Google has announced the launch of Network Service Tiers, offering customers cheaper, lower performance networking.

The move is claimed to be the first from a major public cloud provider offering a tiered cloud network.

Current Google Cloud customers are automatically on the ‘premium’ tier, with the new ‘standard’ tier – “an attractively-priced network with performance comparable to other leading public clouds”, as the company puts it – becoming available. Pricing for outbound traffic is priced up to 33% lower in standard than in premium.

“You enjoy the same infrastructure with Premium Tier. But for some use cases, you may prefer a cheaper, lower-performance alternative,” said Urs Holzle, Google SVP technical infrastructure, in a blog post. “With Network Service Tiers, you can choose the network that’s right for you, for each application.”

Google enlisted the help of Cedexis, an internet performance monitoring provider, to assess the differences between the premium and standard tiers for latency and throughput. For HTTP load balancing traffic at the 50th percentile (below), premium throughput was at 5,401 kbps, compared to standard of 3,223 kbps.

Elsewhere, marketing automation software provider Marketo is to go all-in on Google’s cloud, as part of a wider six year ‘alliance’ seeing expanded use of Marketo at Google internally, as well as Google’s tools being integrated into Marketo’s products.

“Our alliance with Google will simplify and improve how enterprises engage with their customers,” said Steve Lucas, Marketo CEO in a statement. “Marketo customers use our Engagement Platform to deliver personalised experiences, fuelling revenue growth and improving brand impact, while scaling to support the demands of today’s digital landscape.

“This collaboration with Google takes that capability to new heights, and I’m incredibly excited about what we’ll provide together for our customers,” Lucas added.

Last month, announcing Q2 financial results, Google said it had tripled the number of cloud deals above $500,000 year over year. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google Cloud Platform “continues to experience impressive growth across products, sectors and geographies and increasingly with large enterprise customers in regulated sectors.”