It’s been almost six months, so it must be time to start another round of major price cuts in cloud computing services. Once again, Google is leading the way with this week’s announcements of cuts to the cost of Google Compute Engine instances ranging from a 5 percent drop in the cost of the most CPU intensive instances to a 70 percent single instance reduction for users able to utilize the new Preemptible Instances service offering.
Google claims that with this most recent cost reduction that its service is now 40 percent less expensive than the competition. Of course, given the history of this business, you can be sure that Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure services will soon follow suit, making this information most appealing to those who haven’t committed to one of the big three cloud services yet.
As you can see from the chart, price reductions are dependent on the type of instance that you are using. Actual prices are dependent on a number of items because of Google’s automatic discounts, such as the sustained use discount, and the per-minute billing, which can change the price charged based on usage in 10-minute increments.
Using idle power
For customers with appropriate workloads, the new Preemptible VM offering allows Google to utilize idle processing power by offering it to customers who have pre-emptible workloads at a very steep discount (70 percent compared with a single instance price). The fixed pricing allows customers to budget the cost of their computing knowing exactly how much the resource will cost.
Obviously, the nature of this service leans towards jobs that are fault tolerant (running service is shut down with 30-seconds notice and no guarantee when the next resource will become available) and while it’s not mentioned directly in the product announcement, the current version is a beta release and subject to all the potential issues that entails.
Complete details on pricing for the Google Cloud Platform can be found here along with details on their free trial with a $300 credit for one month.