Google ups the ante with cloud price cuts

Google has upped the ante on its competition by announcing price cuts to its cloud services, as well as new virtualisation technology.

Following in the footsteps of price cuts to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure services, Google has used its Cloud Platform Live Summit to announce plans for further reductions to its own prices.

The company will cut the price of network egress by 47%, its BigQuery storage service by 23%, and persistent disk SSD services by 48%.

Google VP of engineering for cloud developer experience Jörg Heilig said Google was the first to cut its cloud prices, forcing rivals to follow suit. He said Google is keeping up the pressure, Computerworld reported.

Google also used the event to introduce new features and improvements to its cloud platform. These include a new engine for running services using the new Docker virtualisation technology, and the integration of recently acquired mobile platform technology Firebase.

To expand the ways customers can connect to Google's cloud service, the company has started offering direct peering and VPN connections.

Other enhancements include bringing its managed virtual machine product into beta release, a compute engine based on SSDs and a debugger for correcting service faults.

Image courtesy of jf 1234 under CC.