​Google drops cloud Local SSD prices by up to 63 percent

Google's latest cloud price cuts have come to the solid-state disks attached to its on-demand virtual machines.

Google has rolled out a 63 percent cut for its Compute Engine's local 375GB SSDs, which are physically attached to the server hosting its virtual machines (VMs), offering high bandwidth and IOPS performance.

Most US regions can now rent local SSDs for these on-demand instances for eight cents a GB per month. Customers can attach up to eight local SSDs to a VM.

The new local SSD pricing is available in the Iowa, Oregon, Taiwan, and Belgium regions. While charges are adjusted to reflect actual usage down to seconds, local SSDs can only be purchased in 375GB units. This translates to a cost of $30 per unit per month or, if only a portion of the month is used, an estimated hourly rate of 4.1 cents.

Google has also lowered the price for local SSDs for its "preemptible" VMs by up to 71 percent. Google introduced these short-lived instances in 2015 as a cost-saver for businesses.

The VMs last up to 24 hours and can offer a cost-saving strategy for those with fault-tolerant workloads that don't need continuously running VMs. In most US regions it will cost 6.4 cents a GB per month, according to Google.

As Google notes, it uses preemptible instances to run its data center capacity more efficiently and deliver cost savings to users. It's only suitable for fault-tolerant workloads because Google can shut down the VM before the 24 hours is up if it needs to.

The company is promoting their use for big data tasks, including financial market analysis, rendering movies, and crunching genomic data. Some customers are also using thousands of these VM cores to complete business and engineering tasks on a smaller budget.

Google cut the cost of its preemptible VMs a year ago to compete with Amazon's EC2 cheaper spot instances.

In pursuit of customers, Amazon, Microsoft and Google have made regular price cuts to different aspects of their cloud infrastructure services over recent years.

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