Originally posted to Data Center Frontier by Rich Miller.

The network is the new focus in the cloud computing wars. Google today introduced network tiers, providing Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers with the option to save money by having some traffic delivered over the Internet, rather than Google’s private network.

The new service allows customers to assign workloads to different network tiers based on their performance requirements, keeping priority applications on Google’s network while using the Internet to deliver workloads that don’t need a low-latency connection. This kind of tiered segmentation of workloads has been used as a cost management strategy in data storage for many years.

Google says that GCP customers in North America and Europe can save 24 to 33 percent on their GCP traffic costs by using the new Standard Tier instead of the existing service using Google’s network, which is now known as Premium Tier. Standard Tier delivers outbound traffic from GCP to the internet over transit (ISP) networks where it may experience congestion or outages more frequently relative to Premium Tier, but at a level comparable to other major public clouds, Google said.

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