Announcing price cuts on Local SSDs for on-demand and preemptible instances

Starting today, you'll pay up to 63% less for Local solid-state disks (SSDs) attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines. That’s $0.080 per GB per month in most US regions. We’re also introducing even lower prices for Local SSDs used with Preemptible VM instances: up to 71% cheaper than before. That’s $0.064 per GB per month in most US regions.

At Google we're always looking to reduce total cost of ownership for our customers, pass along price reductions achieved through technology advancements and adjust our pricing so you can take advantage of technology that will help you innovate, in a manner that's simple for our users.

Local SSD is our high performance, physically attached block storage offering that persists as long as your instance exists. Supporting both NVMe and ISCSI interfaces, Local SSD provides the high IOPs and bandwidth performance that the world’s most demanding workloads require. Local SSD is often the preferred option for your scratch disks, caching layers and scale-out databases like NoSQL.

A key feature of Local SSDs is that you can attach any amount of Local SSD storage to an any machine shape. You aren’t locked in at a fixed ratio of Local SSD capacity to a VM’s vCPU count and memory. Also, Local SSDs are available on the same instances as GPUs, giving you flexibility in building the most high performance systems.

In addition to dropping prices on Local SSDs attached to regular, on-demand instances, we’re lowering the price for Local SSDs attached to Preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs are just like any other Compute Engine VM, with the caveat that they cannot run for more than 24 hours and that we can preempt (shut down) the VM earlier if we need the capacity for other purposes. This allows us to use our data center capacity more efficiently and share the savings with you. You may request special Local SSD quota for use with Preemptible instances, though your current Local SSD quota works as well (learn more).

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers use Preemptible VMs to greatly reduce their compute costs, and have come up with lots of interesting use cases along the way. Our customers are using Preemptible VMs with Local SSDs to analyze financial markets, process data, render movies, analyze genomic data, transcode media and complete a variety of business and engineering tasks, using thousands of Preemptible VM cores in a single job.

We hope that the price reduction on Local SSDs for on-demand and Preemptible VMs will unlock new opportunities and help you solve more interesting business, engineering and scientific problems.

For more details, check out our documentation for Local SSDs and Preemptible VMs. For more pricing information, take a look at the Compute Engine Local SSD pricing page or try out our pricing calculator. If you have questions or feedback, go to the Getting Help page.

We’re excited to see what you build with our products. If you want to share stories and demos of the cool things you've built with Compute Engine, reach out on Twitter, Facebook or G+.