Google Cloud Platform Live: Blending IaaS and PaaS, Moore’s Law for the cloud
By Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President
Editors note: Tune in to Google Cloud
Platform Live for more information about our announcements. And join us during our
27-city Google
Cloud Platform Roadshow which kicks off in Paris on April 7.
Today, at
Google Cloud Platform Live
we're introducing the next set of improvements to
Cloud Platform: lower and simpler pricing,
cloud-based DevOps tooling, Managed Virtual Machines (VM) for App Engine, real-time Big Data
analytics with Google BigQuery, and more.
Industry-leading, simplified pricing
The original promise of cloud computing was simple: virtualize hardware, pay only for what you
use, with no upfront capital expenditures and lower prices than on-premise solutions. But
pricing hasn't followed
Moore's
Law: over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30% annually but public
cloud prices fell at just 8% per year.
We think cloud pricing should track Moore's Law, so we're simplifying and reducing prices for
our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85%:
- Compute
Engine reduced by 32% across all sizes, regions, and classes.
- App Engine
pricing simplified, with significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute
instances.
- Cloud
Storage is now priced at a consistent 2.6 cents per GB. That's roughly 68% less for
most customers.
- Google BigQuery
on-demand prices reduced by 85%.
Sustained-Use discounts
In addition to lower on-demand prices, you'll save even more money with
Sustained-Use
Discounts for steady-state workloads. Discounts start automatically when you use a
VM for over 25% of the month. When you use a VM for an entire month, you save an additional
30% over the new on-demand prices, for a total reduction of 53% over our original prices.
Sustained-Use Discounts automatically reward
users who run VMs for over 25% of any calendar month
With our new pricing and sustained use discounts, you get the best performance at the lowest
price in the industry. No upfront payments, no lock-in, and no need to predict future use.
Making developers more productive in the cloud
We're also introducing features that make development more productive:
- Build, test, and release in the cloud, with minimal setup or changes to your
workflow. Simply commit a change with git and we'll run a clean build and all unit
tests.
- Aggregated logs across all your instances, with filtering and search
tools.
- Detailed stack traces for bugs, with one-click access to the exact version of the
code that caused the issue. You can even make small code changes right in the
browser.
We're working on even more features to ensure that our platform is the most productive place
for developers. Stay tuned.
Introducing Managed Virtual Machines
You shouldn't have to choose between the flexibility of VMs and the auto-management and
scaling provided by App Engine.
Managed VMs let you run any
binary inside a VM and turn it into a part of your App Engine app with just a few lines of
code. App Engine will automatically manage these VMs for you.
Expanded Compute Engine operating system support
We now support
Windows Server 2008
R2 on Compute Engine in limited preview and
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and
SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server are now available to everyone.
Real-Time Big Data
BigQuery lets you run interactive SQL queries against datasets of any size in seconds using a
fully managed service, with no setup and no configuration. Starting today, with
BigQuery
Streaming, you can ingest 100,000 records per second per table with near-instant
updates, so you can analyze massive data streams in real time. Yet, BigQuery is very
affordable: on-demand queries now only cost $5 per TB and 5 GB/sec
reserved query capacity
starts at $20,000/month, 75% lower than other providers.
Conclusion
This is an exciting time to be a developer and build apps for a global audience. Today we've
focused a lot on productivity, making it easier to build and test in the cloud, using the
tools you're already familiar with. Managed VMs give you the freedom to combine flexible VMs
with the auto-management of App Engine. BigQuery allows big data analysis to just work, at any
scale.
And on top of all of that, we're making it more affordable than it's ever been before,
reintroducing Moore's Law to the cloud: the cost of virtualized hardware should fall in line
with the cost of the underlying real hardware. And you automatically get discounts for
sustained use with no long-term contracts, no lock-in, and no upfront costs, so you get the
best price and the best performance without needing a PhD in Finance.
We've made a lot of progress this first quarter and you'll hear even more at Google I/O in
June.
Posted by Louis Gray,
Googler
