Google has announced a price cut on its local SSD (solid state disk) storage attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines – to the tune of up to 63%.
The latest move from Google will see costs drop by $0.080 per gigabyte per month in the majority of US regions for on-demand VMs, while the company also announced prices were being lowered on preemptible VMs.
Local SSD is a high performance, physically attached block storage offering, and can be the most viable option for workloads such as caching layers and NoSQL databases, while preemptible VMs only run for 24 hours and can be taken off by the provider – hence the name – if the capacity needs to be used for other purposes.
“At Google we’re always looking to reduce total cost of ownership for our customers, pass along price reductions achieved through technology advancements and adjust our pricing so you can take advantage of technology that will help you innovate, in a manner that’s simple for our users,” wrote product managers Chris Kleban and Michael Basilyan in a blog post.
Slashing cloud prices is not as common a practice as it once was. AWS’ most recent price cuts – the 62nd – was last month, focusing on Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition for EC2. Given the service has been going since 2006, and the 40th price cut appeared over the horizon at the start of 2014, it gives you some idea as to the slowdown.
According to a paper from 451 Research back in April, object storage, rather than VMs, will become the focus of the new cloud price wars. “This is the first time there has been a big price war outside compute, and it reflects object storage’s move into the mainstream,” said Jean Atelsek, 451 digital economics unit analyst at the time.
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