Google Slashes Cloud Prices By Up To 79%

Google Cloud’s long-awaited price cuts have finally been announced with various new features coming as part of the decreases that follow earlier cuts by its two main competitors in the space in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The search giant cut some products by almost 80 per cent and added direct peering, container scheduling and a new container engine built on Google’s Kubernetes technology.

Google’s cuts extend to Network egress [down 47 per cent], BigQuery storage [23 per cent], Persistent Disk Snapshots [79 per cent], Persistent Disk SSD [48 per cent], and Cloud SQL [25 per cent].

It comes after Google slashed the cost of its Compute Engine by 10 per cent just last month and Brian Stevens, VP of product management, stated that the cuts "reflect our commitment to make sure you benefit from increased efficiency and falling hardware prices."

"As always, we have an enduring commitment to passing along the savings we receive from Moore's Law to our users," he added in a blog post.

Google Cloud Interconnect brings a new secure network that allows direct peering to connect to Google at over 70 points of presence in 33 countries around the world and it also includes carrier interconnect with a number of partners including Equinix, Verizon, TATA and many more. Google also plans to add VPN-based connectivity next month.

The new Google Container Engine based on Kubernetes allows companies to move from looking after application components on individual virtual machines to launching portable Docker containers scheduled into a managed compute cluster.

In addition, it revealed its App Engine – Managed VMs service has gone beta and now includes auto-scaling support, Cloud SDK integration and support for runtimes built on Docker containers.

To try to tempt new customers it is offering a free trial of its cloud platform that includes $300 [£188] worth of free credits to spend on all Cloud Platform services with no ongoing commitments.

Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services have both engaged in a war on pricing over the past year and it would be hardly surprising should the two decide to cut them further following Google Cloud’s news.