In the pricing competition between Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS), perhaps the largest battle of the on-going “Cloud War”, Google has recently announced a price reduction of up to 30% on its virtual machines and has lowered all of its Compute Engine pricing, enabling it to provide its service at a rate 40% less than its Cloud Server competition.
Evidently, AWS has reduced prices over 40 times over the previous 6 years with Google Cloud following suit each time. It seems that the Cloud Giants are sacrificing immediate profits in order to not not “admit defeat” in addition to setting their sights on future potential.
According to a count by Business Insider, AWS has cut its prices 44 times in the last six years, forcing Google Cloud to reduce prices several times just to keep up. In 2012, Google Cloud announced two storage price cuts, one just a day after Amazon cut its S3 storage prices by 25 percent. Last spring, Google Cloud cut prices across most major services and all regions, stealing the “low-cost provider” title from AWS.
Analysis from RBC Capital says AWS lowered prices 8 percent between October 2013 and December 2014, and Google Cloud came in just behind it at 6 percent.
While cloud providers are still lowering prices, it’s not happening with the same tenacity as it was in the past. At AWS’ most recent re:Invent conference, it didn’t even announce a price cut, which was odd considering that had become a staple of AWS news events.
It looks like the last price reduction from AWS came late last year. The decreased prices for three different types of data transfers became effective Dec. 1.
Erin Moriarty – May 18, 2015
So the moral of the story appears to be, the longer you wait, the cheaper it gets, just as defined by “Moore’s Law” in the early days of the Digital Revolution.
Source: Erin Moriarty’s article Google Cloud Lowers Prices Again, Raising the Stakes Versus AWS on SDxCentral news.
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