Google Hits Back At Amazon’s Cloud Price Cuts

“Pay less, compute more!” was Google’s simple rebuttal to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) price cuts last week as the two cloud computing giants dragged their price war into the new year.

The statement, part of a return fire blog post aimed at Amazon, came from Google Cloud’s Head of Solutions Miles Ward. Ward argued that Google Cloud is “anywhere from 15-41 percent less expensive than AWS for compute resources after their reduction”.

51st cost cut

AWS announced its 51st cloud price cut to date last week, lowering the charges for its EC2 service on some instances by up to five percent.

“I am happy to be able to announce that we are making yet another EC2 price reduction!” said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr on the division’s blog.

“We are reducing the On-Demand and Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for C4 and M4 instances running Linux by 5 percent.

But Google wheeled out all kinds of facts and figures regarding its own pricing, pricing that Ward said AWS “can’t match”.

“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.

Back to you, AWS!

Take our cloud computing quiz here!