Dive Brief:
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Google announced last week it has improved its free cloud tier and expanded its free cloud trial program, according to TechCrunch.
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In a "try before you buy" setup, the free tier gives users a small instance in Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions and includes 15 services total, though it is still only available in Google’s us-east1, us-west1 and us-central1 regions.
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The free trial gives users $300 in credits they can use over a year. Previously, users had to use the free credits within 60 days.
Dive Insight:
Google has not widely advertised its free cloud tier or free cloud trial, but the idea is to give programmers a way to test Google Cloud prior to committing. With an extended free trial, once they are hooked, programmers will encourage their entire organization to commit to Google Cloud as well.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a similar service, but Google’s revamped offering is now slightly more generous.
Google has been pulling out all the stops to attract more enterprise users to its cloud services. The company announced a number of new cloud improvements and partnerships at its cloud conference last week. The enterprise cloud push is all in an effort to expand market share, though it is unlikely Google will be able to take that much away from cloud behemoth AWS.
