Cost management is an important skill set for using GCP services. Effective cost control is implemented via a set of practices, patterns and tools. Increasingly, GCP includes tools for this topic. Shown below is a good starting point - an example of the GCP Billing Console.
- 🛠️ GCP Cost Control tools described - link
- 📋 Cloud Billing onboarding checklist - link
- 💰View cost details for GCP - link
- ➕ Online GCP service pricing calculator - link
- 💸 Understand and Use custom GCP Recommendations - link
- 🔖 Short article, best practices for cost control - link
Google offers pricing features that help its users manage and reduce their cloud costs:
- Flexible Payment Charging Cycles - more at link
- Monthly - for invoiced or self-serve billing cycle types
- Threshold - when your account spend reaches a pre-defined level (for self-serve cycle types)
- For Many Services (check documentation to verify which services are included).
- Sustained-use discounts — up to 30% off for workloads that run for most of the billing month on GCP services
- Committed-use discounts - up to 57% off if users commit to use an instance for a certain time period, with no upfront payment and with the flexibility to change instances during the commitment period - more at link - report view example shown below
- For Google Compute Engine instance (VMs)
- Preemptible VMs — up to 80% off for Virtual Machines (GCE instances) that they can be shut down at any time and replace with others
- Per-second billing — Google charges per second, which can add up to major savings when instances are frequently started and stopped.
- Customizable machine types — this feature lets users configure their own machine configurations. This can translate into significant savings if you need a machine with stronger capabilities, but the high-end instances offered by other providers are not an exact fit.
- For Google Cloud Storage buckets (file/blob storage)
- NearLine or ColdLine storage tiers - for archived data, which are significantly cheaper than ordinary storage and offer fast access.
Sections for key services, organized by service group type - links to additional pages in this repo.
- Control Storage Costs - GCS Buckets - link
- Control Compute Costs - GCE VMs / GKE K8 - link
- Control BigTable and BigQuery Costs - DW / NoSQL - link