Google Cloud Price Increases, New Fees And Features: 5 Big Things To Know

‘Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products,’ says Google Cloud infrastructure leader Sachin Gupta.

Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Load Balancing and Google Network Topology Price Changes

Customers paying for Google Cloud’s cloud storage, Cloud Load Balancing and Network Topology should expect to see a price increase or a new line-item fee in their cloud bill beginning later this year.

Google Cloud is changing the prices for some of its storage, compute and networking products, while at the same time reducing costs on some services.

“Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products,” said Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of Google Cloud Infrastructure in a statement. “Ultimately, our goal is to provide more flexible pricing models and options for how customers are using our cloud services.”

The price change stems from the public cloud giant saying it can do more to align its capabilities and pricing with customers wide array of workloads.

“We will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities,” said Gupta.

Customers who use Google Cloud’s cloud storage will see a price increase, while clients leveraging Google’s currently free Network Topology and Cloud Load Balancing will now pay a fee.

Interestingly, Google said the changes are also designed to “better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products” in order for customers to more easily “compare services” between cloud providers.

Google Cloud’s top competitors are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google currently holds the No. 3 market share position behind AWS and Azure in terms of the $178 billion cloud infrastructure services market on a worldwide basis, according to fourth quarter 2021 data from Synergy Research Group.

CRN breaks down the five most important price increases, new features and Google Cloud customer impact information that channel partners and customers need to know about.

Price Cloud Storage For Data Mobility Is Increasing; New Archive Snapshot Option

The price tag for Google cloud storage for data mobility, such as replication of data written to dual or multi-region storage buckets, will increase along with inter-region data access.

Google Cloud customers will soon pay $0.019 per GB for regional, $0.024 per GB for multi-region.

When the price change going into effect, standard regional snapshots will cost $0.05 per GB per month, while multi-regional snapshots will cost $0.065 per GB each month, up from its current price of $0.026 per GB on a monthly basis.

However, Google said it is launching a new, cheaper archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD) so that those leveraging the service for archiving or compliance will be charged less that those doing compute-intensive DevOps workloads.

Persistent Disk is Google’s local durable storage service, fully integrated with Google Cloud products, Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine. Persistent disks are durable network storage devices where instances can access like physical disks in a desktop or a server.

Google Network Topology No Longer Free; New Features Added

The company’s Network Topology was launched last year as a free service.

Google Cloud is now making Network Topology a paying product. Customers will now need to pay $0.0011 per resource hour used.

However, to help customers deal with the new price, Google Cloud says Network Topology will now include a Performance Dashboard within its Network Intelligence Center at no additional charge.

Google’s Network Topology collects real-time telemetry and configuration data from Google's infrastructure to visualize customer resources.

Network Topology is a visualization tool that shows the topology of a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks, hybrid connectivity to and from on-premises networks, connectivity to Google-managed services, and the associated metrics.

Cloud Load Balancing Fees

Google Cloud Platform clients that leverage the company’s Cloud Load Balancing will begin to see a new charge on their could bill, which is an outbound data processed by load balancer.

Currently, outbound data processed by the Google Cloud Load Balancer is free for customers. Clients will now be expected to pay between roughly $0.008 and $0.012 per GB.

Google said the new outbound data processing pricing for Cloud Load Balancing is “in line with other leading cloud providers.”

Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed, software-defined, managed service for all of a Google customer’s traffic. Businesses can scale applications on Google’s Compute Engine quickly with Cloud Load Balancing, with no pre-warming needed. Customers can distribute their load-balanced compute resources in single or multiple regions to meet high availability requirements. Google’s Cloud Load Balancing can put resources behind a single anycast IP and scale resources up or down with intelligent autoscaling.

When Exactly Will Google Cloud’s New Pricing Hit Customers?

The new price increases will start impacting customers on Oct. 1, 2022.

Google Cloud said it sent out the price change news to customers this week in order to give customers six months until the prices officially change.

The company said the total impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage. While some customers may see an increase in their bills, Google said its new options for some services will better align with usage, “which could lower some customers’ bills.”

Will Customers Under Existing Google Cloud Contracts Be Hit By The Price Changes In October?

No.

Customers under existing commit contracts with a floating or fixed discount will not face any changes until renewal.

“Our goal is to help our customers manage any impact of these changes and allow time for them to adjust or modify their implementations,” said Google Cloud’s Gupta.

Google Cloud said the company will not implement the pricing changes to current customer contracts until the client’s contract is up for a renewal.

Overall, Google said customers will be able to evolve and adopt to the new pricing changes in a positive way.

“Many customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs. We’re working directly with customers to help them understand which changes may impact them,” said Gupta.