Google announced on Tuesday at its Cloud Platform Live event that it is lowering prices on Cloud Platform, and launching cloud-based DevOps tooling, Managed Virtual Machines (VM) for App Engine, real-time Big Data analytics with BigQuery.

On the pricing, Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle says, “The original promise of cloud computing was simple: virtualize hardware, pay only for what you use, with no upfront capital expenditures and lower prices than on-premise solutions. But pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law: over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30% annually but public cloud prices fell at just 8% per year. We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85%.”

Compute Engine has been reduced by 32% across all sizes, regions and classes. App Engine gets a simplified pricing strtucture with significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances. Cloud Storage is priced at 2.6 per GB, which is roughly 68% less for most customers, according to the company. Finally, BigQuery on-demend prices have been reduced by 85%.

They’ve also launched sustained-use discounts, which start automatically when you use a VM for over 25% of the month. When you use a VM for a whole month, Google knocks off another 30% over the new on-demand prices for a total reduction of 53
53%.

“We’re also introducing features that make development more productive,” says Hölzle. “Build, test, and release in the cloud, with minimal setup or changes to your workflow. Simply commit a change with git and we’ll run a clean build and all unit tests; Aggregated logs across all your instances, with filtering and search tools; Detailed stack traces for bugs, with one-click access to the exact version of the code that caused the issue. You can even make small code changes right in the browser. We’re working on even more features to ensure that our platform is the most productive place for developers. Stay tuned.”

Managed VMs will let you run any binary inside a VM and turn it into part of your App Engine app, and App Engine will automatically manage them.

On real-time big data, Hölzle says, “BigQuery lets you run interactive SQL queries against datasets of any size in seconds using a fully managed service, with no setup and no configuration. Starting today, with BigQuery Streaming, you can ingest 100,000 records per second per table with near-instant updates, so you can analyze massive data streams in real time. Yet, BigQuery is very affordable: on-demand queries now only cost $5 per TB and 5 GB/sec reserved query capacity starts at $20,000/month, 75% lower than other providers.”

Compute Engine now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 in limited preview and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for everyone.

Image via Google