| Category | Premium | Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Network | ||
| Network | High-performance routing | Lower-performance network |
| Network services | ||
| Network Services | Network services such as Cloud Load Balancing are global (single VIP for backends in multiple regions) | Network services such as Cloud Load Balancing are regional (one VIP per region) |
| Service level | ||
| Service Level |
99.99% availability SLA High performance and reliability |
99.9% availability SLA Performance and availability comparable to other public cloud providers (lower than Premium) |
| Use case | ||
| Use Case | Performance, reliability, global footprint, and user experience are your main considerations | Cost is your main consideration, and you're willing to trade-off some network performance |
Premium Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over Google's well-provisioned, low-latency, highly reliable global network. This network consists of an extensive global private fiber network with over 100 points of presence (POPs) across the globe. By this measure, Google's network is the largest of any public cloud provider. See the Google Cloud network map.
Google Cloud customers benefit from the global features within global load balancing, another Premium Tier feature. You not only get the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP (VIP), but can also expand seamlessly across regions and overflow or fail over to other regions.
Our new Standard Tier delivers Google Cloud traffic over a transit ISP's network with the latency and reliability typical of transit ISPs, and with a network quality comparable to that of other public clouds, at a lower price than our Premium Tier. We also provide only regional network services in Standard Tier, such as the new regional Cloud Load Balancing service. In this tier, your load-balancing VIP is regional, similar to other public cloud offerings, and it adds management complexity compared to Premium Tier global load balancing if you require a multi-region deployment.
Deliver your traffic on Google's high-performance global network
Deliver the best possible application experience to your users
Deploy global load balancing, with the management simplicity of a single anycast IPv4 or IPv6 Virtual IP across multiple regions. Seamlessly expand, overflow, or fail over into other regions.
Premium Tier supported for Cloud CDN
Run cost-sensitive workloads
Performance comparable with other public cloud offerings
Deploy regional load balancing to lower costs for single-region workloads
Full flexibility in selecting the tier for each application
Specify the tier per instance or instance template
Specify the tier per load balancer for Compute Engine and Cloud Storage backends
Enable the tier at the project level to apply it to all underlying applications (coming soon)
| Features | Premium Tier | Standard Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Plain VM instance | ||
| Plain VM instance | Yes - Regional | Yes - Regional |
| Application Load Balancer | ||
| Application Load Balancer | Yes - Global only | Yes - Regional |
| Network Load Balancer (non-HTTP traffic) | ||
| Network Load Balancer (non-HTTP traffic) | Yes - Global or regional | Yes - Regional |
| Internal load balancers | ||
| Internal load balancers | Yes - Regional VIP (+ client can be anywhere) | No |
| Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine | ||
| Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine | Yes | Yes - Regional but only by using load balancing |
| Cloud CDN | ||
| Cloud CDN | Yes | No |
| Cloud VPN/Cloud Router | ||
| Cloud VPN/Cloud Router | Yes | No |
| IPv6 | Yes | No |
“Google’s global network is one of the strongest features for choosing Google Cloud.”
—Ravi Yeddula Sr. Director Platform Architecture & Application Development, The Home Depot