Google is learning from the airlines industry
"Standard leg room" = zero leg room. And pray the guy in front of you doesn't lean his chair back.
It would be mischievous, perhaps, to suggest Google needs some network back for its own purposes – but the Chocolate Factory wants at least some of its cloud customers to shift their data around on the Internet instead of its private network. Announcing its offer-too-good-to-refuse here, Mountain View says its two-tier cloud …
"where's the advantage?"
All the data they're slurping out of the system can be directly married up to everything else you have sacrificed at the altar of "free stuff" by choosing Google, rather than them having to get it indirectly from tracking cookies, domains registered with Google and links in Gmail emails?
The "standard tier" pricing might be the leader to get you in the door. Then, once you want serious support, you pay for the real thing.
OTOH, I don't know how GCP is set up (I worked on the inside), but this seriously sounds like the mischievous suggestion might be spot on. The G already has internal tiers for network prioritization. There is no requirement to go outside unless saturation of the internal nets becomes an issue.
As for global load balancing, it is *hard*. The G's resources heavily favour the US, and I could easily see a situation where a lot of their customers are heavy in East Asia or Europe. Don't even start on India. In the event of a regional failure, link saturation strikes me as a real threat.
Not that the competition can do any better. I was talking to Amazon in April. I asked them about their latest outage. Immediate response: "We do sell regional diversity". But as he talked, he indicated that 2/3rds of their compute is in US-E. So yeah, they sell it, but they physically cannot sell it to everyone.
Throw in the national protectionist<bs><bs><bs><bs><bs><bs><bs>privacy regulations, and it strikes me as entirely likely that a growing GCP customer base is starting to significantly affect G's capacity. Down-tiering expectations might well be their only option until they can up their capacity.