> What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3
Which shouldn't be too surprising, since the (more expensive than Drive) Google product that is more of a direct competitor to S3 (Google Cloud Storage) is still an order of magnitude less expensive than S3 (Cloud Storage is $0.085/GB for the first 1TB.)
EDIT: Well, actually, that's not true; parent's cited prices for S3 were wrong. GCS and S3 are, at least for the first TB, exactly the same price at $0.085/GB.
> This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period.
That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.
Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.
> Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.
Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.
> > This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period.
> That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.
Normally I would agree, but the price gap is so large (close to 10x), you could easily downgrade to the next smallest capacity level in Google Drive. You would only actually lose money if you wanted to store more than 100 GB but less than 10/0.085 = 118 GB. That means for most overcommit levels, you're still winning by a reasonable margin.
> Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.
Compression is unlikely to yield enough, but perhaps deduplication would save you. Still, 10x is big gap to make up for.
> > Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.
> Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.
Admittedly, I'm not too familiar with the Google Drive API, but my impression is that it is geared toward entirely different use cases (compared to S3-like storage services). Could you build a business on top of it?
Which shouldn't be too surprising, since the (more expensive than Drive) Google product that is more of a direct competitor to S3 (Google Cloud Storage) is still an order of magnitude less expensive than S3 (Cloud Storage is $0.085/GB for the first 1TB.)
EDIT: Well, actually, that's not true; parent's cited prices for S3 were wrong. GCS and S3 are, at least for the first TB, exactly the same price at $0.085/GB.
> This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period.
That depends. With drive you pay for allocated capacity, with S3 don't you pay for actual usage? Depending on the level of overcommit, its possible for less expensive per GB "capacity" priced service to be profitable on top of a more expensive per GB "usage" priced service.
Plus, its at least theoretically possible, especially if a lot of the stored content is not efficiently compressed on its own, that the consumer capacity-priced service could also use compression and/or deduplication to further reduce usage on the usage-priced backend.
> Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3.
Google Drive most assuredly is programmatically accessible via an API.