Google has recently announced a pricing update for its infrastructure services. This change will impact Google Cloud customers in two parts over six months.
What do the Google Cloud Updates include?
The first part of the update, which started on October 1st, 2022, includes changes to the pricing structure on new products/SKUs for Persistent Disk and Persistent Disk Snapshots. The second part of the update will take place later in 2023 - and will include changes to the pricing structure of existing products, including; Persistent Disk Volumes and Compute Engine Instance-Templates.
The breakdown of the first part of the change will include;
The addition of new products and services
Changes to existing products and services
New features for customers using existing products and services
Rate increases on certain new products and services – with a focus on storage, persistent disk (PD), load balancer, and cloud ops monitoring.
Cloudflation?
The rate increases are not a welcome signal, with electricity prices rising and consumption in the cloud growing as adoption is at its peak.
IT experts are now having trouble keeping cloud expenditures under control, and some are noticing a *25–50% increase in cloud rates. *Anodot Report
Companies are finding it difficult to manage cloud spending and cut waste due to the rapid move to the cloud and the complexity of understanding cloud usage and prices. The issue is made worse by a struggling economy, the risk of a recession, and the requirement for businesses to reduce costs and support revenue growth rates.
The price of energy is on the rise, and inflation is set to trigger an increase in the cost of data centre hardware; companies are looking to re-evaluate their infrastructure and step back into transparent and known costs. Options also include retaining current hardware and optimising with third-party IT Maintenance.
This is also where the XaaS model comes in, predictable costs over an agreed time. You can also read the 5 Reasons why SMEs are moving to IT financing here.
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. With nearline storage and archive storage, pricing will increase in the U.S., EU and Asia multi-regions.
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 now 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 visualisation tool that, was 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.
The breakdown of the second part of the update will include;
New pricing models for all products and services
New support options for customers with existing contracts or subscriptions.
Why is Google making these changes? Does it benefit users?
Google is making these changes because they want to provide users with more flexibility when it comes to managing its cloud infrastructure. With this update, you'll be able to:
Manage your resources more efficiently by placing them where needed most at any given time.
Scale up or down as needed; and
Save money by choosing a plan that fits your needs with their pay-as-you-go pricing structure. You can better match costs to the services you use.
