Google Cloud Platform is pushing its low-cost storage service Nearline from beta into general availability.

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Nearline was first unveiled in March as a polar opposite alternative to tiered storage. Google's new storage option promised virtually immediate access to stored data within seconds versus hours typical of online and offline storage infrastructures.

Being an on-demand offering, Nearline doesn't come with any data ceilings or limits, and the line of service is fully integrated with the rest of the Google Cloud Storage structure.

Touted as a lower cost option too, capacity pricing started at a penny per gigabyte for data at rest.

By comparison, Google Cloud standard storage (amid many other pricing options, structures and schemes) started at just over two cents per gigabyte per month.

With the GA upgrade, Google has also ramped up the competition -- specifically with Amazon Web Services -- considerably.

For starters, Google installed a total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator with the intention of promoting cost savings on Google Cloud Platform versus AWS.

Beyond the promise of saving money, Google is also prepping for data transfers with general availability for the Google Cloud Storage Transfer Service, a mechanism for importing large amounts of online data from HTTP/HTTPS locations.

Google's cloud department specifically highlighted Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a potential source.

Finally, Google introduced a new promo dubbed "Switch and Save," flaunting a 100-petabyte (PB) credit on Nearline for new Google Cloud Platform customers when they switch from any other cloud or on-premises services provider.

For reference, one petabyte is equal to 1,000 terabytes (TB) or 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB).

Google has rolled out a bevy of cloud updates this week amid the Oscon open source and engineering summit in Portland, Ore. this week.

On Tuesday, the Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered company released version 1.0 of Kubernetes, its open source container deployment and management tool, for general use in production environments.

At the same time, Google turned over Kubernetes to a new open-source foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which aims to unify cloud native applications and services.