| 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 | High performance and reliability | 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 GCP 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.
GCP 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 GCP 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 Virtual IP (VIP) is regional, similar to other public cloud offerings, and adds management complexity compared to Premium Tier Global Load Balancing, if you require multi-region deployment.
Deliver your traffic on Google’s high performance global network
Deliver the best possible application experience to your users
Performance measured by Cedexis at https://itm.cloud.com/google-reports/
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
Performance measured by Cedexis at https://itm.cloud.com/google-reports/
Deploy regional load balancing to lower costs for single-region workloads
Full flexibility in selecting tier for each application
Specify tier per instance or instance template
Specify tier per load balancer for compute and storage backends
Enable tier at 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 |
| HTTP(S) Load Balancing (LB) | ||
| HTTP(S) Load Balancing (LB) | Yes - Global only | Yes - Regional |
| TCP/SSL Proxy LB (non-HTTP traffic) | ||
| TCP/SSL Proxy LB (non-HTTP traffic) | Yes - Global only | Yes - Regional |
| Network / Internal LB | ||
| Network / Internal LB | Yes - Regional VIP (+ Client can be anywhere) | Yes - Regional VIP (+ Client needs to be in same region) |
| Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine | ||
| Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine | Yes | Yes - Regional but only via LB |
| Cloud CDN | ||
| Cloud CDN | Yes | No |
| Cloud VPN/Cloud Router | ||
| Cloud VPN/Cloud Router | 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