Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren't cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise price cuts, but Google today claimed that "pricing hasn’t followed Moore's Law: over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year."

In today's announcement, unveiled at Google's Cloud Platform Live event, the company said, "We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent." Moore's Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power.

One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn't that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its "public cloud prices" statistic.

UPDATE: A day after this story published, Amazon unveiled price cuts of its own ranging from 10 to 65 percent.

Google's latest price cut is a broad one, affecting many services used by developers. Google Compute Engine, an infrastructure-as-a-service platform, will get a 32 percent price cut "across all sizes, regions, and classes," Google said. Here are Compute Engine prices before today: And here are the new prices effective April 1: Google Cloud Storage, which helps developers serve data to the users of their applications, "is now priced at a consistent 2.6 cents per GB," the company said. "That’s roughly 68% less for most customers."

The platform-as-a-service offering Google App Engine will have simplified pricing, "with significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances." Finally, there is an 85 percent price cut for on-demand capacity in Google BigQuery, a service that lets you "run fast, SQL-like queries against multi-terabyte datasets in seconds."

"In addition to lower on-demand prices, you’ll save even more money with Sustained-Use Discounts for steady-state workloads," Google said. "Discounts start automatically when you use a VM for over 25 percent of the month. When you use a VM for an entire month, you save an additional 30 percent over the new on-demand prices, for a total reduction of 53 percent over our original prices."

In addition to price cuts, Google unveiled a managed virtual machine service that brings more flexibility to App Engine without sacrificing its auto-management features.

"You can start with App Engine, and if you ever run into a case where you need more control, or need to use a language or library that App Engine doesn’t support, you can replace part of your application with a VM," Google said. "For example, your application may need access to a native resource, such as a file system or network stack; or you might require a library or framework that is only available in C or C++. Current Platform as a service offerings lack this type of support, and developers are forced off the cliff into an Infrastructure as a service world. With Managed VMs, this is not the case."

Because App Engine is designed to hide some of the complexity of running virtual machines from developers, Google still handles management and scaling, "ensuring that deployments are collocated, monitored, and running smoothly, with minimal network latency," the company said. The managed VM service is available to some early access users and will "soon" be more widely available in a "preview" or beta mode.

Some other new developer features were described by Google as follows:

Build, test, and release in the cloud, with minimal setup or changes to your workflow. Simply commit a change with git, and we’ll run a clean build and all unit tests.

Aggregated logs across all your instances, with filtering and search tools.

Detailed stack traces for bugs, with one-click access to the exact version of the code that caused the issue. You can even make small code changes right in the browser.

Additionally, Google Compute Engine will now support Windows Server 2008 R2 in a "limited preview," with broader support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Service.

Amazon announced a cloud update of its own this week, with new networking capabilities for its Virtual Private Cloud service.