Bulletins

Google Cloud will raise prices on some storage and data services

The cloud provider is tacking on new fees in addition to raising and cutting other infrastructure prices.

Google datacenter

The cloud provider is tacking on new fees while raising and cutting other infrastructure prices.

Image: Google

Google Cloud put customers on notice Monday that a series of price hikes for its infrastructure services will take effect Oct. 1.

The cloud provider is adding new data replication fees and network egress charges and, in some cases — for coldline storage operations, for example — is doubling its prices.


Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of Google Cloud Infrastructure, tied the changes to the cloud provider’s infrastructure investments in the last several years. Google Cloud has struggled to reach a break-even point over the last few years as it attempts to catch AWS and Microsoft.

“They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers,” Gupta wrote in a blog post today. Google Cloud declined further comment.

New fees for default data replication are among the new storage charges for Google Cloud services that previously were free. Google Cloud also will start charging network egress fees for reading data in a cloud storage bucket in a multiregion from a Google Cloud service in a region on the same continent.

New options and capabilities for a wider variety of workloads, meanwhile, will give customers more choice in how they pay for storage, compute and networking services, according to Gupta.

While Google Cloud is raising prices for its Persistent Disk (PD) standard snapshot storage, it plans to roll out a new, lower-cost archive snapshot option for PD in the second half of this year that will have the same features, including incremental chains, compression and encryption. This would allow for compliance/archiving use cases to be charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads, Google Cloud said.

Here’s a look at some of the other notable pricing changes. Customers who sign or renew a commit contract with a fixed or floating discount before Oct 1. will not be impacted by the price changes until they renew, according to Google Cloud.

Google Cloud storage price changes

  • Google Cloud will increase the amount of its Always Free Internet egress from 1GB per month to 100GB per month to each qualifying egress destination
  • Nearline storage and archive storage pricing will increase in the U.S., EU and Asia multiregions
  • Coldline storage pricing will increase in the Asia multi-region
  • Standard storage and nearline storage pricing will increase in the NAM4, EUR4 and ASIA1 dual regions
  • Coldline storage pricing will decrease in the NAM4 and EUR4 dual regions and increase in the ASIA1 dual region
  • Archive storage will decrease in the NAM4, EUR4 and ASIA1 dual regions
  • Coldline storage class B operations and class A operations in regions will double

PD snapshot pricing

  • Regional snapshot and multi-regional storage pricing will increase from $0.026 per GB per month to $0.05 per GB per month
  • Multi-regional snapshot storage pricing will increase from $0.026 GB per month to $0.065 GB per month
  • Snapshots will have a minimum billing period of one hour

Cloud load balancing

  • Google Cloud will start charging outbound data processing fees of $0.008 to $0.012 per GB, based on a specific region, for all cloud load balancing products to “maintain consistency and alignment with the variable costs of the services across our cloud load balancing portfolio.”

Network topology

    • Google Cloud will introduce a new charge for its Network Topology visualization tool that initially launched as a free service. The pricing – $0.0011 per resource hour – will include the Network Intelligence Center’s Performance Dashboard for no additional charge.
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