The cloud industry has been bustling around from the moment Google released a new notice on its Google Cloud pricing. With new rates announced across various fundamental services, the search giant’s cloud infrastructure services will cost more as compared to before. For the existing customers, the google cloud price increase is not less than a nightmare, and for the one who is in thought of migrating to the google cloud platform for storage, computing, network, and other such services may fall in a setback. Google cloud pricing is mostly leaned towards the pay-as-you-go model from the initial days. Though there is a substantial increase in cost range, their core model is not altered, and that’s something where existing users can take a breath.
If you are not sure how these Google Cloud price changes affect your business, stay with us until the end because we are bringing you the why, how, & when factors of these Google Cloud price changes via this blog.
A note for Google Cloud customers
We are not surprised to say that the entire cloud fraternity is amused with this move of Google Cloud pricing change. Because as per trends, users were expecting lower costs while renting cloud infrastructures in the long run, but all of sudden Google Cloud platform has made them speechless. However, in a statement from the Google Cloud website, it is noted that
“Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products” – statement by a Google Cloud official.
Before you frame an opinion on how these latest changes may affect your business, you need to understand exactly why & what changes are made in the google cloud price offerings.
Why did Google Cloud make price changes?
According to Google, these sharp changes in google cloud pricing are due to the addition of innovations, use cases & services such as – new flexible options in Cloud Storage, data mobility, Persistent Disk snapshots, network load balancing, and elements of the Network Intelligence Center. They believe that as businesses move towards the multicloud approach, these latest changes give users more flexibility and competitive pricing approaches by comparing the prices of services to other cloud service providers.
What are the changes in Google Cloud pricing?
Here is a sneak peek of some of the notable changes made in revised Google Cloud price increases and not to forget these changes will be in effect from October 1st of 2022.
Cloud storage pricing changes:
The Google cloud price change of storage is for data mobility, including data replication written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket and inter-region data access.
- Nearline storage and archive storage pricing will see a rise in cost in the US, EU, and Asia multi regions.
- Whereas coldline storage pricing will increase in the Asia multi-region.
- Standard replication pricing in the US, NAM4, EU and EUR4 locations will rise.
- Archive Storage at-rest storage pricing in the NAM4, EUR4, and ASIA1 will decrease.
Load balancing price changes:
From the cut-off date mentioned, as a part of revised Google Cloud price change, users can observe a trend of getting charged for outbound data processing at a fee of $0.008 to $0.012 per GB, based on a specific region.
Persistent Disk snapshot price changes:
The Persistent disk snapshot prices for Google cloud compute are revised where there are some cost-effective archive solutions, and some are with increased regional and multi-regional snapshot storage pricing.
- There are currently plans to launch a low-cost archive snapshot capability, and it is expected to roll out from the second half of 2022.
- Regional and multi-regional archive snapshot pricing will increase accordingly on their base price.
- Archive snapshots now will have a minimum billing period of 90 days.
- Regional and multi-regional standard snapshot pricing will increase.
- Standard snapshot storage will have a minimum billing period of 1 hour.
Network topology price changes:
Last year Google Cloud announced a free of charge network topology visualization tool; however, from the mentioned cut-off date, October 1st, 2022, it is no longer a free tool, charges are incurred based on connectivity tests, firewall insights, and performance dashboards based on the number of resource-hours for the resource types.
Google Cloud bills – are they increasing or decreasing?
According to the Google Cloud website, the impact of the pricing changes depends on the client’s use cases and usage. It may decrease for some users and may be high for others. Like multi-region Nearline storage, core storage features will see at least a 50% price increase. Google Cloud’s Coldline Storage Class, A operations pricing, will increase from $0.10 to $0.20 per 10,000 operations. Finally, Network Topology, which was previously available for free, will now be a premium service, with customers paying $0.0011 per resource hour consumed. Moreover, all these updates give us a sense that the revised prices lean more towards the price increase curve.
How will Google Cloud price changes impact its customers?
With the new Google Cloud price increase now, customers will be forced to be in a state where they need to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs for a safer side, as these changes are very new. Still, it will be a burden to hold on for the customers.
It may not be astonishing to say that customers are already searching for some alternative solutions for tackling situations like this. In a statement from Google official it is said that the recent Google Cloud price changes are made keeping to meet the best demands of its customer and to better align in terms of pricing and offerings with other major public cloud providers like AWS, Azure in the market.
Is public cloud getting expensive in future?
According to a survey of 2021, it states that 77% of companies using cloud were surprised with their cloud expenses and some insights also states that $26.6 Billion worth of cloud resources are unused in public cloud by 2021. These stats are true to their findings, as public cloud cost management is complex, companies suffered $ 14.45 billion wastage on idle resources, $8.7 billion due to overprovisioning, $3.4 billion wasted on orphaned volumes and snapshots in the year 2021 alone ( as per data sourced from Gartner and figures estimated by B2C )
Coming back to our question, the one answer we can surely say is ‘yes’ public cloud cost can become too expensive, if it is not governed and managed effectively. You may argue with us that there are certainly public cloud management tools to effectively track and monitor your public cloud cost & resources but here you also need to pin the point that certainly these tools do also come with some sort of pricing for its usage which again adds on to your cloud budget.
Also, we can see that there are some recent announcement of price increase from major public cloud providers like Google Cloud, IBM on DB2 warehouse on cloud AWS are also hints us that there certainly possibilities some price changes may come from other players and you can’t deny it too. However relying on only public cloud for your cloud usage is surely a cash burn in the the long haul.
Paradigm shift from public clouds is a new cloud trend
Though public clouds has its own advantages and flaws still public cloud expenditures makes dents in software companies’ bottom line and market share. Because it need a proper cost governance and optimization approaches. And over the year we have noticed a trend where numerous companies drop public clouds partially or in a full pledge to avoid certain public cloud challenges like vendor lock-ins, cost managements, resource controls, etc. We are supporting our above statement with a classic example of this trend.
A classic example
Dropbox is the one of the best example where after it bids farewell to AWS public cloud and setting up their own infrastructure using combinations on-prem, private cloud models has significantly saved around $75 million over two years and there are numerous companies which are following the same paths of cloud repatriation.
What can customers think of as an alternative solution?
It’s not absurd to say that the one best alternative solution to tackle these uncertainties put forward on customers by these public cloud service providers is a dedicated private cloud service.
Yes, that is true to stress here that the private cloud gives users more flexibility in terms of pricing, infrastructures, services, and many more. In fact, a private cloud will have greater control over it than a public cloud because they operate completely on your terms and choices. Say no to vendor lock-ins since private clouds are extremely available, customizable, and portable.
Now many of you may not be fully keen to leverage either only a public cloud or a private cloud completely, so how about the mix of both worlds giving you hybrid advantages. Since it is the era of hybrid cloud, it is not just a strategic move anymore but merely a need to adapt to these changes.
“What you may get in a public cloud, many are not in a private cloud and vice versa, but you can certainly enjoy both worlds via the hybrid cloud. “
Key benefits of private cloud VS public cloud:
- Fully flexible with low latency and on-demand scalability
- Highly available with low down times and supports critical workload customizations
- Greater control of your assets where you manage your most of your services unlike public clouds
- Reduced prices on a long term usage as compared to public clouds with flexible and standard packages
- Managed security with clear understanding of roles and responsibilities between customers & private cloud service providers
Keeping all the benefits of cloud computing but with greater controls, cost savings and security of an enterprise-grade private cloud infrastructure, United Private Cloud offer its users a dedicated software defined private cloud solution ‘G3 private Cloud’, powered by VMware, Hyper-V, OpenStack. It delivers high performance, availability, scalability, reliability, and connectivity to all major public clouds giving you a hybrid way. Comes with guaranteed availability of 99.999% with N+M clusters, multi cloud software defined edge cloud, multifactor WAN connector with SD-WAN acceleration, multi cloud connectivity, and fully flexible RAM size configurations without lock-ins on specific VM type.
Our Promise:
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We specialize in hybrid hosting solutions. Contact us to know more about how we can unify these disparate cloud architectures for you.
