Google has dropped cloud storage pricing 20 percent, has added a set of new features, and is expanding its availability in Europe — all in advance of rival Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) first major event this week in Las Vegas.
With the drop in pricing, Google is offering a new service called Durable Reduced Availability Storage, a service that allows people to store data at a lower price by limiting its availability. It’s similar to AWS Glacier, an archiving service that provides secure and durable storage for data archiving and backup. Like AWS Glacier, the Google storage service means that data would require some extra time to access. It’s essentially a way for companies to archive data that they rarely access or not at all.
Google is also introducing Object Versioning, which allows users to keep a history of updates to an object and may be used to help protect against accidental object overwrites or deletes.
Earlier this year, Google introduced four instance types for Google Compute Engine. Today Google is introducing 36 new instance types. According to Google the new instance types include the following:
- High Memory Instance – High performance instances tailored for applications that demand large amounts of memory.
- High CPU Instance – Reduced cost option when applications don’t require as much memory.
- Diskless Configurations – Lower cost options for applications that do not require ephemeral disk and can exclusively utilize persistent disk.
In addition to the news about its cloud platform, Google has also announced that customers using Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL and (soon) Google Compute Engine can deploy their applications, data, and virtual machines to European data centers.
The news today is well-timed. AWS re:Invent will be a massive event but Google’s place in the market is looming in advance of its general availability, which is expected to happen early next year.
