UPDATED 08:10 EDT / AUGUST 15 2016

NEWS

What you missed in Cloud: Price cuts and APIs

The industry’s top cloud providers regularly cut their infrastructure rates in a bid to stay ahead of the competition. Last week, Google set the pace by announcing a massive 33 percent reduction in the price its so-called Preemptive VMs, which are geared towards low-priority workloads that don’t need to run continuously for an extended period of time.

What makes the instances better-suited for the task than the search giant’s regular cloud machines is the fact that they’re provisioned on unused gear in its data centers. Google reserves the right to reclaim the hardware whenever the need presents itself and in exchange makes Preemptive VMs available at a small fraction of the price of other machines. This week’s mark-down makes the series even cheaper, which the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary hopes will make its platform more competitive against market leader AWS.

Google timed the update to go out shortly before the start of AWS Summit in New York, where Amazon Inc. announced a plethora of changes for its rivaling cloud. Among them were a major price reduction of its own, new administrative functionality and an API management feature that allows companies to regulate how developers access their AWS-hosted services. The addition makes it possible to throttle the number of requests that a third party can make to a workload in a given time period, create fixed usage quotas and download activity data in a JSON files.

Amazon sees the functionality finding use mainly among software-as-a-service providers with API-based offerings like FullContact Inc., which sells an organization tool that helps workers manage their address books. The startup raised $25 million in funding last week from a group of investors led by Foundry Group to finance the development of new features for the platform. It’s also planning to step marketing efforts in a bid to grow its user base.

Image via StockSnap

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Support our open free content by sharing and engaging with our content and community.

Join theCUBE Alumni Trust Network

Where Technology Leaders Connect, Share Intelligence & Create Opportunities

11.4k+  
CUBE Alumni Network
C-level and Technical
Domain Experts
15M+ 
theCUBE
Viewers
Connect with 11,413+ industry leaders from our network of tech and business leaders forming a unique trusted network effect.

SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation serving innovative audiences and brands, bringing together cutting-edge technology, influential content, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — such as those established in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology, and AI. .

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a powerful ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands, with a reach of 15+ million elite tech professionals. The company’s new, proprietary theCUBE AI Video cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.