Google ups the ante with another round of cloud price cuts

Google is kicking off October with a bang by announcing another significant price reduction, further heightening the competition against the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, among others.

Announced amid Google's Atmosphere Live one-day webcast summit, the new deal consists of a 10 percent reduction for all Google Compute Engine instances types across all regions, effective immediately.

Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of Technical Infrastructure, attributed the latest round of price cuts to "increased efficiency in our datacenters as well as falling hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers."

Google has been steadily ramping up its cloud strategy over the last several months, starting with an initial round of price reductions in March.

At the time, Hölzle and company garnered attention for comparing cloud pricing schemes to Moore's Law, predicting a significant and continuous decline for cloud costs, much like hardware before it.

Since then, Google executives from the cloud team as well as the department formerly known as "Enterprise" and now just "Google for Work" have been repeatedly stressing Google's ambitious roadmap for the cloud — both for the rest of 2014 as well as the long-term.

In August, the internet giant also launched on a third zone to both us-central1 and asia-east1 regions, further bolstering Compute Engine support for running systems such as MongoDB that use a quorum-based architecture.

With Google Cloud Platform Live still on the schedule in November (not to mention hints about a "12-month plan" that we've only begun to cover), it is likely that we will hear more about Google Cloud Platform updates (and possibly more price reductions) soon.