> With the opening of this Mumbai region, Indian customers are now able to buy these services directly in Indian rupees.
Somewhat related: I was forced to switch to GCP for hosting my static website because of lack of payment options. AWS doesn't allow you to prepay. The only way to settle your dues is using a credit card. My international debit card usually works everywhere but it didn't in case of AWS. I never felt the need to get a credit card. I had to waste many hours in moving to GCP because there wasn't a way I could use to pay.
It's funny how I have failed often to buy something online because payment options are not international friendly. Latest in this case was New Yorker subscription. Every address combination I tried said the same thing: "Address is invalid", even though I had ticked the option for International subscription. Support was hopeless and in the end, I had to go without it. It's like I am saying, "Shut up and take my money" and people at the other end are tone-deaf to it.
IMO, credit cards are less damaging to you in case of misuse.
If your debit card is stolen or its details are stolen from websites, you are at risk of losing your money directly from your bank account and recovering it may not be easy. You're at the mercy of the bank to compensate you, and most banks insist on formalities such as filing a police complaint. Good luck with that if the misuse happens from some other country.
If the same happens with a credit card, you can dispute it without actually losing any money.
A blanket statement like that isn't very useful without giving the country. Protection for the customer varies widely around the world; I trust that the Danish system would work out fine for me.
(Additionaly, if my debit card is stolen it's of limited use without my PIN.)
Credit cards fraud protection is varied country by country. I've been fucked by stolen info (just card number) and lost around $300. Disputed to my bank and in their generalize respond is "fuck you pay me". I never trust any banks anymore, I'll avoid banking at all if possible.
In Turkey, I'm using a bank called Garanti. They give you one virtual MasterCard, linked to your normal cash accounts. Allows you to transfer money to the card and back, no charge and instantly. And I haven't encountered anywhere where I can't use it, unlike my debit card where only a few online places accept it.
1. It doesn't make any sense to allow yourself to risk spending more than you have
2. They're more prone to abuse: if somebody gets hold of the numbers on your card (whether by a leak or hack or by old-fashioned pickpocketing), no further PIN, password or 2FA token is required
3. The only use for them is online spending outside Europe, and even then the number of websites that require them is rapidly shrinking (PayPal can work with bank accounts, and Stripe now supports SEPA direct debit and local payment methods such as SOFORT (Germany), iDEAL (Netherlands) and Bancontact (Belgium))
4. They cost money (see point 3, people don't like paying for things they don't use)
The cost of the risk of fraud is bundled into the ~2-3% transaction fee.
1. As for 1, it's self control.
3. The only use is not for online shopping, it's for every day use. Cash can get stolen, credit card can, but you can then cancel it.
4. Plenty of cards are free.
3. For every day use, there is your bank card which comes for free with your bank account. (A growing number of people don't use cash daily, and there are even people who have ditched cash altogether and gone card-only.)
4. I have not run into any free CCs offered in my country (Netherlands). If you have, please point me to them.
As for fraud, it's not only about the risk, but also about the hassle. I have heard of people who had their credit card suddenly cancelled because of fraudulent transactions, and the banks will only send a replacement to your home address, even when you are travelling! The risk that this happens with a bank card is much lower, as entering your PIN proves that you authorize the transaction.
Definitely not the experience in united states. I was offered to cancel my card for a similar situation, and they offered to send it to my country.
I guess a bunch of countries are behind USA in credit card offerings. I am from Turkey, and situation in Turkey is very similar to united states - credit cards are very very common.
China is almost credit card free now, except for things like pre-auth at hotels. People use apps like alipay or wechat to pay everything. They have the following advantages:
* Easy to use, you always carry your phone.
* Never expire.
* Password protected, card number and CVV are fragile.
* Works without a POS. Basically in China QR-codes on paper are everywhere.
* Online payment is super easy, you won't need to type billing addresses, etc.
I recently got my first card. Before that, I had tried applying for two but got rejected for some random reason. It's a pain to navigate through the banking bureaucracy, so I didn't try hard. Because debit cards worked fine always, even for International transactions, I never felt a strong need to get one.
In some countries you won't get a credit card if your employment has gaps etc. - and debit cards serve the exact same purpose as credit cards, just with different billing model.
Yes: 12 cables land here
SEACOM
SEA-ME-WE-4
SEA-ME-WE 3
EIG
I-ME-WE
FLAG Europe Asia (FEA)
FLAG Alcatel-Lucent Optical Network (FALCON)
Gulf Bridge International
BBG (Bay of Bengal Gateway)
SEA-ME-WE-5
MENA
AAE-1 (Asia Africa Europe)
The users are in every building all over the country and the world - which makes the datacenters best positioned at the junctions and interchanges of global wiring.
Also power, yes Tamilnadu does lead the country with power generation but Maharashtra comes close second with better power distribution backed by top private sectors in the industry.
>> Tamilnadu does lead the country with power generation but Maharashtra comes close second with better power distribution
As of November 2015, Maharashtra had 38 Gigawatts of generation to Tamil Nadu's 23 [1]. Maharashtra and Gujarat jointly produce a quarter of India's 100 GW; Tamil Nadu 8%.
Mumbai and Chennai are coastal cities with cable landings, but Mumbai is the finance and media capital - it has the stock exchange and Bollywood, both of whom I imagine will be big customers. And a bigger population as well.
Not exactly Bollywood, but VFX outsourcing is big in India. From low-cost animation (think animation for kids' TV) to top TV drama like Game of Thrones to Hollywood blockbusters like Interstellar and Doctor Strange -- they all use outsourcing and most of these companies are in Bombay.
Datacenter staffing in the cloud is fairly easy; only about 6 or so are needed on-prem for HVAC and hands-on. The rest are remote. Many cloud datacenters are able to be located in extremely obscure locations because of this.
Why do you need a California region? There’s already a west coast datacenter in Oregon. I’m guessing the latency differences would be likely negligible. That said there's plans for a Los Angeles region here: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/
(Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, but totally not working on datacenter stuff.)
The Pacific northwest has all of that delicious, cheap, reliable, non-polluting hydroelectric power. It's really a logical location for regional data centers, and Google is far from the only company making that same decision.
I agree with you, I'm not seeing the big draw of California, especially given the much more expensive electricity plus greater earthquake risk.
having spent considerable time in the Los Angeles datacenter market I am insanely curious where they're putting these 3 zones. I am guessing El Segundo/Hawthorne area, Wilshire Annex in downtown LA, and something in the Orange County area.
Google is following AWS ,. Microsoft is also following AWS . Which is not necessarily bad but doesn’t speak much of their innovation . The only play they have against AWS is fear mongering about vendor lock-in which is highly debatable anyways .
Oh, give me a break... where did Kubernetes come from? Whose LB solution relies on DNS and whose uses BGP/ECMP for regional routing and failover? Who offered HIPPA compliance without dedicated hosts and stupid markups first? Who created BigQuery?
Look, both Google and AWS have areas where each excels over the other, but to say that Google isn’t innovating is to say you are basically ignorant of their offering.
Google's pricing is also a lot more attractive. Unlike Amazon, they don't cut you from the free tier after a year. For a small toy project that's all you need.
To elaborate more, automatic discounts are really a big deal even at scale because it’s somewhat similar to AWS pricing schemes for reserved instances except it doesn’t require you to reprovision anything at all. For a lot of companies with stateful software and non-cloud native architecture (lift and shift) this helps cut significant costs while you’re growing.
The default pricing mechanism in AWS for on-demand instances in particular for companies that can’t afford to rewrite their non-cloud native software with tons of state and no CI/CD infrastructure or process is a boon for AWS and even at six figure monthly spend you could certainly use a 40%+ discount on your instances.
NLB DynamoDB EMR even HIPAA without dedicated was on AWS first ... whatever AWS does Google is trying to do better. Granted Kubernetes was google product but what was so innovative about it when Docker and Linux container was already there for a long time ... and now AWS has ECS
You are factually incorrect about HIPPA and dedicated hosts. Amazon only switched to the non-dedicated approach this year some time. Google has been that way for at least two (if not longer).
EMR is basically hosted Hadoop, which is an open source implementation of a system Google created and made famous.
Docker is based on cgroups, which was largely contributed by Google engineers. And anyone deploying docker for distributed systems will tell you that you need some kind of scheduler/orchestrator.
Amazon excels at packaging and bundling the work of others, and provides a fairly robust enterprise management layer on top of it. CloudFormation, for example, is much better than GCP’s Deployment Manager. Google is quickly catching up in the enterprise management space as well, as they take on larger customers who demand these abilities, but I still feel like AWS has a bit more capability there.
You probably should have listed Lambda, which was a nice idea out of AMZN.
Vendor lock-in is most certainly not the only competing point we have against AWS. From BigQuery, to BigTable, to Spanner, to our private network, to our live migration of compute, to our hosted Kubernetes, the list goes on and on.
AWS does a lot of things right, and we're more than happy to go toe-to-toe with them in the areas they have us beat. Competition is a sign of a healthy economy where everyone benefits. How can you compete if you don't even try to match the people you are competing against?
Speaking of innovation, I think google's innovation in cloud has started long before AWS. Many things that's ubiquitous today was google's innovation that's been battle tested internally for serving google ad and search business. Google has been a bit late to cloud game, but i guess it's going strong.
Disclaimer: Google employee, not working on cloud stuff, but admire how cloud has evolved over time.
Google is quickly moving to containerized solutions for almost everything you might want to deploy.
Avoiding lock-in, where reasonable (you're never going to be able to carry out something like big query as far as I can tell, and I don't work on those products or have special knowledge there) is something close to our hearts and is an important topic during design discussions of new products.
(I work for Google, on cloud, on the containerized developer workflow)
For any multi instance or multi datacenter managed distributed service, lock in is to be expected - the companies build and provide the service tightly coupled with their infrastructure and tech, so the effectively the companies are the service. The lock in follows from there. See DynamoDB, Bigtable, Spanner, SQS, S3 etc.
With s3, at least, Google Cloud Storage can be used as a drop in replacement in most scenarios. The object model is the same, and it even supports the same API.
Somewhat related: I was forced to switch to GCP for hosting my static website because of lack of payment options. AWS doesn't allow you to prepay. The only way to settle your dues is using a credit card. My international debit card usually works everywhere but it didn't in case of AWS. I never felt the need to get a credit card. I had to waste many hours in moving to GCP because there wasn't a way I could use to pay.
It's funny how I have failed often to buy something online because payment options are not international friendly. Latest in this case was New Yorker subscription. Every address combination I tried said the same thing: "Address is invalid", even though I had ticked the option for International subscription. Support was hopeless and in the end, I had to go without it. It's like I am saying, "Shut up and take my money" and people at the other end are tone-deaf to it.