Google announced today that it's cutting the price for high-speed storage attached to its cloud virtual machines. Customers will pay up to 63 percent less for Local SSD storage that's attached to the virtual machines they use in Google Cloud Platform.
Local SSD storage is designed to offer companies high-speed data access for cloud applications that require it for high performance like data analysis and other tasks. Google's storage will persist for as long as the underlying instance keeps running in the company's cloud.
One of the key benefits Google offers is the ability to store arbitrary amounts of data in a Local SSD blob, rather than lock certain instance types to certain amounts of storage. Customers are then charged for how much data they store on a per-month basis. For most U.S. customers, Google will charge 8 cents per GB stored per month under the new pricing scheme.
These price cuts also benefit users of GCP's Preemptible VMs -- virtual machines that can run for a maximum of 24 hours and can be shut down by the tech giant at any time if it needs the compute capacity for other workloads. In exchange for those drawbacks, customers using Preemptible VMs will be able to get the same compute power for a lower price.
The price cut shows the continuing battle among cloud providers like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. All of these platforms regularly cut their prices in a bid to attract and retain business.