What Google says to AWS price cuts: Our cloud is still way cheaper
Google's own comparison of Google Cloud Platform versus AWS's new prices suggests it is still between 15 and 41 percent less expensive for compute resources.
Google isn't following Amazon Web Services' recent price cuts but claims it still offers the most bang for the buck in cloud.
Amazon Web Services delivered its 51st price cut last week, trimming five percent off C4, M4, and R3 reserved instances, on-demand instances and dedicated hosts running Linux across regions in the US, Asia Pacific, and Europe.
Google has hit back at its rival's price cuts, arguing that while the reductions may look appealing, Amazon's pricing model can contain nasty surprises, particularly for AWS customers who've sought lower prices by committing to one-year or three-year reserved instances.
Cloud
"We often hear from customers who are locked into contracts and aren't eligible for the new rates, or are stuck with instances that no longer fit their needs," argues Miles Ward, global head of solutions for Google Cloud Platform.
Indeed, as AWS noted last week, retroactive price cuts to January 1 only apply to on-demand and dedicated host pricing.
Google introduced Moore's Law principles to its cloud pricing in 2014 when it highlighted cloud prices hadn't fallen as fast as hardware costs. Google committed to reducing prices on a continual basis at the rate of Moore's Law, whereas last year AWS targeted cuts at reserved instances.
As noted by cloud management firm Rightscale last May after the Google cut prices, Google Cloud Platform was significantly cheaper than AWS, unless customers opted for reserved instances compared with its more expensive on-demand instance rates.
Ward highlighted that even with AWS' latest price cuts, Google Cloud Platform remained between 15 percent to 41 percent less expensive than AWS across several comparable instance types.
But as an AWS executive argued at its Re:Invent conference this October, while defending the lack of any new price cuts, price isn't everything, with customers showing more interest in the features and capabilities it offers.
Indeed, analysts have previously noted, AWS leads the infrastructure-as-a-service market by offering the largest array of features and platform capabilities.