Google updates Cloud Platform services, reduces prices
updated 05:25 pm EST, Mon November 26, 2012
Introduces Amazon Glacier-style backup system
Google has updated the pricing for its cloud computing services, with the new costs representing a drop of about 20 percent compared to what they were previously. The changes come in just before Amazon holds its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, a developer event focusing on Amazon Web Services and cloud computing.
As spotted by TechCrunch, standard storage prices have dropped from $0.12 for the first terabyte down to $0.095, while the 400TB range is down from $0.085 to $0.07. A new storage system called Durable Reduced Availability has also been revealed, and seems to be a direct competitor for Amazon Glacier, in that it offers to "store data at lower cost, with the trade-off of lower availability than standard Google Cloud Storage." While pricing is seen as marginally higher than Amazon's own version, it is said to have fewer restrictions for developers to follow in order for it to work.
There are also 36 new instance types for the service, claims a company blog post, which fits into three distinct groups: high memory instances, high CPU instances, and diskless configurations. For instances with disks, Google is also adding Persistent Disk Snapshotting, allowing for quicker and easier creation of backups, and as a byproduct of this, quicker virtual machine transferals between Google data centers.
