Google Cloud Continues Moore’s Law Price Cuts

Google Cloud has slashed the prices of its virtual machines by up to 30 percent, following its Moore’s Law price drop strategy announced in 2014.

Google can now, and does indeed, claim that its Google Cloud Platform is now 40 percent less expensive for many workloads compared to other public cloud providers (namely Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services).

Very low, fixed cost

On a blog post announcing the price chop, Urs Hölzle, senior vice president, Technical Infrastructure said: “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 delivers short-term capacity for a very low, fixed cost.”

Google only revealed the price cuts for its VMs for the US region, but said that “the price reductions in Europe and Asia are similar”.

Standard configuration VMs from Google get a price reduction of 20 percent, high memory 15 percent, high CPU 5 percent, small 15 percent, and micro 30 percent. It makes sense for Google to slash the priciest the highest on its cheapest VM, but a 20 percent drop for standard is still a bold move.

On the Cloud blog, Hölzle continued to use the announcement to take swings at Azure and AWS, whilst naming no names. The firm said: “Our continued price/performance leadership goes well beyond list prices. Our combination of sustained use discounting, no prepaid lock-in and per-minute billing offers users a structural price advantage which becomes apparent when we consider real-world applications.”

Last year saw Google cut its cloud prices in March and October, with AWS announcing cuts all the way through until December. Microsoft dropped Azure prices in January, March and September. This is Google’s first volley of the year in terms of the public cloud price wars, and it can be expected that similar price cuts will come from the other two within the next few months.

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