14 DAY TRIAL // The battle of the giants is on as Google refuses to back down and let Amazon win. The company has updated its prices for the cloud services it offers, and announced new products that should help customers start using the cloud faster.
During the Cloud Platform conference that was held in San Francisco, Google made quite a few announcements as it seeks to push up its market share in the cloud storage business.
Google slashed prices for the cloud Platform, a move that should make all companies with an account quite happy. The company cuts 10 percent of the Google Compute Engine, 23 percent on the BigQuery Storage, 79 percent on the Persistent Disk Snapshots, 48 percent on the Persistent Disk SSD and 25 percent on the large Cloud SQL instances.
“The price is right: We just announced price cuts that are in line with our ongoing commitment to bringing Moore's Law to the Cloud. First, we are aligning storage pricing to the low prices that we currently have on Cloud Storage,” the company also announced in a Google+ post.
New products on the horizon
The company also introduced App Engine with support for automatic scaling, runtime built on Docker containers, as well as cloud SDK integration. There’s also a new network called Google Cloud Interconnect, which should set the ground for apps and IT architectures and brings the fiber network to direct peering for 33 countries, Mashable reports.
The Internet giant also announced another new service called Google Container Engine, which allows businesses to move from managing application components running on individual virtual machines to portable Docker containers scheduled into a managed compute cluster. As the integration with Docker deepens, Google said that users will be able to create and tie together container-based services that will, in turn, make it possible for companies to log, monitor and manage incoming data.
Starting next year, Google will also implement carrier interconnect with partners such as Verizon, which should allow users to keep apps and data on their own turf, while using the public cloud for other type of tasks.
Other companies dealing in the cloud business are quite upset with the likes of Google and Amazon because they’ve been cutting prices in an aggressive rhythm, leaving them all lagging behind and unable to properly compete. Of course, giants such as these two can afford to cut down prices, while the smaller competitors don’t really have much wiggle room.
