5 years, 1 month and 28 days after S3 is publicly launched. It is just a reminder that the threat by incumbents to startups is hardly worth worrying about.
The pricing is far less interesting to me than the differences between GS and S3. In some significant ways, GS appears to be a much more technically sophisticated product. And there are some arguably less used functionality like BitTorrent which are removed from the picture.<p>The ACL scheme is significantly more flexible on GS. In fact, one of the two major problems I have with S3 is a non-issue on GS:<p>1. All files on S3 are not world-readable when they are first uploaded. You cannot change the default permission for a file uploaded to a bucket. On GS you can set the default ACL on a bucket to world-readable.<p>2. For me, the most incredible thing GS could do right now is add a callback API. I want it to notify my application when my bucket is updated, webhooks style.<p>With both 1 & 2 in place, you can build storage driven applications in the cloud that don't require constant polling. Man, that would sure be something.
A compelling reason for our use case to switch from S3 is their support for lots of buckets coupled with CNAME support:<p><a href="http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/reference-uris.html</a><p>Due to Amazon's limitation of 100 buckets per account and the coupling between bucket name and CNAME, hosting files for our clients and supporting custom CNAMEs has not been possible for us. If we were to move to Google Storage, it would be.
It's really nice to see that boto (python AWS library) supports S3 and Google Storage side-by-side. Being able to pick and choose providers behind the same API is how the cloud should be.
At Google's scale I would have guessed that they would have had no difficulty in matching and even beating Amazon's pricing. This is surprising. Why so?
Download data:
$0.15 to Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
$0.30 to Asia-Pacific<p>So if a bunch of people from Japan decide to download from your app, you are screwed.
meh, in 3 years they'll probably just announce a new pricing structure where every reasonable use of this ends up with 1000%-2000% price hike (GAE user here, grumble grumble)