Pricing of Google Cloud Computing Services — It’s Different!

Google has done the smart thing —
it has taken away all the uneasiness and awkwardness generally felt while discussing pricing, be it with a new client or with an established one. There is no “let-me-discuss-this-with-my-boss-and-get-back-to-you” kind of gimmicks when the client expects discounts or the “I-simply-cannot-afford-to-give-you-more-discounts” exasperation when your back is against the wall!

The way Google has priced its cloud computing services is different — it’s aggressive, smart and efficient.

Google’s Cloud Platform has on-demand pricing that Google regularly adjusts according to Moore’s law. This, in combination with sustained-use discounts that apply automatically if the resources are used continuously and sub-hour billing, enables its customers to use Google’s resources for bursty workloads, all making Google Cloud Platform up-to 40% more affordable than its competition.

To back up this up, all detailed calculations of the information above is available at: https://cloud.google.com/pricing/

Following traditional IT procurement, a typical customer would probably end up paying more than just following the official Google pricing.
Google does not:

1. Have any special pricing available through service partners.
   (This cuts out a lot of drama from the price-negotiations discussions!)
2. Proposes customers traditional 10–15% annual discount schemes.

Instead, Google offers in-built & automatic cost reductions while operating a solution on the Google Cloud Platform which substantially reduces the TCO.

Listing them:

1. Affordable On-Demand Prices & A Commitment to Moore’s Law

Google continues to slash pricing — recently slashing pricing by as much as 30%
The latest pricing is always applied to the monthly bill.

2. Sub-Hour Billing

Sub-hour billing allows developers to use more granular billing increments, so they can economically run short-lived instances.
All Google Cloud Compute Engine instances are charged in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum.

3. Sustained-Use Discounts

Sustained use discounts provide auto-calculated discounts for machines that are in use more than 25% of a given month. The discounts can be as much as 40% the on-demand price.

You can see the details here:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use

Google’s Pricing Philosophy is here:
https://cloud.google.com/pricing/philosophy/

4. Preemptible VM

Preemptible VM are about 70% cheaper than regular priced VMs.

You can read about it here:
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/05/Introducing-Preemptible-VMs-a-new-class-of-compute-available-at-70-off-standard-pricing.html

The pricing info is here:
https://cloud.google.com/compute/#pricing

And based on experiences, we can say that the above mentioned savings really do add up over time.

Additionally, following are some of the strategies that we normally implement that further reduces the monthly bill:

1. Compute Engine VMs
   - Efficient use of VMs, the right sized ones for the right amount of time.
   VMs should be brought down ASAP to reduce costs.
2. Using Preemptible VMs in the system as much as possible
   - We use Preemptible VM for all bursty computations and analytics.
3. Network Bandwidth
   - Data localization techniques would be used to reduce the network bandwidth charges.
4. Using Persistent Disk over SSD
   - Cost of persistent disk is much lower than SSD and for scenarios where speed of computation is not of prime importance, disk drives could be used instead of SSDs.

All in all, if you know what you are doing, you can really bring down the cost of running your infrastructure on the Google Cloud with some creative setups and some help from Google’s pricing policies.