato_and_cold-potato_rou...

  • by breck on 8/23/17, 5:03 PM

    Seeing the map of Google's network makes me appreciate more the impact of undersea cables.

    If you're interested in the history of earth-scale networks I recommend this free documentary on Cyrus Field and the heroic struggle to lay the first transatlantic cable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFKONUBBHQw

  • by jerkstate on 8/23/17, 5:33 PM

    How is this different from paying more for a fast lane, which net neutrality is supposed to prevent?

    Edit: there seems to be a bit of confusion what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the Open Internet Order of 2015 [1] which states:

    18. No Paid Prioritization. Paid prioritization occurs when a broadband provider accepts payment (monetary or otherwise) to manage its network in a way that benefits particular content, applications, services, or devices. To protect against “fast lanes,” this Order adopts a rule that establishes that: A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not engage in paid prioritization.

    [1] https://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/201...

  • by jloveless on 8/23/17, 5:59 PM

    Google's network (especially w/ BBR[1]) is amazing and this makes the price point more approachable for other use cases (like running your own CDN[2]).

    [1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/07/TCP-BBR-congest... [2] https://blog.edgemesh.com/deploy-a-global-private-cdn-on-you...

  • by xg15 on 8/23/17, 5:34 PM

    Not that I'm really surprised, but does that map imply that Google has its own trans-atlantic undersea cables? Is there some more info about that?

  • by kyledrake on 8/24/17, 5:03 AM

    Great idea, but it's still way too expensive. I pay between $0.01/GB (the fancy CDN stuff) to ($0.0024/GB) from an IP transit provider for Neocities. That's market rate. I would have given them a pass at $0.02-$0.03, but not for $0.085.

    If you pay this "public internet" rate, you're paying essentially 2007 transit prices. I hope you don't need to ship a lot of traffic. I hope you don't need to compete with someone that's paying market rate.

    I would love to use GCS for our infrastructure, but with rates like this, it's hard to imagine us ever switching.

  • by heroic on 8/23/17, 4:50 PM

    > There are at least three independent paths (N+2 redundancy) between any two locations on the Google network, helping ensure that traffic continues to flow between these two locations even in the event of a disruption. As a result, with Premium Tier, your traffic is unaffected by a single fiber cut. In many situations, traffic can flow to and from your application without interruption even with two simultaneous fiber cuts.

    What does this mean? N+2 redundancy should mean, that even if both go down, then service will not be affected at all, no?

  • by jedberg on 8/23/17, 5:43 PM

    The most interesting thing to me here is that they can actually deliver a cheaper service by going over the public internet. I would think their private net would be cheaper because they don't have to pay for transit.

    I guess transit is still cheaper than maintaining ones own lines...

  • by cwt137 on 8/23/17, 4:59 PM

    I thought I read an article about an online game company who was doing something similar with their users; trying to get their users on their private network as soon as possible. Does anyone else remember that article on HN?

  • by ssijak on 8/23/17, 5:00 PM

    Reading this I just got stumped by how many stacks, layers, hardware, technologies, and knowledge incorporated into all of that those bytes needed to travel so I could read them on a laptop across the globe

  • by 0x27081990 on 8/23/17, 7:01 PM

    I thought they were firm supporters of Net Neutrality. Or is this somehow different case?

  • by CodeWriter23 on 8/23/17, 6:24 PM

    It would be nice if they would say if their pricing is per GB or per TB.

    https://cloud.google.com/network-tiers/pricing

  • by ksec on 8/24/17, 11:14 AM

    A Naive Questions. When we say Private Networking, In Google or Amazon terms, does it actually mean Google buying / laying down Fibre from DC to DC, much like how OVH does. Or they are renting / buying dedicated links in multiple exchanges.

  • by gigatexal on 8/23/17, 11:49 PM

    I just think the funny thing is the new feature is instead of taking the hit on price for the current level of service their shiny new feature is “standard” networking! Woot!!

  • by Animats on 8/23/17, 6:34 PM

    Don't sign up for a Google service unless you get contract terms which say they can't terminate you at will and have penalties if they do.

  • by grandalf on 8/23/17, 8:15 PM

    Ironically, this offering is precisely the argument against network neutrality -- different customers need different QoS guarantees.

  • by benbro on 8/23/17, 5:25 PM

    Can I use the new standard tier with all services like cloud storage or only with compute instances?

  • by josephv on 8/24/17, 2:04 PM

    Cloud neutrality now

  • by hartator on 8/23/17, 7:27 PM

    It's kind of interesting that after being so against preferred networking via their net neutrality stance, they basically implemented it.

  • by unethical_ban on 8/23/17, 8:21 PM

    The title should not have been changed - old version noted the product referenced, Google Cloud Compute.

  • by always_good on 8/23/17, 5:37 PM

    This precedent (including CloudFlare's new private routing) doesn't bode well for the public internet.

    Imagine the day when everyone has to use private routing and the public internet barely even gets maintained anymore.

    Of course, public internet also suffers tragedy of the commons and not much is happening on that front. Like how most people are still behind ISPs that allow their customers to spoof IP addresses. And nobody has reason to give a shit. We're getting pinned between worst of both worlds. It's a shame.

  • by sitepodmatt on 8/23/17, 5:12 PM

    I suppose this was inevitable, the costs of cold potato routing must be prohibitive, especially if we consider more exotic places, for example riding the GCP network from just a few milliseconds away in Bangkok all the way to a tiny GCP compute instance in London on practically all GCP network (exc first three hops locally). GCP network is awesome, I am surprised we are only see a small pricing reduction for standard offering, perhaps idea is to eventually make it 2-3x price, a premium worth it imo if you consider one would push most bandwidth heavy assets onto edge CDNs anyway.

  • by 0xbear on 8/23/17, 5:47 PM

    So now we know why Google's egress was so expensive before. It was the premium offering, and standard wasn't quite ready yet.

  • by fundabulousrIII on 8/25/17, 5:17 PM

    You know what? If you aren't ready to invest in infra you are out for the buck and worth a damn. I won't even mention cloud in a meeting anymore. It is plain fraud.

  • by christa30 on 8/24/17, 8:55 AM

    Via the wonderful people at Google... Introducing Network Service Tiers: Your cloud network, your way

  • by Tepix on 8/23/17, 8:20 PM

    > "Over the last 18 years, we built the world’s largest network, which by some accounts delivers 25-30% of all internet traffic”

    I think that's way more than enough already, thank you.

  • by arekkas on 8/23/17, 5:31 PM

    Ok so lobby against net neutrality but don't give a * in your own network. "Don't be evil", right?

  • by lowbloodsugar on 8/23/17, 5:00 PM

    So is this like the app engine price hike debacle a few years ago but with "better" messaging? So "Try Network Service Tiers Today" means "Migrate to Standard Tier today to avoid the massive price increases coming soon"?

    But fundamentally they just massively underestimated costs and need to find a way to adjust pricing. With app engine it was very conveniently beta, so they used the end of beta for the price hike. For this, they're having to invent a "Premium" and a "Standard" Tier, and hey guess what, everyone has been using "Premium".

    My experience so far with Google has been "Use this now, and we'll have a massive price hike later, if we keep it around at all."