Google Serves Up IaaS Price Cuts and Enterprise Cloud Enhancements

Some analysts felt as if Google’s IaaS cloud offerings were falling behind the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and SoftLayer. Google has announced that they have pledged significant resources to their IaaS operations by enhancing much of the functionality for corporate clients. Virtual private cloud is becoming an emerging trend in the IaaS game and many specialty outfits are popping up to gain a share of this market. Google is seeing this slip away therefore they have publically announced that they will step up their game.

Brian Stevens, vice president of cloud platforms for Google mentioned, “IT departments are still bearing the burden of handling IT assets in the sky; We want to be able to change what our users are able to do and not just where they’re doing it. IT is spending far too much time and dollars on administrative aspects of the cloud.”

With Google’s investment in Docker, Google is now offering what they call Clustering-as-a-Service which serves up Docker instances within the management portal. Google is also slashing prices on many of their popular cloud services. A run down of the price cuts are as follows (according to Forbes):

  • Managed VMs moves into beta and adds auto-scaling support, Cloud SDK integration and support for runtimes built on Docker containers
  • Google Cloud Debugger becomes publicly available in beta
  • Google Compute Engine Local LOCM +4.05% SSD is being released in beta for customer VMs to use as high performance scratch disk or to back replicated databases. Local SSD offers up to 680,000 read IOPS or 280,000 write IOPS.
  • Google Compute Engine Autoscaler is launching in beta and automatically grows and shrinks a fleet of VMs based on metrics our customers define.

The App Engine and Compute Engine received most of the cuts with SQL services also receiving a significant cut at 25%. More information about these pricing decreases can be found on the Google Platform’s website.

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