Home Google Offers Limited Time 75% Discount On Local SSD

Google Offers Limited Time 75% Discount On Local SSD

by Adam Armstrong

Google Cloud Platform announced a trial discount off of its Local SSD. The discount will take 75% off of their standard pricing. This promotion is aimed at getting potential customers to try it out and see the performance difference compared to a different vendor such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).


Google Cloud Platform announced a trial discount off of its Local SSD. The discount will take 75% off of their standard pricing. This promotion is aimed at getting potential customers to try it out and see the performance difference compared to a different vendor such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Google is not only offering a discount to compete with AWS, they also claim better performance as well as more competitive pricing. The example used was setting up n1-highmen-8 instances on Google Compute engine with 4 attached local SSD volumes. This setup is almost identical in CPU, RAM, and SSD storage volume to the AWS i2.2xlarge instance. Google’s monthly pricing would be $1,883.04 to AWS’s $3,744.18. So everything else being equal it would save money. But the major difference was in performance:

  • i2.2xlarge advantages:
    • 17% more memory
    • 7% more SSD space
  • n1-highmem-8 with 4 attached SSD partitions advantages:
    • 39% less expensive
    • 807% more read IOPS
    • 380% more write IOPS

Another advantage of Google’s Local SSD’s is that they have extra read performance keeping the price low as a NoSQL workload grows over time (with AWS users would have to step up to the next larger instance). Google Local SSDs can be added in 375GB increments as well. Not only does that allow one to start off smaller, but they can scale more linearly as the need arises.  Google claims that users can get a higher performing local SSD, in smaller increments, for less than AWS.

Availability and pricing

The discount on Local SSD started yesterday (April 21, 2015) and runs through May 21, 2015. The discounted price is $0.055/GB.

Google Cloud Platform Compute Engine Local SSD

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