Cost-efficiency is one of the main reasons why companies are increasingly choosing the cloud over hardware on their own premises. As a result, price competition has always been a key strategy for providers of infrastructure as a service.

The latest example comes from Google Inc., which on Tuesday significantly lowered flash storage rates for customers of its cloud platform. The main highlight is the up to 63 percent price reduction that the tech giant has applied to so-called Local SSDs, or solid-state drives, attached to on-demand virtual machines. Each such drive is connected directly to the server hosting a user’s instances, which facilitates faster information access than other storage options.

Local SSDs are geared mainly towards databases and other latency-sensitive workloads that require the ability to access their records with minimal delay. These drives are typically used to power the cache containing an application’s most frequently used information, or to expand the amount of memory available for carrying out operations.

Renting a Local SSD will now cost just 8 cents a gigabyte a month at most of Google’s U.S.-based cloud data centers. This amounts to $30 per drive in practice since they’re provisioned in 375-gigabyte units.

Local SSDs attached to Preemptive Instances have in turn received an even bigger price cut of up to 71 percent, which lowers the monthly fee to 6.4 cents per gigabyte. Preemptive Instances are a cheaper alternative to on-demand virtual machines that run on Google’s unused data center infrastructure. The catch is that they’re automatically shut down after 24 hours, or as soon as the underlying hardware is needed elsewhere.

Google’s hefty price cuts come against the backdrop of a major shift in the memory market. Chip makers are adopting 3D NAND architectures that stack multiple layers of flash atop one another, which makes it possible to create denser and more cost-effective SSDs. Like other web giants that invest heavily in their infrastructure, Google has a great deal of buying power that puts it in a strong position to take advantage of such hardware advancements.

Meanwhile, other leading cloud providers are bringing down their rates as well. A few months ago, market leader Amazon Web Services Inc. dropped the price of certain compute instances by 21 percent.

Image: Google