Google announced today that it was lowering pricing on Google Compute Engine Instance types. Google states that it is already 40% less expensive than other cloud providers on many workloads. Google is also introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines. These new VMs will deliver short-term capacity for low costs.
Google announced today that it was lowering pricing on Google Compute Engine Instance types. Google states that it is already 40% less expensive than other cloud providers on many workloads. Google is also introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines. These new VMs will deliver short-term capacity for low costs.
Google has made a series of product announcements recently including Google Nearline Cloud Storage, an archival storage product that still has high speed and accessibility, and Google BigTable Database Service, a high performance NoSQL database. Google is looking to further extend its reach in cloud services by lowering costs of existing Compute Engine Instance types as well as the introduction of the new VMs.
Not only does Google start with a lower list price, they also offering a variety of discounts and choices while letting users avoid prepaid lock-in. Google offers discounts such as per-minute billing, which would be ideal for a developer environment where they could easily turn on and off the service and only pay for the amount they use. A production environment, where the service always needs to be on, would benefit from a sustained use discount, which is up to 30% addition discount. Google offers a TCO tool to see how customers can save costs in real world applications.
Preemptible VMs
Preemptible VMs are no different than normal VMs except they are available at a much lower cost and are available for short-duration batch jobs. Google runs Preemptible VMs on idle resources, making these VMs considerably cheaper than they would be otherwise. Preemptible VMs are ideal for workloads such as Hadoop MapReduce, visual effects rendering, and financial analytics. Preemptible VMs’ price is fixed so their costs are predictable however their availability is subject to system supply and demand.
Along with the introduction of the new VMs, Google is reducing the pricing of existing VMs up to 30%. VM prices have been reduced by more than half since Google Compute engine was launched in November 2013.
