Google has made its next move in the cloud computing wars against companies like Amazon, slashing the price of Compute Engine by up to 30 percent.
The company also introduced Preemptible Virtual Machines, able to deliver short-term computing capacity for a low, fixed cost.
"Compared to other public cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform is now 40 percent less expensive for many workloads," said the company in a statement. "Starting today, we are reducing prices of all Google Compute Engine Instance types as well as introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines that deliver short-term capacity for a very low, fixed cost."
The move will mean that a standard U.S-based instance will be cheaper by 20 percent and a micro-instance cheaper by 30 percent. Europe and Asia are set to get similar price cuts. As mentioned, Google suggests that these price cuts will represent around 40 percent savings over competition.
The reductions in cloud computing costs are just another move in an ongoing price war in cloud computing. Many suggest that cloud computing costs are set to get cheaper and cheaper until they are eventually free, with companies like Google and Amazon charging for services around cloud computing and storage rather than computing and storage themselves. Competition like Amazon and Microsoft will likely counter Google's announcement with their own price reductions, and the cloud price war will get increasingly intense.
Of course, it's a little ironic that Google is introducing a new pricing scheme with Preemtible VMs. The price of these virtual machines is fixed at $0.015, which is 70 percent cheaper than their non-preemtible counterparts. Google does not gurantee that these virtual machines will run continuously. While this might sound a little non-useful, the idea is that it will be used in clusters, where no one machine needs to be running all the time for the whole cluster to work properly, but rather at least one of the cluster does. Google also says that machines set to terminate will be notified 30 seconds in advance.
The closest service that Amazon has to Google's new Preemtible VMs is the EC2 spot instance. Instead of there being machines that could shut down at any time, users bid on spare instances, which are run for the user when the bid is met.
Despite this, Google's announcement of a new type of cloud computing will expand its diversity and offer more options for those on Google's platform.
