Happy New Year from Google Cloud Platform - still the price/performance leader in public cloud!

Pay less, compute more!

Developers running cloud-based apps and services will find out whether it’s a happy new year or not once they take a look at their bill. In case you’ve been reading recent announcements and were wondering, rest assured: Google continues to be the price/performance leader in public cloud.

As you can see, we’re anywhere from 15-41% less expensive than AWS for compute resources, after their reduction. We use automatic Sustained Usage Discounts and our new Custom Machine Types to ensure that we’re presenting exact spec-to-spec comparisons here, something AWS can’t match.

*You might have noticed that the price is a little closer for high-memory instance types: AWS provides a particularly high ratio of ram to CPU on these, so for our comparison instance we’re using one with 4 cores rather than 2… and it’s still over 15% less expensive.

While price cuts sound appealing on the surface, when you unpack the specifics of Amazon’s pricing model, it can be an unpleasant surprise. We often hear from customers who are locked into contracts and aren’t eligible for the new rates, or are stuck with instances that no longer fit their needs.

We designed Google Cloud Platform pricing to be as flexible and beneficial to our customers as possible. You’re not required to make a long-term commitment to a price, machine class or region ahead of time. Our combination of lower list prices, sustained use discounting, no prepaid lock-in, per-minute billing, Preemptible VM’s and Custom Machine Types offers a structural price advantage that’s unmatched in the industry. For a detailed look at our pricing versus Amazon’s see this post on understanding cloud pricing.

As you consider which cloud provider to build and host your apps with in 2016, check out our TCO Tool. Explore how different combinations of development and production instances, as well as environmental assumptions, change the total cost of a real-world application hosted in the cloud — and be sure to compare it to our competitors!

Happy New Year!