More choice, less complexity: New Compute Engine pricing options on tap

At Google Cloud, we believe cloud pricing should be simple, fair and transparent. You shouldn’t need an advanced degree in finance to get the most out of your cloud investment, and you definitely shouldn’t have to worry about your cloud provider covering up costs under layers of complexity.

Today, we’re taking simple, fair and transparent pricing for our Compute Engine service even further with the following announcements:

• We are extending committed use discounts to support GPUs, Cloud TPU Pods, and local SSDs. Committed use discounts are ideal for predictable, steady-state usage. Now you can purchase a specific number of GPUs, TPU Pods or local SSD storage for up to 55% off on-demand prices. At the same time, you have total control over the instance types, families and zones to which you apply your committed use discounts. Committed use discounts are available in all Compute Engine regions and support our wide 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.
• We now support capacity reservations for Compute Engine. Reservations allow you to reserve resources in a specific zone to use 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. 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.

Committed to pricing innovation

We have been committed to delivering simple, fair and transparent pricing for Compute Engine since it first launched in 2013. We were the first to offer per-minute and per-second billing, and simple fixed pricing with preemptible VMs. We were also the first to let you pick exactly how much RAM and vCPUs you need with custom machine types. We introduced committed use discounts, which reward steady-state, predictable usage in a way that’s easy-to-use and accommodates a variety of applications. Most recently, we were the first to introduce resource-based pricing, which lets you see exactly what you’re paying for — from vCPUs and RAM to GPUs or premium OS licenses. 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.

Get started today
We will continue to introduce discounts and pricing options that are flexible and predictable—so you don’t have to get that advanced finance degree. We won’t make you choose from thousands of SKUs, or worse, hide costs in confusing and hard-to-use bundles. To learn more about how to lower your cloud costs and reserve compute resources, check out our committed use discount and capacity reservation pages.