Google enhances Cloud Platform, drops pricing

Google today announced price cuts of up to 85 percent across the board for its cloud platform, saying it intends to apply Moore's Law of hardware cost efficiences to its services.

Pricing for its standard Cloud Storage service will be 2.6 cents (US) per gigabyte/month in all regions from April 1 this year, although Australian and Asia-Pacific customers will still pay roughly twice as much in network egress charges, ranging from 15 to 21 cents (US) per gigabyte depending on the monthly usage.

BigQuery on-demand structured query language pricing will be slashed by 85 per cent, Google said, now costing US$5 per terabyte (AUD$4.60), and with 5 gigabyte per second reserved query capacity starting at US$20,000 a month.

Using BigQuery Streaming, a customer can ingest up to 100,000 records per second and per table for large-scale data analysis, in real-time. 

Google's Compute Engine now offers Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 but only in limited preview. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server are new operating system options that are available to everyone starting now.

Pricing for Compute Engine machines has been slashed by a third, Google said. Again, APAC customers pay substantially higher internet network egress charges than users in the Americas or Europe, Middle East and Africa.

A new discount for sustained use of virtual machines has also been introduced, and Google said it could save customers up to 30 per cent a month.

Today's price reductions follows Google's earlier, substantial cuts to online storage charges.