Credit: Google Cloud
Google Cloud is giving customers six months' notice as it plans to hike up prices on certain storage, compute and networking products from October 1.
In a blog post, Google Cloud Infrastructure vice president and general manager Sachin Gupta said it was adjusting its infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers "more choice" in how they pay for what they use, alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities.
“These changes are designed to help ensure better product fit for our customers’ use cases across a wider array of workloads," he said. "They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers.”
“Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products. Ultimately, our goal is to provide more flexible pricing models and options for how customers are using our cloud services.”
Some of these changes will impact cloud storage pricing for data mobility, replication of data written to a dual or multi-region storage bucket and inter-region data access.
For example Nearline Storage at-rest pricing in multi-regions will increase from US$0.010 to US$0.015 per gigabyte (GB) per month. Coldline Storage at-rest pricing in the Asia multi-region will increase from US$0.00700 to US$0.00875 per GB per month.
A new lower-cost archive snapshot option will also be introduced for Persistent Disk (PD) so that compliance and archiving use cases are charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads. For example Archive Storage at-rest pricing in the Asia multi-region will decrease from $0.0040 to $0.0030 per GB per month.
Default data replication pricing in the Asia, and Asia1 locations will now attract a price tag of US$0.08 per GB.
There will also be new outbound data processing pricing for Cloud Load Balancing of US$0.008 - US$0.012 based on region and new pricing for Network Topology.
This was previously offered as a free service, but will soon attract a charge of US$0.0011 per resource hour and will now also include Performance Dashboard within Network Intelligence Centre at no additional charge.
No doubt, Gupta said, the impact of the pricing changes may see an increase in some customer bills, but it was also introducing new options for some services to better align with usage, which could lower some bills.
“The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage,” he said. “In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs. We’re working directly with customers to help them understand which changes may impact them.”
Customers under existing commit contracts with a floating or fixed discount will not face any changes until renewal.
“Our goal is to help our customers manage any impact of these changes and allow time for them to adjust or modify their implementations,” Gupta said.
Earlier this month, Google Cloud was axing multiple technical engineer roles across US, Switzerland and Australia, although how many were impacted, wasn't specified.
