Google Cloud infrastructure VP and GM Sachin Gupta said the changes reflect the cloud infrastructure investments the company has made over recent years. “They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers,” Gupta said in a blog post. He added the changes would give customers “more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities”. Some of the specific changes will include introducing fees for data replication, as well as network egress fees for reading data in a cloud storage bucket located in a multi-region from a Google Cloud service on the same continent. There will also be a new price of $0.0011 per resource-hour being introduced for its network topology service, which will include Network Intelligence Center’s performance dashboard at no additional charge. When Google initially launched this tool, it was accessible as a free service. Google will also begin charging customers that use its load balancing product for outbound traffic data processing at a rate of $0.008 to $0.012 per GB, based on region, “in order to maintain consistency and alignment with the variable costs of the services across our Cloud Load Balancing portfolio”. Fees previously only applied for cloud load balancing for inbound traffic data processing. But it’s not all price increases. Pricing for both coldline and archive storage services will decrease in Nam4 and Eur4 dual regions. The price for archive storage Asia1 dual region will also decrease. Additionally, while Google Cloud will raise prices for its persistent disk (PD) standard snapshot storage, it plans to roll out a new, lower-cost archive snapshot option for PD so that compliance and archiving use cases are charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads, Google Cloud said. Google Cloud also assured customers under existing contracts with a floating or fixed discount that they would not be impacted by the price changes until they renew their contracts. It also advised customers to use the storage transfer service to select the right cloud storage bucket locations, noting the service will be available for free within cloud storage from April 2 until the end of the year.

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