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At Google Cloud Platform Live on March 25, 2014, Google announced broad but service-specific price reductions and a set of infrastructure and developer features. The cuts ranged from 30% to 85% for on-demand services, but they are historical announcement figures—not current Google Cloud prices.
What Google announced about cloud pricing
Google framed the changes as lower, simpler pay-as-you-go pricing. Its announcement specified different reductions by service rather than one discount applied across the board.
| Service | 2014 announced price change | Related terms or capability |
|---|---|---|
| Compute Engine | 32% reduction across sizes, regions, and classes, according to Google’s March 2014 announcement. | Automatic sustained-use discounts were also announced for VM use during a month. |
| Cloud Storage | About 68% lower for most customers; Google stated a rate of 2.6 cents per GB. | The source does not establish how that rate maps to present-day storage tiers or billing. |
| BigQuery on-demand | 85% reduction; Google stated an on-demand query price of $5 per terabyte. | Google also announced reserved query capacity starting at $20,000 per month for 5 GB/sec of capacity. |
| App Engine instance-hours | 37.5% reduction. | Google also announced pricing changes for memcache and Datastore writes. |
| App Engine dedicated memcache | 50% reduction. | — |
| App Engine Datastore writes | 33% reduction. | SNI SSL and PageSpeed were announced as available to all applications at no extra cost. |
All figures in the table describe Google’s 2014 announcement, not current prices or service terms. The BigQuery capacity figure and the stated query price are likewise historical announcement-era figures.
How the 2014 sustained-use discount worked
Google said Compute Engine discounts would start automatically after VM use exceeded 25% of a month. A VM used for an entire month could receive an additional 30% discount against the new on-demand price. Google described the combined effect as a 53% reduction from its original prices.
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The announced model was intended to reward sustained use without requiring customers to reserve capacity or make an upfront commitment. These thresholds and savings describe the 2014 terms only.
Features announced alongside the cuts
Infrastructure and DNS
- Live Migration: Data Center Knowledge reported that Google demonstrated moving virtual machines between physical hosts without interrupting service, while retaining the same IP address and configuration. The article described it as useful for maintenance and hardware issues.
- Cloud DNS: Google introduced a managed DNS service with an API and integration into the Google console, according to Data Center Knowledge.
- Operating-system support: Google announced limited-preview support for Windows Server 2008 R2 on Compute Engine, alongside general availability for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
App development and operations
- Managed VMs: Google described running binaries inside VMs managed as part of App Engine applications, combining VM flexibility with App Engine management.
- Developer tooling: Announced tools included cloud builds and tests triggered by Git commits, aggregated logs with search and filtering, and detailed stack traces linked to the code version associated with an issue.
BigQuery Streaming
Google said BigQuery Streaming could ingest up to 100,000 records per second per table with near-instant updates. That was the stated capacity in the 2014 announcement, not a current performance guarantee.
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Why Google said it was changing prices
In Google’s 2014 announcement, Senior Vice President Urs Hölzle wrote: “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.” Those figures are Hölzle’s attributed comparison, not independently verified market statistics here.
The announcement positioned lower pricing as an effort to make cloud costs simpler and reflect falling infrastructure costs. It does not establish how Google’s prices compare with competitors or how any service is priced today.
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What the announcement means for cloud customers now
The article is useful as a record of Google’s 2014 pricing and product direction, not as a guide to budgeting a current workload. Current costs depend on the specific services, usage, region, and discounts in effect; the historical announcement does not establish today’s prices or whether every feature remains available on the same terms.
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