Google takes on AWS, Azure virty servers with micro billing and fat disks

Google is done dabbling with raw compute and storage infrastructure and has thrown the doors wide open on its Compute Engine services, while at the same time offering finer-grained pricing and fatter persistent storage for its virtual machines than is available from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, and other public …

[Anonymous Coward]

gotta catch 'em all

Heh. Shooting neutrino's through the earth works for a reason. I'd be willing to be that the low capture rate would offset the gains.

[oolor]

Re: Laying under sea cables - forget cables, use neutrinos!

Oh please, you know sweet-fuck-all about HFT.

Any financial institution that is doing it on a large scale has locations in all the relevant centers with the full complement of staff. Sadly, the real money runs on equipment/software so slow you would cry (or beg to use MS products).

Most banks make more money on internal arbitrage than in the general market.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Chriswell predicts!

"Sooner or later, it has been predicated, banks will build particle accelerators to fire neutrino through the Earth"

1) You "predict" something or you "predicate upon" some established fact.

2) No it hasn't. That was some whimsical suggestion. And pumping out enough high-energy neutrinos to reliably collect a high-frequency signal after several 1000 km of rock will mean that the people working at the targeted office building will have a pretty high incidence of cancer. Yes, neutrinos are unhealthy for you if you can detect them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Laying under sea cables - forget cables, use neutrinos!

So we can add Physics, HFT and general Banking IT to the things you clearly know sod all about.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So just think about that. Imagine making a 1 minute phone call and then you get charged for a minimum of 10 minutes. It makes no sense"

[The Islander]

One wonders

if the number crunchers may have found a model to maximise revenue? A boon for users, well maybe ...

[Jon Green]

Worth migrating yet? Perhaps not.

If you're not using servers for short periods, the per-minute pricing won't make a lot of difference. In other respects, Google's pricing is broadly similar to Amazon's, with a less-sophisticated infrastructure support. Even if Google does get into a price war with Amazon, the differences will be marginal unless one or the other is running a short-term loss leader to try to get a market shut-out.

Right now, with most of our VM instances running constantly, I'm not seeing a strong incentive to migrate from AWS (with GreenQloud fallback) to Google - but I look forward to seeing the bun-fight - and reaping the benefits - as these two big players (I'm not including Azure here) compete for dominance.