Hoping to battle its way into contention with cloud computing leaders Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure, Google Inc. today offered a new, cheaper way to get basic network access on its cloud platform.

The Network Service Tiers, released today in early “alpha” test mode, provide the capability of Google’s cloud computing customers to choose the existing “Premium Tier,” which uses Google’s own global network employed for Gmail, search and YouTube, and a new Standard Tier, which leverages the broader Internet more economically.

Google said it’s the first major public cloud provider to allow customers to customize their cloud network. Although cloud computing’s appeal is partly the ability to buy levels of computing and storage on demand, generally providers haven’t offered the same kind of flexibility on network access.

“Networks don’t need to be out of bounds for choice,” Prajakta Joshi, product manager for cloud networking for the Google Cloud Platform, said in an interview.

Google’s Premium Tier, which is the one all of its current customers use by default, uses the company’s private fiber network that has more than 100 points of presence around the world for faster data transfer. It’s set up so most network requests reach their destination in only one “hop” across the network to the user’s own Internet service provider, reducing latency. This service level also offers tweaks such as global load balancing to reduce latency issues with high traffic.

By contrast, the new Standard Tier delivers outbound traffic to and from the Google cloud using the networks of public ISPs for eventual delivery. According to Joshi, this tier is more comparable to the service offered by most other cloud providers — though it’s hard to validate that claim because AWS, Azure and others do offer their own fiber networks.

Although this level of service isn’t as fast as Premium, it’s sufficient for non-critical workloads such as backup or for regional Internet services that don’t need high network performance globally. The key is that it’s priced some 24 to 33 percent lower than the Premium Tier, making it more affordable for those workloads for which Premium hasn’t been worth it compared with other cloud providers, and for smaller companies with limited budgets.

Joshi said Google expects most Standard Tier uses to be new to Google’s cloud. “We don’t expect a mass migration from Premium,” she said. So the aim to is attract customers that weren’t using Google’s cloud because the network costs were too high relative to rivals’.

Indeed, the offering seems unlikely to change the competitive dynamics in cloud computing all that much. For one, said Stu Miniman, senior analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, complaints about either Google’s or AWS’s networking services are few, indicating networking prices and service levels are not yet a big issue. On the margins, though, the new network service tiers might help Google compete for more workloads for which it wasn’t competitive before.

“Google’s network is the best,” Miniman said. “What I read from this is that for many environments, Google has overengineered the solution, so now they made a less expensive offering to make it more competitive.

But likely not for long. “Google has had price advantages against Amazon many times, but Amazon tends to close the gap quickly,” he said.

Google offered a decision tree for cloud customers to decide which network tier they should use:

Images: Google