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Google has unveiled new lower pricing for Google Cloud Platform users through “Sustained Use Discounts” that the company has just made available to users who run large projects on virtual machines.
Under the new pricing scheme, users will save more as they use more virtual machines in the Google Cloud, wrote Navneet Joneja, a Google Cloud Platform senior product manager, in an April 4 post on the Google Cloud Platform Blog. The Sustained Use Discounts for Google Compute Engine were announced recently at the company’s Google Cloud Platform Live developer’s event.
The Sustained Use Discounts “automatically lower the price of your virtual machines (VMs) when you use them to run sustained workloads,” wrote Joneja. “You still only pay for the minutes you use, but with sustained use discounts we give you the best price for every VM you run without your having to perform any additional planning, make any long-term commitments, or pay any up-front fees. Discounts increase with use, so the more you use a VM, the greater the discount you get.”
The Sustained Use discounts give users higher agility, simple pricing and lower risk, wrote Joneja.
Google is often tweaking its Google Cloud Platform for users and developers.
In March 2014, Google introduced a new Google APIs Client Library for .NET and improved documentation for using third-party Puppet, Chef, Salt and Ansible configuration-management tools, according to an eWEEK report. The new Google APIs Client Library for .NET is an open-source effort, hosted at NuGet, that lets developers building on the Microsoft .NET Framework integrate their desktop or Windows Phone applications with Google’s services. The library includes more than 50 Google APIs for Windows developers.
Also released in March was a new Google paper, “Compute Engine Management with Puppet, Chef, Salt, and Ansible,” which provides information for Google Cloud Platform developers who want to use configuration-management tools such as those from Puppet, Salt, Chef and Ansible.
In October 2013, Google replaced its old Google API Console with a new, expanded and redesigned Google Cloud Console to help developers organize and use the more than 60 APIs offered by Google.
Earlier in October, the company released several technical papers to help cloud developers learn more about the development tools it offers through its Google Compute Engine services. The papers, “Overview of Google Compute Engine for Cloud Developers” and “Building High Availability Applications on Google Compute Engine,” offer insights and details about how the platform can be used and developed for business users.
In September 2013, Google unveiled its second version update of the Google App Engine since August, with the latest release 1.8.4, including a host of features that the company says will make it more flexible and simpler for developers to use for their applications. Included in 1.8.4 is support for Dynamic Web Projects in Eclipse to better support Google Cloud Endpoints and App Engine Backends, as well as fixes for several bugs. One other important new feature is the ability of Google App Engine to handle differential snapshots of a Google Compute Engine persistent disk so that only the most recently changed data is updated.
The August 2013 launch of the previous App Engine 1.8.3 was also accompanied by deeper features for Google Compute Engine and the Google Cloud Datastore as the search giant continues to add functions and robustness to the Google Cloud Platform. The new tools included Layer 3 load balancing for Google Compute Engine and improvements to the PHP runtime in the latest Google App Engine release. The Layer 3 load-balancing capabilities were a key addition in the Google Compute Engine, to provide Google-scale throughput and fault tolerance to manage Internet applications.