Google cuts Compute Engine and App Engine costs

Google promises to lower the prices of its cloud services for developers next week. Below that are the prices of Compute Engine and App Engine. In addition, prices are automatically reduced as workloads run longer.

The price cuts will take effect on April 1, Google’s Urs Hölzle announced during a Google conference in San Francisco. Prices for Compute Engine, where virtual machines can be hosted, are reduced by 32 percent. Prices for App Engine, for hosting individual applications, will be reduced by 30 percent for most customers and will also become more understandable, says Hölzle.

All data storage will immediately cost developers 2.6 cents per gigabyte per month, regardless of whether it is structured database data or blobs. That equates to a 68 percent reduction for most customers, says Hölzle. The variant with a lower availability, whereby the round trip time can be higher, will now cost 2 cents per gigabyte per month.

In addition, Google is introducing limited support for running Windows Server in Compute Engine. Red Hat and SUSE support is now available to everyone. Google is also introducing managed VMs, where Google takes on certain management tasks but the user has the freedom of a virtual machine. Both applications from the App Engine and virtual servers in the Compute Engine can be easily converted to a managed VM, according to Google.

In addition, the prices of BigQuery, which can process and analyze large amounts of data, will be reduced by 85 percent. Those who want to do five gigabytes per second of queries can now do so for $20,000 per month, which is 75 percent lower than competitors’ prices, according to Google.

In addition, starting next week, prices will be automatically reduced on stable workloads. When a workload runs for a quarter of the month, prices keep getting lower for the rest of the month. If a workload runs for a whole month, it even costs 53 percent less.