Google today quietly launched an improvedalways-free tierand trial program for its Cloud Platform.
Thefree tier, which now offers enough power to run a small app in Googles cloud, is offered in addition to an expandedfree trial program (yep thats all a bit confusing). This free trial gives you $300 in credits that you can use over the course of 12 months.Previously, Google also offered the $300 in credits, but those had to be used within 60 days.
The free tier, which the company never really advertised,now allows for free usage of a small (f1-micro) instance in Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions. In total, the free tier now includes 15 services.
The addition of the Compute Engine instance and 5GB of free Cloud Storage usage is probably the most important update here because those are, after all, the services that areat the core of most cloud applications. You can find the exact limits here.
Its worth noting that the free tier is only available in Googles us-east1, us-west1 and us-central1 regions.
With this move, Google is clearly stepping up its attacks againstAWS, which offers a similar but more limited free tier and free 12-month trial program for its users. Indeed, many of Googles limits look fairly similar to AWSs 12-month free tier, but the AWS always-free tier doesnt include a free virtual machine, for example (you only get it for free for 12 months). I expect AWS willpull even with Google in the near future and extend its free offer, too.
The idea here is clearly to get peoplecomfortable with Googles platform. Its often the developer who runs a hobby project in the cloud who gets the whole team in an enterprise to move over or who decides to use a certain public cloud to runa startups infrastructure. New developers, too, typically chose AWS to learn about the cloud because of its free 12-month trials. The 60-day $300 credit Google previously offered simply didnt cut itfor developers who wanted to learn how to work withGoogles cloud.
