Google Responds to AWS Price Cuts: We’re Still the Lowest Cost in Cloud
When Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced yet another price reduction for some of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances last week, many viewed the cuts as just another shot fired in the long and bloody price war over the cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market that has raged between AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft’s PaaS-ish Azure.
Google, however, says the war is over. And they’re claiming victory.
After AWS delivered the price cuts last week (their 51st overall), which trimmed five percent off C4, M4, and R3 reserved instances, on-demand instances and dedicated hosts running Linux across regions in the US, Asia Pacific, and Europe, Google responded with a simple statement: “pay less, compute more.”
In a blog post published last Friday, Miles Ward, Global Head of Solutions, Google Cloud Platform, reassures Google Cloud users who may have been “looking at recent announcements and wondering” that GCP is “still the price/performance leader in public cloud,” with prices “anywhere from 15-41% less expensive than AWS for compute resources,” even after their latest reduction.
Ward highlighted several examples where Google’s pricing is cheaper than AWS. First, M4 “Standard” would cost $87.60 a month while GCP’s Customer 2 core, 8gb instances comes in at $54.82, second, AWS C4 “HighCPU” costs $76.65 a month compared to GCP’s Customer 2 core, 3.75gb offering at $44.66 per month, and finally, AWS’s R3 “HighMem” instances cost $121.18 a month, while GCP’s n1-standard-4 comes in at $102.40.
All told, GCP customers save an average of nearly 32% over AWS customers, according to Google’s math.
“While price cuts sound appealing on the surface, when you unpack the specifics of Amazon’s pricing model, it can be an unpleasant surprise. We often hear from customers who are locked into contracts and aren’t eligible for the new rates, or are stuck with instances that no longer fit their needs,” said Ward.
No response from AWS so far, though as the market leaders in cloud IaaS, they may just let the numbers speak for them.