Google Slashes Cloud Computing Prices, Introduces Pre-emptible Virtual Machine

Google recently announced that it has reduced the price of its Compute Engine hosted infrastructure service by up to 30 per cent as well as launched a new range of virtual machines that will deliver short term capacity boosts at lower costs, according to reports.

“We are reducing prices of all Google Compute Engine Instance types as well as introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines that delivers short-term capacity for a very low, fixed cost. When combined with our automatic discounts, per minute billing, no penalties for changing machine types, and no need to enter into long-term fixed-price commitments,” Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure, of Google said through its blog post.

A report on Tech Times says that the standard US-based instance will now be cheaper by 20 per cent and a micro-instance cheaper by 30 per cent. As per Google, these price cuts will result in around 40 per cent savings and European and Asian markets will also get similar price cuts, as per the Tech Times report.

According to the Tech Times report, cloud computing costs will get cheaper over time with companies like Google, Amazon charging for services around cloud computing and storage rather than computing and storage themselves. Rivals like Microsoft, Amazon are expected to counter Google’s announcement with reduced prices and this will lead to intense competition in the cloud computing segment, reports Tech Times.

Preemptible Virtual Machines (VMs)

Apart from the price reductions, Google also launched a new Pre-emptible Virtual Machine for those organizations that do not need additional infrastructure capacity on a daily basis to run short duration batch jobs, as per a report on eWeek.

“Google's Pre-emptible VMs offer all the same features as the company's regular VMs but will be up to 70 percent cheaper,” the eWeek report quoted Hölzle, as saying. Google mentioned in its blog post that the availability is subject to system supply and demand.

The eWeek report quoted Paul Nash, Senior Product Manager at Google, to say that one of the companies, named Descartes Labs, recently used the option to squeeze more than a petabyte of satellite imagery in 16 hours. Besides that, Google’s Chrome team have been using Pre-emptible VMs to boost compute power, the eWeek mentioned Paul Nash, as saying.

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