Google has slashed the prices for its cloud computing platform – more specifically on compute – and introduced a new instance type called micro instance. The price cuts affect all regions but only details for the US have been revealed – they vary from 5% for the High CPU configuration to a whopping 30% for the Micro one.

Last year the company announced that it was going to peg its pricing index against Moore's law, which meant that users could expect to get roughly twice the performance for the same money every 18 months (or pay half what they were paying over the same period).

Google also unveiled a new instance called 'preemptible VMs' that are analogous to Laterooms' last minute hotel room sales. This allows Google to maximise efficiency by selling unused resources for up to 70% less than its regular instances, although these instances can be terminated within 30 seconds if Google needs the resources back.

More importantly perhaps, the price of the instance remains fixed unlike Amazon's EC2 Spot Instances, which makes pricing more predictable. However, Google doesn't yet offer GPU instances for specialised, compute-heavy tasks.