Sustained-use discounts on Google Cloud Platform. KISS applied to the cloud

Yesterday, Google announced great changes on its Cloud Platform. One announcement I’d like to talk about is the new pricing model. I think it’s a huge change.

One thing I’m always asked when I tell people I use the cloud is:

Well, Google made a nice move to address this point. They lowered the price of Compute Engine by 32% and App Engine by 37.5%. That alone is very welcome. But the biggest move to my opinion is their Sustained-Use discounts. The more you use a resource, the less it costs, per hour. Simple. Effective. Will remove a lot of headache.

When you use VMs in the Cloud, you often have two options:

• Pay upfront for a reserved instance/dedicated server. It will cost you less by the hour but you are locked in. You loss a lot of flexibility. This is not really what the Cloud was meant for. I’ve worked for a company that could offer buying and hosting 50 servers and had to keep on paying the bills when those servers where not used anymore. Not the best scenario.
• Pay by the hour an higher price and spend a lot of energy trying to optimise your usage. That means man-hours, complex tooling…

You have one option: Use what you need and if it was used a lot, its price is lowered.

I like it when it’s simple.