Credit: Dreamstime
Google Cloud has extended its committed use discounts for its Compute Engine services to include GPUs, cloud TPU pods and local SSDs.
As a result, specific numbers of GPUs, TPU Pods or local SSD storage can be purchased for up to 55 per cent off on-demand prices.
Committed discounts can be applied to instance types, families and zones as per the user's preferences.
Committed use discounts are available in all Compute Engine regions and support Google Cloud's selection of GPUs, including NVIDIA Tesla K80, P4, P100, and V100 GPUs, as well as all available slice sizes of Cloud TPU v2 Pods and Cloud TPU v3 Pods.
The Cloud services provider is also allowing for resources to be reserved in a specific zone to be used later.
"Reservations help ensure you have compute capacity available when and where you need it and are especially useful for anticipated spikes, say, during the holidays, when performing backup and disaster recovery, or for planned organic growth," explained Manish Dalwadi, product manager for Compute Engine.
"You can create or delete a reservation at any time. Reservations consume resources just like normal VMs, so any existing discounts you may have (e.g., sustained use discounts and committed use discounts) apply automatically. Even as we add more functionality, getting the lowest billing remains simple and fair in Google Cloud."
Google Cloud claims to have been the first to offer per-minute and per-second billing, and simple fixed pricing with preemptible VMs in Compute Engine.
"We are still the only cloud provider to automatically lower the price of your compute resources when you use them for a significant portion of the month, even without a long-term commitment with our sustained use discounts," Dalwadi added.
