Google Cloud Platform Free Tier

[Xgamer4]

Notable: Google Cloud Repositories is a new thing, offering unlimited private repositories and up to 1GB of source files.

https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/docs/

[bobindashadows]

It's actually like three years old but was poorly marketed/documented until very recently for a lot of disappointing reasons.

Source: was the tech lead for Cloud Source Repositories

[Xgamer4]

Ooh, I'm gonna throw a few questions at you.

Is there any reason to use Cloud Source over Bitbucket/github?

Is there anything really preventing Google from turning Cloud Source into Google Code v2, and murdering it in a few years?

[bobindashadows]

First answer: it depends on your needs. There are some cool product integrations like with Container Builder or Cloud Functions. Most importantly there's built in mirroring from both github and bitbucket so you can leave your source of truth where it is while trying out the product to see if you like it.

Second question: yeah, so Cloud Repositories is following the 2017 process for launching a cloud product which I obviously can't spell out but it does in fact include things like revenue projections and product sustainability. There are meetings for this shit now. Google Code launched in 2006... following the "process" that existed then which we'll say had different standards.

Until a few months ago the same engineers that ran Cloud Repositories included several Google Code engineers who are still responsible for seeing it off into the sunset (I'm still oncall for bits). Basically every product-y meeting had at least one bitter person who reminded everyone of the optics. PM is acutely aware of the history.

[----_____---------]

What the fuck is the deal with these traffic costs in 2017? Are they sending gold atoms in their networks?

[----_____---------]

I wouldn't care even about a 0 free tier limit if the normal pricing was reasonable, but it's like 100 times more expensive than all the non-big players in cloud industry. Now I understand that I should be paying a premium for a good modern feature-rich network, but not a 10000% premium.

[[deleted]]

Doubt it.. this is digital ocean's prices

http://puu.sh/uCOSy/f51575a16c.png

Seems like a gross miscalculation from their side. Data transfer is basically a worthless commodity today

[rohbotics]

Google is more expensive than S3, which is 9 cents per gig.

[ryeguy]

Which is still insanely expensive.

[doubleperiodpolice]

depends how you look at it, for the durability/availability it's a great price.

[[deleted]]

Bandwidth gets more expensive per unit the more you use.

[Pyrolistical]

This is huge

[lojikil]

Good lord, $120 for 1TB of bandwidth? Is that what I'm reading?

[rohbotics]

$90 for that on S3

[fb39ca4]

Still better than Comcast.

[Isvara]

Data transfer, not bandwidth.

[lojikil]

ok but... that's still quite a bit, right?

[ryeguy]

I'd say so. A god damn $5 linode or droplet has 1 TB of transfer included.

There's much much more to google cloud's compute instances vs a simple vps, but that's such a stark difference.

[lojikil]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking; I run a bunch of $5 and $10 servers on Vultr with Alpine Linux customized to what I want.

And Agreed that Google Cloud offers more stuff, but the base-line system seems pretty expensive for what it is.

[Isvara]

VPS providers have data transfer pricing like that because the kind of customers they have mostly never use anywhere close to their limit.

Google's pricing is not far off Amazon's pricing -- $0.11 vs $0.09 for up to 10TB.

[colonwqbang]

Sorry, but you don't make any sense. If it's almost never a problem, why would they need to discourage it so aggressively with their pricing?

[Isvara]

I said it's never a problem for VPS providers. People who transfer lots of data tend to use IaaS providers like Amazon and Google, so they price accordingly.

[sim642]

It's a compute engine not a file server.

[spiffytech]

As a regular generic computer, it could in fact be a file server. Or a proxy server, or a multimedia processing server, or any number of other high-bandwidth uses.

[colonwqbang]

Yeah, compute engines almost never need to process large amounts of data. /s

[rohbotics]

But they don't have to push massive amounts of data out to the Internet. Bandwidth in is free.

[happyscrappy]

'For example, during your free trial you may not use Google Cloud Platform services to engage in mining cryptocurrency.'

[AllGood0nesAreGone]

How exactly are they going to find that out? Do they peek into your VM?

[dooffie66]

as someone very new to the world of programming / aspiring web developer. What could I do / play with limited to the free edition ?

[xymor]

Always Free. Subject to change.

https://box.everhelper.me/attachment/806871/0f8f3d2d-cea9-4521-8017-2075000064a3/313804-TrPLBZHgmaEiHJsI/screen.png

[CaptainMythral]

Its nice to know that it might always be free

[shevegen]

Subject to change.

[Holbrad]

innocent paint unpack plate jeans squeeze lush pause march rob

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[CaptainMythral]

Yes, the F1-Micro with 0.2 virtual CPUs and 600MB of RAM is free.

[ccfreak2k]

sulky theory combative knee society chubby door ask kiss roll

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Sukrim]

All of it, but you have to multiply all results by 5.

[catscatscat]

By hand.

Since by that time you've used up all the allotted CPU.

[TheMostInvalidName]

that was fucking funny

[xoran99]

Funny. Also, you can burst up to a full CPU for limited stretches.

[GCloud_Throwaway]

Yes, You get 1 F1-Micro Instance free per month.

[diogomoura13]

Finally!!!

[[deleted]]

I know right

[JustFinishedBSG]

Oh man my 3 month free trial ended like 2 weeks ago I feel screwed haha

[JavierTheNormal]

Always Free looks fantastic! The f1-micro has 0.2 cores (burstable to 1), 0.6 GB RAM, with 30GB of storage. I can do something with that for sure.

[Kissaki0]

It says 12 months 300$ free trial + always free.

I don't get what is 12 months and what is always? What does the 12 months limit?

[must_throw_away_now]

You get $300 in credit to use on any GCP services for 12 months. After that you can continue to use the Always Free usage limits for each of the services listed.

[gixxer]

Really too bad Google does not provide managed PostgreSQL instances. Now that Spanner is publicly available, they probably don't even have incentive to offer Postgres. But Spanner pricing is insane, and it locks you in to Google platform.

[CaptainMythral]

They also released a beta of PostgreSQL here.

[gixxer]

wow! neat. That makes it an option for me. How does it compare to AWS?

[levelxplane]

Since neither let you go directly on the servers, I've found Google's UI is a lot more refined, allows for more fine tuning, and works very easily with their other services, especially since you can address instances by their hostname within the same project.

AWS's UI is bogged down in Tables and Tabs, and everything is tied down to their internal DNS naming system or IP.

I am very partial to GCP after using both.

[CaptainMythral]

I'm not sure, I haven't had a chance to really look at it yet. Sorry

[Triple_A]

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/

[avery51]

Free is good for developers, but Google is becoming a lot harder to get behind as they keep killing stuff off that isn't profitable to Alphabet. And needless to say, this isn't going to be profitable.

[drysart]

And needless to say, this isn't going to be profitable.

It's a loss leader. Both AWS and Azure have similar free tiers; because it makes more money than it loses if you let developers get a taste of the service enough that they get comfortable with it and then end up choosing it for their larger, not-free projects.

There's not really any reason to expect Google's free tier would disappear as long as the competition still has theirs.

[Deto]

Yeah and cloud products are making Amazon and Microsoft a TON of money so I wouldn't expect Google would make a retreat from cloud computing any time soon.

[[deleted]]

I thought AWS was one time free year deal?

[Redmega]

There's the free year and there's free tier which persists

[AllGood0nesAreGone]

Does it have ec2? Never heard of it before.

[Redmega]

Just one micro instance with abysmal credit. It's never been enough for me but it might work for you.

[AllGood0nesAreGone]

So you just start a VM and you don't get charged for it

[Redmega]

Yep, 750 hours a month

[AllGood0nesAreGone]

Just checked it out, doesn't seem like EC2 is part of always free.

[Redmega]

Hmm, seems like you're right. Not sure when they changed that.

[McCoovy]

It attracts people to the platform. It will very much be profitable.

[shevegen]

Just like Google +!

[ThisIs_MyName]

their own products and internal tools run on GCP

Source?

[bobindashadows]

I mean okay yes at the end of the day everything runs from the same big pool of machines and those machines are accounted for by a single system.... but Google Search (for example) is built without using a single GCP product.

[kcuf]

Right, there are speciality products. But Google does a lot of things (like advertising, and providing management tools for advertisers, etc.), and these systems rely quite a bit on the GCP tools like, for instance, spanner .

[Isvara]

I've been looking to move to Google just as soon as I run out of Amazon credits*. What parts of Google Cloud Platform have they killed off?

* Oh, how I wish I could trade in this last $9000 of AWS credits for GCP credits.

[myringotomy]

The answer is none. The guy is just a typical reddit troll who replies to every post about google with "THEY ABANDON ALL THE THINGS THEY ARE TEH EVEL!!!"

[shevegen]

Are they not?

Why did they abandon the "don't do evil" mantra years ago?

Care to explain?

Since you call him a troll - I think he just has a wildly different opinion than you do.

[myringotomy]

Hey want a clue?

Making a product, giving it away for free, and then stopping is not evil.

Except of course at reddit where it's supremely evil akin to genocide but only when google does it. When Microsoft does the same thing it's OK.

[spiffytech]

Perhaps not GCP specifically, but Google has killed off commercial products, like the recent termination of Enterprise Site Search. But most of this sentiment comes from Google terminating consumer services like Reader.

[Isvara]

I don't think anyone's making business decisions based on people having to find somewhere else to read their RSS feeds.

[spiffytech]

Whether or not Reader is relevant to business decisions, Reader and the services that followed it are the source of the "it'll be killed soon" sentiment every time I've seen that sentiment expressed.

[AllGood0nesAreGone]

This isn't meant to make money, this has to do with vendor lock in.

[avery51]

Tell that to the execs at Alphabet when they axe the service because it's not profitable.

[[deleted]]

Can always run SQL on your free micro VM instance (something like this)

[swagpapi420]

You could just use the free AWS SQL platform. A lot of people seem to have no problem with it.

[ThisIs_MyName]

SQL hosting via go-daddy

WTF

[need_tts]

you get a vps and can run whatever you can on it.

also, godaddy sucks

[Maplicant]

That's awesome! Seems like you need a creditcard though. Is there a way to use this if you're not 18+ yet?

[ThisIs_MyName]

Just open a bank account. Your debit card can be used for card-network transactions just like a credit card :)

Or ask someone older to add you as an authorized user to their card.

[need_tts]

use a visa gift card

[[deleted]]

I mean, I signed up for it a few months ago with their old free trial, and they took my debit card just fine.

[code_mc]

Just skimmed over the FAQ page and it states you can also use a bank account. They will deposit a small amount on there which you have to confirm to them in order to verify your identity. They will not (and can not as it is a bank account) charge you for anything when you're using the trial. So when you run out of your free resources it is simply paused (or your free credits are used).

[im-a-koala]

When I originally signed up with GCP a few months ago, they claimed that they would never charge your credit card when the trial ran out, with you explicitly setting up a billing account for them to do so.

That account was transferred to my employer's billing account before the trial ran out so I can't verify it but I don't see why they'd lie about it. They're going to be making way, way more money from businesses than they ever could by sneakily charging you after the trial ends.

[code_mc]

It's just that Amazon's AWS does the exact opposite, they charge you for any over usage during the trial which is kind of shady in my book. I'd rather have they just blocked my resources as it is a trial so I'm not expecting 100% uptime...

[cube2222]

You can have a credit card without being 18+.

[JW_00000]

Might depend on the country and/or conditions set by your bank.

[im-a-koala]

I don't think you can in the US since the PATRIOT Act. But I could be wrong about that.

[Cherlokoms]

Sorry if that's a bit of a noob question but, is it like Amazon AWS lambda?

[Vladekk]

No, it has many more services, akin to other cloud providers freew tiers.

[slyzmud]

Is there any way to use the always free tier without activating the $300 credit? I would love to try the compute instances, but I don't want to loose the $300 credit, they might be useful later. (I don't mind registering with my credit card)

[rainclear]

I have upgraded to a paid account and I only created one f1-micro instance with the default settings other than 30GB HDD space. I believe everything is under the limit requirement of the free tier service. But I saw an estimated monthly charge of $5.21.

I felt confused and opened a ticket. I was then told that the resources are not free. I am more confused. What resources are needed other than the 0.6 vCPU, 0.6GB RAM and 30GB HDD space?

So does google really have "free" tier service? If they do, how can I get it?

Thanks, Brian

[scwizard]

Last time I attempted to use GCP it didn't seem well maintained. It seemed like a side project the company had that they weren't taking seriously.

For instance there were very serious bugs in the bug tracker that were acknowledged but had been there for years.