Does the Google Cloud services price drop spell trouble for AWS? It depends.
With Google announcing massive price drops (https://developers.google.com/storage/) it has a lot of developers and tech managers re-thinking the use of AWS, Rackspace, etc. Certainly the $.026/GB of monthly storage and lowered compute engine prices make stiff competition. I am not convinced yet, however.
First, depending on what one is trying to accomplish, the new bandwidth prices announced by Google are still more expensive than AWS once you reach a certain volume. For heavy bandwidth out users then, it may not make sense to use Google over AWS if pricing is your only concern.
A larger issue is one of trust, and opinion shows many developers and decision makers are in agreement with me on this one. Google has failed users and developers countless times as it has pulled its APIs and services. Google has a one year notification term for its cloud computing services, but that can change, and one year is possibly not enough time if your entire business is structured around the service. The fine details of the cloud computing terms of use with Google could also give one pause compared to AWS.
Further, AWS revenue accounts for ~7% of Amazon’s overall business revenue. In comparison, the Google cloud computing business brought in roughly 1.5% of Google’s overall 2013 revenue. That alone is enough to give me a second thought when considering trusting my business or computing needs with Google due to its lengthy history of pulling services.
There are of course other reasons to distrust Google, which I won’t go into now.
AWS is likely to follow Google and continue dropping its prices as well. So, any prudent decision-makers should take a wait-and-see approach before jumping ship. And even then make a careful analysis (including future growth scenarios) of how your business or process actually utilizes the various cloud services to determine the real and future costs involved.
