What isn’t Google doing nowadays? In September, they announced through a blog article posted by VP of Google Cloud, Brian Stevens, that their Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is planning to launch an Australian region, in Sydney.

This comes alongside a list of other global regions — including Mumbai, Singapore, Northern Virginia, São Paulo, London, Finland, and Frankfurt — with more regions to be announced next year.

Three availability zones will be set up in Sydney, which Google hopes will rival the big players in the game; Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, as well as IBM Softlayer, and a multitude of homegrown IaaS providers.

All part of its mission “to power businesses around the world”.

The Google Cloud Pricing Strategy

Aggressive price cuts

With reference to a Google blog post, the company’s strategy will involve aggressive price cuts, as they’ve noted that public cloud prices have fallen 6-8% annually since cloud computing became widely available. Following Moore’s Law, the underlying hardware has fallen at 20-30% annually in the same amount of time.

Sustained-use discounts

As well as this, Google Cloud Platform will look to turn “the reservation aspect on its head”. APJ managing director of Google Cloud Platform Rick Harshman stated that they “fundamentally do not believe in contracts or commitments”, and essentially criticised other cloud platforms for claiming the same, but offering bigger discounts for long-term commitments or reservations.

Essentially, what Google are going to offer are sustained-use discounts, which are (as they sound) discounts that are automatically applied monthly to customers who utilise capacity for a sustained period of time.

Minute-by-minute model

The company states that although many other cloud hosting platforms that offer pay-as-you-go models are appreciated, it isn’t as optimised as they would like on different workloads. They also bill per hour, which Google are capitalising on with their minute-by-minute model. They give the example that, if your hundreds of VMs and applications are used for 25 minutes, you’ll be billed for those 25 minutes and not for the rounded hour.

Customisable VMs

Although already offered by other cloud hosting providers, customisable VMs are said to save you up to 19%, “on top of other savings”.