Google is at it again, announcing what it characterized as 40% price cuts for many computing tasks. It’s been, what six or so months since Google last took out the axe, announcing price reductions on Google Compute Engine in October, and other services in November.
The obvious question is when (not really if) Amazon (AMZN) Web Services and Microsoft (MSFT) will respond.
Google got the ball rolling on all this competitive price slashing back in March when it announced big cuts at a Google (GOOG) event in San Francisco.
That touched off a round of cuts with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Up until then, Amazon had been on its own, unilaterally cutting prices on base computing and storage services more than 40 times in its eight years of existence. The fact that Google and Microsoft, both very well-funded from their other businesses, can now call the shots has got to be a concern to Amazon, the market leader in public cloud.
It’s also important to note that while these three cloud poohbahs take turns chopping prices on basic services, they’re also rolling out pricier higher-end services. It’s also notable that there haven’t been as many, similar cuts to networking charges. As most big cloud customers will note, getting data into and out of the cloud or moving it around once it’s up there is where the big costs lie.
Given all this talk around pricing, you might think cloud cost is the primary consideration for customers. But the feature that seemed to get the most applause last March was Google’s decision to have usage-based discounts kick in automatically, so users don’t need to track their usage as closely. Managing compute instances is tough work, and anything that automates that process is appreciated.