Google slashes cloud prices by 10%

Google has slashed prices for all instance types and regions across its Compute Engine.

Senior vice-president of technical infrastructure Urs Holzle said: "Effective immediately, we are cutting prices of Google Compute Engine by approximately 10 percent for all instance types in every region.

"These cuts are a result of increased efficiency in our data centres as well as falling hardware costs, allowing us to pass on lower prices to our customers," he said.

[Related: Who wins in the cloud price wars?]

Holzle announced the cuts during Google's Atmosphere Live webcast, where the vendor also revealed surging popularity for its Google Drive platform – which now has 240 million active users, up from 190 million in June.

Users of Compute Engine include social network Snapchat, business report SaaS outfit Workiva - which processes financial reports for 60 percent of the Fortune 500 - and Coca Cola, which worked with Google partner CI&T to build and run the Happiness Flag campaign around the 2014 soccer World Cup.

Google, AWS and Microsoft have all chased each others' pricing in a race to the bottom.

In April, Microsoft said it would match Amazon's cloud pricing – if AWS drops prices to meet Google's latest reduction, it seems Azure would follow.

It's notable that Google's most recent price cut apparently impacts the whole portfolio of services, which is not always the case with public cloud price cuts.

 However, while price cuts dominate the narrative about public cloud, some have questioned whether this is the whole story.

In August, tech site GigaOM published an analysis into AWS price cuts in which it found that while prices were reduced for certain instance types, others instances remained static or saw changes to discounts, resulting in "a net price cut that could be different than what you might expect".

Earlier this year, CITEworld published a chart comparing Google's cloud prices with AWS. 

Meanwhile, VMware has been trading blows with AWS, claiming its vCloud Hybrid Service is cheaper and more powerful.

Rather than join the discounting war, Rackspace has tried to position itself as a high-touch "managed cloud" provider.