Price war: Google cloud is now 40% cheaper than Amazon and Microsoft

The price war in the cloud computing space further heats up as Google said it will reduce the price of its Google Cloud Platform by as much as 30 percent.The company said it is reducing prices of all Google Compute Engine Instance types. And, Google claims that “compared to other public cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform is now 40 percent less expensive for many workloads.”The price reductions are as follows:Standard: 20 percentHigh Memory: 15 percentHigh CPU: 5 percentSmall: 15 percentMicro: 30 percent“We have continued to lower our pricing since Google Compute Engine was launched in November of 2013; together, these price cuts have reduced VM prices by more than half,” Urs Hölzle, senior vice president, technical infrastructure, Google said in a blog post.In addition, the search engine giant is also introducing a new class of pre-emptible virtual machines that delivers short-term capacity for a very low, fixed cost. Pre-emptible VMs are identical to regular VMs, except availability is subject to system supply and demand. Since Google run pre-emptible VMs on resources that would otherwise be idle, google can offer them at substantially reduced costs.“If your workload is flexible, our new pre-emptible VMs will run your short-duration batch jobs 70 percent cheaper than regular VMs,” Hölzle claimed.Last year, almost all cloud giants, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were busy playing the "low-pricing" game to rule this lucrative market. However, this year it’s clear that Google has restarted the price game, and if past trends are anything to go by, we can expect other vendors to follow suit.