Google has announced that it has slashed the cost of its SSD powered cloud storage services by up to 63 per cent.
Local SSDs attached to the on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines will cost $0.080 per gigabyte (GB) per month in most parts of the US, with Preemptible virtual machines (VMs) being cut even further, down 71 per cent to just $0.054 per GB.
Google has always worked on a ‘bulk pricing’ approach where it shares the economies of scale it can generate with its customers with regular price cuts – similar to Amazon’s approach with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Google’s blog comments: “Local SSD is our high performance, physically attached block storage offering that persists as long as your instance exists.
“Supporting both NVMe and ISCSI interfaces, Local SSD provides the high IOPs and bandwidth performance that the world’s most demanding workloads require. Local SSD is often the preferred option for your scratch disks, caching layers and scale-out databases like NoSQL.”
Preemptible VMs are designed to run for a maximum of 24 hours at a time, but are guaranteed to be available to the customer and not syphoned off in the event of demand from other cloud customers.
The Google blog adds: “We hope that the price reduction on local SSDs for on-demand and pre-emptible VMs will unlock new opportunities and help you solve more interesting business, engineering and scientific problems.”
UK pricing is yet to be announced, but because regional pricing is affected by the aforementioned economies of scale, coupled with the availability of hardware in the appropriate data centre, there is no guarantee of immediate parity.
It is likely, though, that Google will be forced to consider lowering its European prices at some point in the near future, now the precedent has been set.