Google cuts storage costs in Cloud Platform upgrade

Google has updated its Cloud Platform portfolio with new storage and compute capabilities as it seeks to compete with Amazon Web Services.

It has also announced that it is making a broader range of its services available from its Europe-based datacentres and offering a 20 percent cut in Google Cloud Storage pricing as part of the push.

Announced on Monday, the changes bring greater flexibility for users of Google's cloud computing services, in both the storage options available and the number of Compute Engine instance types that customers can choose to run application workloads.

On the storage side, Google has reduced the pricing for its standard Cloud Storage service by 20 percent while introducing an even lower cost service called Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage.

The latter offers a cost-effective alternative for storing data such as backup images that do not call for a high-availability guarantee, according to Google.

"The service level agreement will be lower than that for the standard Cloud Storage service, but you won't lose any of that data. We offer the same reliability," Barak Regev, Google's head of Cloud Platform in Europe, told V3.

Regev said that Google's storage pricing is already competitive, so the move is expected to make its Cloud Platform attractive to an even broader range of customers.

Meanwhile, Google has also reduced the prices for Compute Engine instances by five percent. It has also increased the number of instance types supported, with 36 additional types on top of the four introduced when Google's service launched back in June.

While the Compute Engine service still supports only Linux virtual machines, customers now have greater flexibility, Google claimed. A High Performance instance can be used by customers with applications that require larger memory.

There are also reduced cost options for applications requiring less memory or which use only persistent disk space for storage rather than ephemeral disk space.

Also new is Persistent Disk Snapshot support, which enables users to create a backup of their Compute Engine and use it to start up a new instance.

Google said it is continuing to roll out support for the Cloud Platform services in its European datacentres, enabling lower latency and faster access for customers in Europe.

While the App Engine development platform was already available in the EU zone for Google Premier users, Regev said the company is now rolling this out to all customers, along with Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL and the ability to launch Compute Engine instances in a European datacentre.

"We will continue with our momentum on our Cloud Platform," Regev said.