Google warns cloud customers that a price rise is coming

Google has announced that from October 1, prices are to rise on a number of its Google Cloud infrastructure services.

The new pricing was unveiled by Sachin Gupta, VP and general manager of Google Cloud Infrastructure, in a blog post.

Gupta said the new price book is about doing more “to align our capabilities and pricing with [customers’] varied workloads”.

"We are announcing we will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs [stock-keeping units] with new product options and capabilities," Gupta wrote.

“They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers."

Gupta’s post includes links to all affected price changes.

To soften the blow, there are some price reductions and new low-cost service options.

While Cloud persistent disk snapshot pricing is rising — multi-region snapshots are being hiked from US$0.026 per GB per month to US$0.065 per GB per month, for example — Gupta said Google is planning to release a low cost “archive snapshot” service.

Multi-region Nearline storage, and Coldline storage in the Asia multi-region are both having prices raised, but archive at-rest storage in the US and EU multi-regions and the Asian multi-region are being cut.

Standard at-rest storage and Nearline at-rest storage prices are being lifted in the nam4, eur4 and asia1 dual-regions, while Coldline and Archive at-rest storage in the same regions are being shaved.

Data replication will no longer be free: in the us, nam4, eu and eur4 regions, it will cost US$0.02 per GB, while in the asia and asia1 regions it will be US$0.08 per GB.

Network egress charges are becoming way more complex: instead of charging according to the monthly egress traffic from a customer’s bucket, the cost will depend on the locations involved.

Hence, for example, egress within North America will cost US$0.02 per GB, but if egress involves North America and Latin America, it will cost US$0.14 per GB.

Currently free, Network Topology will cost US$0.0011 per resource hour used, but will come bundled with the Network Intelligence Center Dashboard.

Cloud Load Balancing customers will, under the new price book, incur an outbound data processing charge of between US$0.0008 and US$0.012 per GB.