This article read like a paid Google App engine advert.

They point to the announcement about RI pricing simplification as proof that "Google has finally arrived." No justification at all, and it isn't obvious how one relates to the other (in particular as the RI changes weren't a direct price reduction).

> “Google is making a dent and AWS is starting to feel the pain from a pricing perspective,”

But they didn't announce a price reduction this week!

> says one ex-Amazon employee who asked not to be identified because his current employer works with the cloud company.

Because they work for Google. Because this is a paid Google advert.

> But this spring, Google introduced a product called Sustained Use Discounts, and this made things much simpler.

I'd argue that the sustained use model makes it harder to calculate your ultimate bill, not easier. It has the same issues Amazon's now retired Light and Medium usage tiers had, how do you track if you're at 25%, 50%, 75%, etc utilisation? Keeping track of that is annoying and harder than you'd think in a real production environment with dynamic instances responding to load.

Amazon's new pricing model actually just scrapped something akin to sustained use billing because it was unpopular. You wouldn't know that reading the article.

> Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to what’s obviously a reaction to Google

Maybe it was a reaction to customer feedback? I see no evidence that Google caused this change, and the fact that Amazon moved AWAY from Google's model is very telling. Light and medium utilisation RI are effectively Google's model, they just do it dynamically. Amazon hasn't added that or indicated that they will.

Do these people even understand Amazon's RI pricing structure, or Google's sustained usage, or anything at all?

> Byrne says that until Amazon changed its pricing, his company was toying with the idea of switching to Google, a move that would have saved Copper.io hundreds of thousands of dollars—until Monday, at least.

That literally makes zero sense. Heavy utilisation RIs have been available since forever, and are extremely price competitive with every other major competitor in the cloud infrastructure space (namely Google, and Azure).

If it would have saved you "hundreds of thousands" legitimately then you are mismanaging your account heavily.

> “When I saw the Amazon announcement, I said: ‘Great. We don’t have to consider moving.'”

Because, why? I don't understand what it is they think Amazon changed. Because that statement makes no sense. If you were mismanaging your account before, you'd still be mismanaging it now. Amazon moving payments will save you a little money (due to the interest on that money sitting in your accounts) but nothing like what is described here.

> When Google first got into the cloud business back in 2008, the company bet that people would want to run cloud applications on its infrastructure in highly specialized ways and not mess around with operating systems and virtual machines. That proved to be a bad bet.

That is an under-statement. Google thought that people wanted to be locked into their cloud APIs and initially at least have to completely re-write all of their software for Google's app engine. It was supremely arrogant on Google's part.

App engine now supports more standardised APIs and databases, but it remains more expensive to do than it should be. Azure's "web-sites" product is what Google App Engine should have been when it first got released, and even today I find "web-sites" more compelling as a bottled solution than Google App Engine (although VMs trump both).

> And now the company is fast catching up.

Is that a fact? Because both Google and Azure topped $1B in 2013, and from what I've been seeing Azure, not Google, has been growing to compete with Amazon in 2014. Microsoft has been leveraging many pre-existing channels (education, MSDN, et al) to give out Azure trials and it seems to be working for them.

> Byrne says that while Google doesn’t offer the wide range of products, it beats out Amazon in many respects. Google’s compute speed and network “is faster than Amazon’s,” he says. “They’re probably the only people where you can say that their infrastructure is really world-leading.”

If you weren't certain this was a paid product advert, now you should be.

Compute speed is relative to cost, and dollar per dollar that statement seems untrue. Network speed on Amazon and Google is great, Google might be better but I wouldn't migrate to them because neither Amazon or Azure have let me down in that department.