If AWS were to go to a per-minute billing cycle, they would be instantly more price-competitive with Google's offering. Or, to put it the other way around, those leftover minutes form a significant chunk of AWS's profit margin.
I don't think so. GCP's bill is usually about 50% of AWS's bill for same application, if you run it full hour (from my personal experiences and from several others as well: https://thehftguy.com/2016/11/18/google-cloud-is-50-cheaper-...). GCP has lot more cost saving features like seamless scalability, custom shapes, sustained discounts and so on. If you workloads span less than hour, GCP can offer more then 50% savings.
I refuted some of the networking claims in that article previously (I work for AWS). Especially the bizarre claims that you have to get a C4.4xlarge for 1gpbs... The 220 mpbs network cap claim is just not true. Just run iperf3 on any aws instance to a GCE instance and you can see greater than 220mpbs.
Honestly we all know that the small instances have terrible CPU that doesn't let you use the advertized 1Gbps anyway. Other than that, even if AWS let 1Gbps traffic go on for a while, you get throttled pretty quickly from my experience.
> Just run iperf3 on any aws instance to a GCE instance and you can see greater than 220mpbs.
For how long is the question. Historically, it’s been considered common knowledge (might just be an urban legend) that AWS, even if you pay for more traffic, at some point just throttles you, the same way that they do with IO.
Though there would still be other things like the lower on-demand rates, custom shapes, networking that scales with shape (rather than being coarsely grouped), being able to attach SSD / GPUs semi-arbitrarily, and so on. For those that care, not having to pay up front for the best price is also a huge deal. You see the same thing in GCS vs S3 as well: Glacier and S3-IA have a few rounding up gotchas that catch many people out.
All that said, I hope we all get to per-minute billing.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but haven't talked to the Metamarkets folks)
