As I said Google's reputation is what made me not even bother to try. We all know that AWS and AZURE both are state of art and very competitively priced. If Google wants to beat them they have to win the perception war too. (OR reduce prices substantially).

I don't agree that AWS and Azure are actually competitively priced with Compute Engine anymore. Following our price cut last May and our custom VM shapes, we're often 40% cheaper:

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/01/Happy-New-Ye...

that's a massive lead (and it's sadly not commonly known). So I agree with you, we need to do better in the perception war, but Compute Engine is hands down the leader in cloud pricing.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (and care a lot about our prices).

GCE pricing is great but GCS is not. It is much more expensive than S3 or cloudfront (2.5x - 1.3x) when you consider per request costs. I have brought this up a couple of times on HN to Google cloud employees but nothing has changed.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442654 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187600

Other problem areas for GCS compared to S3/Cloudfront

1. SSL support for custom domains in GCS is lacking. 2. Also SSL does not work for domain-named bucket when using <bucket>.storage.googleapis.com/<object> form. You can only use https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/ This makes using SSL for a static site hosted in SSL very difficult because you can't use relative URLs. Cloudfront has solved it by using URLs of the form http(s)://xxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/<object>

That's fair, our native egress pricing is higher. We've chosen to partner with folks like CloudFlare for what we call CDN Interconnect (https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect) although this was a somewhat recent announcement.

As far as GCS pricing goes (rather than egress), I think we've been more cautious on the "cost per op" but really led again on cost per byte. This was especially true when we launched Nearline, triggering AWS to launch S3-IA (but with lots of caveats like small files and still a 25% higher base rate).

While not integrated directly into GCS / GCP, does going through CloudFlare alleviate some of your concern?

CDN interconnect is just a bonus :). I prefer GCS having competitive pricing and features since it will be one fewer service to manage.

Also cloudflare is a bit confusing. We only want to serve assets and we serve 3TB per month and I'm not sure if cloudflare is OK with that usage in its free tier option.

I think CloudFlare, Fastly, et al. are all happy to have you serve 3 TiB per month. Their hope is that you grow and upgrade to their paid plans one day.

Disclaimer: I work on GCP. AWS and Azure are not price competitive with GCP, we're routinely seeing a a 40% advantage. Check out HTTP://cloud.Google.com/pricing/tco

Seriously, go and talk to your marketing guys ... Everyone comes out better if there is a third horse in this race, but Google needs to step up your marketing etc. AWS has a massive presence in terms of conferences, documentation and mind share. Azure has a massive sales team that are offering huge discounts to buy business. Google has ... what exactly?

Yes, compare this to a typical Amazon high quality blog post: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-and-R...

You have no idea what is actually being offered after reading that. Is it a managed service, a recommended configuration of what.

Almost every Amazon blog post includes a walk through on how you actually use whatever they are talking about. To be fair, this post does link to more documentation, but it's general purpose and describes a variety of solutions.

Our Google hosting costs are a rounding error compared with our revenue. That's all that matters. Build business that make money.

AWS is often competitively priced, but Azure is usually around twice as expensive.

So what you are saying is basically that you are not doing your market research properly, instead depending on irrelevant anecdata?