Google recently announced its new Network Service Tiers (Alpha version) – Premium and Standard to optimize performance and cost of using public cloud.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the first amongst other Public Cloud vendors to offer a tiered cloud network.
With this, Google gives flexibility to its customers by letting them choose either a high performing network through Premium Tier or a cost optimization network using new Standard Tier.
Urs Hölzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure, Google. “Over the last 18 years, we built the world’s largest network, which by some accounts delivers 25-30% of all internet traffic,”
He added, “You enjoy the same infrastructure with Premium Tier. But for some use cases, you may prefer a cheaper, lower-performance alternative. With Network Service Tiers, you can choose the network that’s right for you, for each application.”
Source: Google
The Premium Tier option uses the global network of Google. As such, anyone who is presently using Google Cloud is already utilizing the Premium Tier.
The global network of Google used in Premium Tier includes global private fiber network with over 100 POPs (points of presence), making Google’s network one of the largest of any other public cloud vendor, per the company.
The network ensures disruption-free movement of traffic through redundancy. Any two locations on the network will have at least three independent paths to make the network work even in case of any disruption or failure. The Premium tier network will be protected by Global Load Balancing.
While Premium Tier will focus on maximizing performance, the new Standard Tier is less expensive way to manage network quality.
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It is less expensive as it will deliver the outbound traffic from Google Cloud to the ISP (internet over transit) networks instead of Google’s own network.
Thus, as compared to the Premium tier, Standard Tier will have reduced capabilities in terms of performance and availability.
To prove that, Google measured performance for both the Tiers, with the help of Cedexix – an internet performance monitoring and optimization tools company, leveraging live dashboards.
Google also announced new pricing for the Tiers which will be effective post general availability(GA).
Post this, outbound traffic on the Standard Tier will be charged 24 percent to 33 percent less than in the Premium Tier for Europe and North America. The pricing for Premium Tier will consider both source and destination of traffic, unlike Standard Tier where it will be charged on source-basis.
Customers have the option to choose different tiers for managing different workloads.
Read the full announcement here.
