The cloud wars are real, and they are being fought on common ground – or at least, that’s what Google hopes!
Google has just cut down on prices for its Compute Engine by 30 percent, and has made Amazon, its primary challenger, re-consider their strategies.
The big G has also introduce a new a new Preemptible Virtual Machine – it’s able to deliver short-term computing capacity at a low, and fixed price. If Amazon doesn’t change its tactics immediately, they will most likely lose a ton of clients to Google.
The Google Cloud Platform Blog states that – ” Compared to other public cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform is now 40 percent less expensive for many workloads. 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.”
This means that in the US a standard instance will be 20 percent cheaper, and a micro-instance will be 30 percent less. Europe, and Asia haven’t received the same treatment yet, and the price reduction will come in the near future, maybe even next month.
Google states that their clients have the upper-hand when it comes down to saving money – they will be paying 40 percent less than what other individuals are paying using a competitors services wink wink Amazon.
Microsoft, and Amazon are most likely to counter Google’s offer, so be patient and don’t move just yet from a service to another. Most analysts think that the services will get even more cheaper in the years to come, eventually leading to it being completely free.
Now, Google introduced their Preemptible Virtual Machines, that cost $0.015, and they are 70 percent cheaper than their non-preemptible siblings. But there is a catch to this. Google doesn’t guarantee that their VM’s will run continuously. This shouldn’t pose as a problem, because you use them only in a cluster, and if one drops, the cluster won’t suffer – also, you’ll receive a notification 30 seconds prior to it going offline.
