Google answers Amazon Web Services' 19th price reduction by trimming its Cloud Storage service costs per gigabyte. Both companies are competing for customers in the platform as a service (PaaS) game.
One day after Amazon
(NASDAQ:AMZN) Web Service slashed its cloud infrastructure prices for the nineteenth
time, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has chopped the rates for its Cloud Storage software
product, which lets developers sock away great chunks of data on the search
engine company's servers.
Google first introduced
Cloud Storage
at Google I/O in May 2010. The service leverages the RESTful application programming
interface (API) and Google's storage and networking infrastructure to store
data and code from cloud computing projects while they are being built. The
service provides storage for computation, static content hosting, Web
applications, as well as the classic backup and recovery scenarios.
Enterprise storage providers
have also integrated Google Cloud Storage to provide a Web-based alternative to
their existing services. For example, Panzura allows global businesses to
store, collaborate and back up files in the cloud using its Panzura File System
and Cloud Storage.
Cloud Storage pricing is
based on storage and bandwidth usage, which are are calculated in gigabytes
(GB).
By and large,
Google has shaved off
pennies per GB.
The new pricing, effective retroactively from March 1, 2012, starts at $0.12 up
to a terabyte (TB), down from $0.13 up to a TB. The next 9TB now costs
developers $0.105 per GB, down from $0.12 per GB.
Amazon's popular Simple Storage Service (S3) costs $0.125
GB for up to 1 TB of standard storage each month, and $0.093 for up to
1TB for reduced redundancy storage.
Google will continue to
offer its Cloud Storage free trial quota through June 30, 2012. Users of this
offer will get up to 5GB of storage and can access 25GB of download data free
for their first project that uses Cloud Storage.
Google's Cloud Storage cost-cutting
came one day after Amazon Web Services (AWS) cut prices for its Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Elastic Map
Reduce cloud computing services. SS3 was not part of these cost cuts.
Even so, AWS provided some
anecdotal evidence of cost savings one of its customers has seen with the new
pricing scheme. This unnamed customer was running 360,000 hours worth of Amazon
EC2 instances.
"Without this customer
changing a thing, with our new EC2 pricing, their bill will drop by over
$25,000 next month, or $300,000 per yearan 8.6 percent savings in their
On-Demand spend,"
wrote Jeff Barr, senior
manager of Web services evangelism at Amazon.com, in a blog post.
That's the type of savings
that C-level executives drool over. It isn't clear how much Google's Cloud
Storage price cuts will save its customers, but it's a sign that the company is
committed to competing with AWS, which kick-started the platform as a service
(PaaS) last decade.
Google is also reportedly
preparing to
launch Google Drive, a lighter-weight storage
locker geared to help consumers and businesses store documents, photos and
files.
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