Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, suggests that the number of integrated circuits today will most likely double after two years. With the boom in hardware, the prices for such should go down along with other services that may use them.
Following the curve assumed by Moore, Google has aimed at players in the cloud industry such as Amazon and Microsoft by announcing big price cuts Tuesday for its Cloud Platform.
"The original promise of cloud computing was simple: virtualize hardware, pay only for what you use, with no upfront capital expenditures and lower prices than on-premise solutions. But pricing hasn't followed Moore's Law: over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30% annually but public cloud prices fell at just 8% per year. We think cloud pricing should track Moore's Law, so we're simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85%," wrote Google senior vice president Urs Hölzle.
During the Google Platform Live, the company announced price cuts and discounts, tools and new features.
While the move is clearly an attempt to catch up with Amazon Wireless Services and Microsoft Azure, the numbers can be compared to a left straight power punch of Manny Pacquiao that wants to knock out its competition.
The price for Compute Engine, for example, was slashed by 32 percent for all of its size, class and region offerings. The pricing for the App Engine is also simplified with instance-hours getting a 37.5 percent price cut, Datastore (33 percent), dedicated memcache (50 percent). Other App Engine services such as PageSpeed and SNI SSL now come as free options.
Customers can also enjoy a 68 percent price drop for the Cloud Storage service now pegged at 2.6 cents a gigabyte. The BigQuery on-demand service also now comes cheaper by 85 percent.
"...we've focused a lot on productivity, making it easier to build and test in the cloud, using the tools you're already familiar with," Hölzle said.
The company also gives a big discount for sustained use customers that make use of its virtual machines 25 percent of the month and as much as 53 percent for those who use VM's during an entire month. The BigQuery service now at $5 for every terabyte can also be a big blow for other providers.
Other features introduce simplify things for developers, businesses and system support.
Hölzle disclosed during the event that the company has now around 4.75 million applications running on the Google Cloud Platform. The App Engine alone handles over 28 billion front-end requests a day or comparable to 10 times the requests of Wikipedia across the globe. Cloud storage handles around 6.3 trillion requests per day or 30 operations a day for every person in the planet.
With these latest announcements, Google makes cloud computing services in plain English. Pre-planning before utilizing the cloud will not cause one pop a pill for headache. Now Amazon and Microsoft will either run around the ring or be knocked out unless they decide to throw their big punches. Win-win for customers.
