Google debuts a calculator to predict public cloud costs

Google wants you to know up front just how much it would cost to run an application on its public cloud.

The beta version of Google’s new Cloud Pricing Calculator lets developers estimate their needs for storage, memory, CPU, and other resources, and for how long. They receive “lightning-fast quotes” in response, Google solutions architect Brian Lynch wrote today in a blog post announcing the feature.

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The calculator offers figures for Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud SQL, and the Google Compute Engine, which became generally available in December. At this point, the tool is missing support for a few other Google Cloud Platform products, such as Google App Engine and Google Cloud Datastore.

Still, it’s possible that the new calculator, which can push estimates to colleagues in email format, can nudge developers to try out Google as a public-cloud provider. Amazon Web Services dominates that market, and Google is thought to be a worthy competitor, along with IBM’s SoftLayer cloud and Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud.

The new calculator comes a couple of months after Google came out with a new way to grab data about actual Google cloud usage.

Such creature comforts could make a difference to fuel Google’s cloud growth — even if Amazon its own cost calculator, as do IBM, Microsoft, and Rackspace.

What the new calculator doesn’t contain is a system for figuring out how much it would cost to run a workload on Google that’s already running on a different public cloud or on a private cloud. That could help Google get developers thinking more seriously about porting more apps over to Google.

Cloud-management companies like Cloudyn have been looking to assist the migration of apps over to Google, and data about costs is a major component. With Google now estimating prices, the cloud management players might want to think about how they can enhance their toolsets.