Every major cloud company now has a free tier, with Google recently rolling out no-cost VMs and other services. Here’s how they compare
Who doesn’t like free stuff? Google knows we all do.
This week Google unveiled a new free-to-use tier for Google Cloud Platformaimed at users with modest compute, storage, database, and networking demands.
In the past, the company has offered a limited-time set of free usage credits for new Google Cloud Platform customers. That offer hasn’t gone away; new sign-ups can still get $300 credit good for the first 12 months.
What’s totally new is Always Free, a no-cost usage tier available for many Cloud Platform products. It’s ideal for a scrappy startup or indie developer spinning up prototypes or launching private betas, or even for minimal public applications like low-bandwidth static sites.
Here’s what you need to know about the free end of Google’s Cloud Platform pool — and how the reigning cloud competition stacks up in key areas.
Always Free doesn’t only provide compute and storage. The total list of products with free tiers spans pretty much everything you’d need to create modern cloud-based software, including Container Engine and Cloud Functions.
Naturally, all of them have fairly low usage ceilings. With Compute Engine, for instance, you’re limited to a single f1-micro instance: 20 percent of one virtual CPU, 600MB of memory, and available only in the United States (sorry, Europe!), with 30GB of persistent storage per month (5GB of snapshot storage) and 1GB of network egress per month. For static sites or minimal applications, that’s a fine fit, but anything more ambitious will feel like it’s in the glove compartment.
Don’t expect to build truly cutting-edge stuff on the free tier alone. With Container Engine, which runs Kubernetes, you have only a basic five-node cluster — and while the clustering is free, each node in the cluster costs standard Compute Engine costs.
