Google has re-ignited the cloud price war with a large price reduction in costs for a number of workloads on its Cloud Platform.
This is the first time the company has cut its prices since November 2015 and this round of price drops are claimed to make the platform cost 40% less than other public cloud providers. The question now is if Amazon or Microsoft will respond.
Google has committed to lowering prices in line with Moore’s Law and now state that it has reduced the prices of virtual machines by up to 30%. Other price reductions come for standard (20%), high memory (15%), high CPU (5%), small (15%) and micro (30%).
The company has also brought to the market, ‘preemptible instances’ which is similar to Amazon‘s spot instances.
This instance type will cost 70% less than standard instances, this is due to them using idle resource in Google’s datacentres. As a downside though, Cloud Engine can terminate these instances when it needs the resources, although users will get a 30 second warning.
Google wrote on its blog: "Many factors influence the total cost of a real-world application, including the likelihood of design changes, the rate of decrease of compute prices, and whether you’ve been locked into price contracts which are now above market rates, or on instances that don’t fit your current needs anymore."
"With Google Cloud Platform’s customer-friendly pricing model, you’re not required to make a long-term commitment to a price, machine class, or region ahead of time."
