Google recently concluded their Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco with 10,000 folks in attendance. They made several announcements, and one in particular that caught my attention was the Google Cloud Platform free tier. Google lengthened their free trial from 60 days to 12 months and introduced ‘Always Free’ products, which have non-expiring usage limits.
It can get a little confusing because the free tier is made up of two parts. A 12-month, $300 credit free trial and Always Free. Here is an excerpt from the Google Cloud Platform FAQ.
The 12-month, $300 free trial allows you to use any GCP product. Always Free allows you to try participating products for free up to their non-expiring usage limits, making it easy for you to test and develop with these products.
When you sign up for the free trial, you will be asked to provide a credit card. You won’t be charged, and it’s used as a verification step.
You should also be aware that your trial ends once the 12 months have elapsed or you’ve spent the $300 in credits whichever comes first. Your credits and days remaining are always on display in the Google Cloud Platform console.
Google Cloud Platform ‘Always Free’ services
There are currently 15 services that are listed as Always Free. This includes Google Compute Engine, with 1 f1-micro VM instance per month. Google Cloud Storage, with 5 GB-months of Regional Storage and Google Container Engine, with a basic cluster of 5 nodes or fewer.
All of these are in the US regions only, which include us-east1, us-west1, and us-central1. Find more services on the Google Cloud Platform free tier page.
If you missed the conference and would like to get caught up, the Google Cloud folks have published their sessions and keynotes online.
Did you attend Google Cloud Next conference? What was your number one takeaway? Do you use the Google Cloud Platform, let me know on Twitter and thanks again for reading!