Earlier this year, Google announced massive price drops for all of its cloud computing services that were quickly matched by Amazon, Microsoft and others. Today, during Google’s Atmosphere Live event, the company’s senior VP Urs Hölzle announced yet another — but smaller — round of price drops centered around the company’s Compute Engine cloud computing service. All Compute Engine instance types will now cost about 10 percent less than before.
Today’s announcement will surely result in yet another round of similar announcements from Google’s competitors, too. If the last skirmish in these price wars is any indication, Amazon will be the first to match Google’s cuts. The current prices for AWS instances pretty much match Google’s old prices exactly (though Amazon has a far wider range of options). A few days later, Microsoft Azure will match Amazon’s cuts. That’s Microsoft’s publicly stated policy, after all.
“We believe that compute — the core of any cloud workload — should be simple and fast to provision, scale without effort, and be priced in accordance with Moore’s Law,” Hölzle said today. He also notes that the company is able to make these price cuts thanks to increased efficiency in its data centers and lower hardware costs.