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by gnfargbl 892 days ago
So on the one hand Google now accepts that egress fees are outrageous. Great! On the other hand, they're only reducing (removing) the fees when you leave them.

If this move were really about acting in customers' best interests, they would reduce the fees for everyone. Doing this only for departing customers feels performative.
2 comments
Patrick_Devine 892 days ago
Google is part of Cloudflare's Bandwidth Alliance [1] which is removing most egress fees. Google still charges for egress, but it's half of what AWS is charging. We moved everything off of S3 anyway and have been using Cloudflare's R2 storage along with Google Compute Engine instances. R2 can be a little flaky, but the cost savings for us more than makes up for it.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

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timenova 892 days ago
Can you give a few more details on the flaky nature of R2?

Does it lose files? Fails to write but gives an error? Fails to read sometimes? Silently fails?

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whitepoplar 891 days ago
I'd like to know this as well!
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vineyardmike 892 days ago
Unless they’re planning to kill GCP entirely. Then everyone is a departing customer /s

But seriously, it seems like a fair-ish compromise. The 60 day limit is tough though. As long as you’re continuing your usage and not using offsite backups, ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic. It’s only problematic when you try to suddenly egress all data you’ve ever stored, which you probably wouldn’t do unless you’re migrating away.

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gnfargbl 892 days ago
> ingress/egress isn’t probably too problematic

It's problematic to me. I run a system partly on GCP and partly on another provider. I'd like to move some of the stuff that's on the other provider over to GCP VMs, but I am prevented from doing so solely by the GCP egress fees.

My general complaint is that high egress fees prevent users from developing hybrid cloud solutions which mix components from different cloud vendors. Instead, you are forced to choose a platform, and then you're locked into it. That seems textbook anti-competitive. We shouldn't be grateful for the opportunity to switch vendors, we should be angry that "choosing a single cloud vendor" is a thing at all.

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