Google Cuts Price by 63% for Local SSDs on Cloud Storage

This article was written on August 8, 2017, on a blog of Google, Inc. by Chris Kleban and Michael Basilyan, product managers.

Announcing price cuts on Local SSDs for on-demand and preemptible instances

Starting today, you’ll pay up to 63% less for Local SSDs attached to on-demand Google Compute Enginehttps://cloud.google.com/compute/ VMs. That’s $0.080/GB/month in most US regions.

We’re also introducing even lower prices for Local SSDs used with Preemptible VM instances: up to 71% cheaper than before. That’s $0.064/GB/month in most US regions.

At Google we’re always looking to reduce TCO for our customers, pass along price reductions achieved through technology advancements and adjust our pricing so you can take advantage of technology that will help you innovate, in a manner that’s simple for our users.

Local SSD is our high performance, physically attached block storage offering that persists as long as your instance exists. Supporting both NVMe and iSCSI interfaces, Local SSD provides the high IO/s and bandwidth performance that the world’s most demanding workloads require. Local SSD is often the preferred option for scratch disks, caching layers and scale-out databases like NoSQL.

A key feature of Local SSDs is that you can attach any amount of Local SSD storage to an any machine shape. You aren’t locked in at a fixed ratio of Local SSD capacity to a VM’s vCPU count and memory. Also, Local SSDs are available on the same instances as GPUs, giving flexibility in building the most high performance systems.

In addition to dropping prices on Local SSDs attached to regular, on-demand instances, we’re lowering the price for Local SSDs attached to Preemptible VMs. Preemptible VMs are just like any other Compute Engine VM, with the caveat that they cannot run for more than 24 hours and that we can preempt (shut down) the VM earlier if we need the capacity for other purposes. This allows us to use our data center capacity more efficiently and share the savings with you. You may request special Local SSD quota for use with Preemptible instances, though your current Local SSD quota works as well.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers use Preemptible VMs to reduce their compute costs, and have come up with lots of interesting use cases along the way. Our customers are using Preemptible VMs with Local SSDs to analyze financial markets, process data, render movies, analyze genomic data, transcode media and complete a variety of business and engineering tasks, using thousands of Preemptible VM cores in a single job.

Resources:
Compute Engine Local SSD pricing page
Pricing calculator