Just one day before the start of Amazon’s AWS-focused re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, Google just announced a number of major updates to its set of Cloud Platform products. With this update, Google is introducing 36 new instance types for Compute Engine and a number of other new features across the platform.
Developers using Google’s App Engine, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL can now also deploy their applications in the company’s European data centers, with support for Compute Engine coming soon.
Also new on the Google Cloud Platform is Google’s new Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage solution, which sounds a bit like an Amazon Glacier competitor, though with a higher price and fewer restrictions. For now, this product is only available as a preview, but just like Glacier, Google notes that this product is mainly meant for developers who want to ” store data at lower cost, with the trade-off of lower availability than standard Google Cloud Storage.” Pricing for DRA storage starts at $0.07 per GB per month for the first terabyte and decreases for users who need more storage.
Even developers who need to get to their stored data quickly and can’t use the new DRA solution will be able to save a few dollars on their bills, though. Google is reducing the price of standard Google Cloud Storage by over 20%.
As for the 36 new Compute Engine instance types, which should be available in the coming weeks, here is Google’s description of the three buckets these fall into:
- High Memory Instance – High performance instances tailored for applications that demand large amounts of memory.
- High CPU Instance – Reduced cost option when applications don’t require as much memory.
- Diskless Configurations – Lower cost options for applications that do not require ephemeral disk and can exclusively utilize persistent disk.
In addition to all of this, Google is introducing Persistent Disk Snapshotting, a feature that, as Google notes, “makes it simple to instantly create a backup of your disk, move it around Google data centers, and use the snapshot to start up a new VM.”