Google's Cloud Adds 36 New Instances, Drops Prices Across the Board

Google's a cloud company at heart, but only recently launched a pure cloud service, similar to Amazon's Web Services. The Google Compute Engine, a competitor to AWS' EC2, was introduced in a preview phase last summer, but it is now ready for a wider roll-out.

Google's other cloud services are getting some updates as well and, more importantly, lower prices. The Cloud Storage service is getting a big price drop, of over 20 percent in most cases Google claims.

The storage service is also getting a new option, Durable Reduced Availability. This new product is cheaper than regular cloud storage since fewer copies of the data are kept.

This means that not all the data may be available at any given time, making it only suitable for tasks which are not time dependent.

The Compute Engine is getting 36 new instances, on top of the four it launched with last summer. The original four are also getting cheaper, by about 5 percent.

The new options are geared for applications that need either more memory or more CPU than the standard instances. There's also an option for diskless configurations, suitable for compute-only tasks.