Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/28/google_cloud_platform/
Google goes for Amazon: Slash-fest on cloud storage prices
Builds EU data centres, drops IaaS costs - there will be blood
Posted in Storage, 28th November 2012 08:29 GMT
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The Google juggernaut has ground out new cloud storage and compute facilities, slashed its prices, and provided European data centre support for its EU zone.
The Google cloud platform [1] includes a range of products, such as its AppEngine, BigQuery, Compute Engine infrastructure service, as well as Cloud Storage. Google's product manager for its Cloud Platform, Jessie Jiang, announced the news in a blog post [2].
Here's the skinny:
- Cloud Storage prices are being cut more than 20 per cent, with prices being $0.095/GB/month for the first TB, $0.085/GB/month for the next 9TB, $0.075/GB/month for the next 90TB and $0.07/GB/month for the next 400TB.
- A limited preview of Durable Reduced Storage (DRS) is available. It loses some data redundancy, meaning lower availability, compared to bog-standard Google cloud, but has the same latency of access and durability. It's meant as a short term-ish backup facility for things like reschedulable batch compute jobs or data where fast restores are needed.
- The prices for this have the same capacity cut-off points as standard cloud storage, are billed on the same GB/month basis, and are $0.07, $0.06, $0.055 and $0.05.
- "Object Versioning" is being introduced, which keeps old versions of users' data and adds to the data protection capabilities. Object Versioning, which works at the bucket level, is only supported by the XML API and, as it develops, backwards-incompatible changes may be made to it. Sounds like beta test code at best.
- Europe-based data centres can now be used for App Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and, in the near future, Compute Engine. European customers of such Google cloud products should experience faster performance and have international redundancy if they wish.
- There are 36, yes 36, new types of compute instances as Google goes niche-filling with a vengeance. Examples are a high memory instance, a high CPU/lower memory instance, and a diskless configuration instance. Google hasn't said in public what the other 33 instances are.
- The seventh item is Persistent Disk Snapshotting, for instant backup creation. You can move this snapshot around Google's cloud data centres and start up VMs from it.
Anything missing? There's no response yet by Google to Amazon's ultimate cheapo Glacier archive data storage offering. Maybe Google isn't going to offer an equivalent service?
Get pricing info here [3]. ®