Google drops Cloud Platform prices across the board, introduces ‘Preemptible Virtual Machines’

Google has today announced big price drops for all Google Compute Engine Instance types, following the Moore’s law pricing philosophy that the company committed to last year. Effective today, the prices of virtual machines through Google Cloud Platform are dropping up to 30%, and Google is also introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines that could bring prices even lower in some cases…

The prices, in US dollars, are seeing a 20% drop for standard configuration, a 15% drop for high memory, a 5% drop for high CPU, a 15% drop for small, and a 30% drop for micro. Google says that the price reductions in other locales, including Asia and Europe, are “similar.” You can find the complete details on the Cloud Platform pricing page.

Alongside these price drops, Google has also announced today that it is introducing new preemptible virtual machines:

Today we are introducing Google Compute Engine Preemptible Virtual Machines, in beta for all customers in all regions. Preemptible VMs are the same as regular instances except for one key difference – they may be shut down at any time. While that may sound disruptive, it actually makes them a great choice for distributed, fault-tolerant workloads that do not require continuous availability of any single instance. By not guaranteeing indefinite uptime, we are able to offer them at a substantial discount to normal instances. Preemptible VM pricing is fixed. You will always get low cost and financial predictability, without taking the risk of gambling on variable market pricing. The savings begin with your first minute of usage, with prices as low as $0.01 per core hour.

Preemptible virtual machines are just like regular virtual machines, with the exception that they might be shut down at any time. But since they use resources that would otherwise be completely idle, Google can charge a low, fixed price for a service that would work great for “distributed, fault-tolerant workloads.” Google is charging as little as $0.01 per core hour. You can read some examples of companies that are already taking advantage of these over at Google’s Cloud Platform blog.