It has certainly been a busy few weeks for the Google Cloud Platform. Back on November 8th, Google updated its Cloud SQL offering to provide faster performance, larger databases, an EU zone (more on that shortly) and a no-cost trial – but now there’s more!

Let’s take a closer look at the numerous enhancements released this month and what it means to developers and businesses alike.

Perhaps the most noteworthy news is that Google is reducing the price of its standard Google Cloud Storage service (by over 20%). The new standard price for the first terabyte comes in at $0.095.

Google this week introduced a “limited preview” of its Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage. The offering lowers prices by reducing some data availability while maintaining the same latency performance and durability - a good option for batch computing.

Object versioning, which enables developers to maintain an update history to an object that can be used to protect against accidental overwrites or deletes, has been introduced.

Developers using Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud SQL can now deploy their applications, data and virtual machines to European datacenters.

Another very noteworthy feature is the addition of 36 new Compute Engine instance types and a reduction in price for the four instances it originally announced earlier this year. In the coming weeks, Google will make high memory instances, high CPU instances and diskless configurations available.