Google Cloud will hike pricing for some storage and data services

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Google Cloud is set to raise prices for its infrastructure offerings in six months time, the company has announced.

The company said it's adjusting its infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities. Customers should have received a six-month notice of the price changes which go into effect on 1 October 2022.

It will change prices for some storage, compute, and networking products, which it says will provide customers with new ways to optimise their spending based on workload type and size, or data portability needs, as well as reducing costs on some services.

There will be changes to cloud storage pricing for data mobility, including replication of data written to a dual or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access. For example, nearline storage at-rest storage pricing in multi-regions will increase from $0.010 per GB per month to $0.015. Archive storage at-rest storage pricing in the Asia multi-region, on the other hand, will decrease from $0.0040 per GB per month to $0.0030.

Google Cloud also has plans to introduce a new lower-cost archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD) so that compliance/archiving use cases are charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads, although it hasn’t disclosed the pricing for this yet. For standard PD snapshots, regional snapshot storage pricing will increase from $0.026 GB per month to $0.05 GB per month. Multi-regional snapshot storage will also increase from $0.026 GB per month to $0.065 GB per month.

There will also be new outbound data processing pricing for Cloud Load Balancing, which will be a charge of $0.008 - $0.012 per GB, depending on the region. It says this is to maintain consistency and alignment with the variable costs of services across the rest of its portfolio.

There will also be new pricing for Network Topology, where the Total Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instance resource-hours per month will be priced at $0.0011 per resource-hour.

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"The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage. While some customers may see an increase in their bills, we’re also introducing new options for some services to better align with usage, which could lower some customers’ bills,” wrote Sachin Gupta, vice president and GM of Google Cloud Infrastructure.

“In fact, 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.”

Google Cloud advises customers to read through the mandatory service announcement sent on 14 March and consider if they want to take any actions based on current storage, networking, or compute needs.

Zach Marzouk

Zach Marzouk is a former ITPro, CloudPro, and ChannelPro staff writer, covering topics like security, privacy, worker rights, and startups, primarily in the Asia Pacific and the US regions. Zach joined ITPro in 2017 where he was introduced to the world of B2B technology as a junior staff writer, before he returned to Argentina in 2018, working in communications and as a copywriter. In 2021, he made his way back to ITPro as a staff writer during the pandemic, before joining the world of freelance in 2022.