Cost Saving in the Cloud

Cloud spending is an important topic for many CIOs. A study by Flexera indicates that executives estimate that efficiency gains can be made in at least 30% of their Cloud usage. At Google Cloud, we understand this challenge. As our Product Manager for Compute Engine, Manish Dalwadi puts it: “You shouldn’t need an advanced degree in finance to get the most out of your cloud investment.” Please read on to see how we use pricing calculators, visibility tools and discounts to make Cloud usage costs predictable.

At Google, we have developed various tools to increase cost visibility and help optimize costs, such as the GCP Pricing Calculator, Cloud Identity, Resource Hierarchy, and Access Management. These tools enable you to monitor and analyze costs by providing transparency and clarity about your cloud spending. Google Cloud Billing provides visibility into your current cost trends and forecasted costs. 

Our Billing Reports page allows you to view usage costs at a glance so you can discover and analyze trends. It’s especially useful because it enables you to see which products and geographical regions contributed to the most spending in a simple, chart-based format. This allows you to analyze costs by your organizational structure. In short, Cloud Billing Reports help you answer fundamental questions such as “How much is my current month’s spend trending?”, “What Google Cloud project cost the most last month?”, and “What are my forecasted future costs based on historical trends?” 

Interested to learn more about tools that help predict costs and increase visibility? Please watch the collection of videos on this topic.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers can use several discount options that can be applied to Compute Engine Virtual Machine (VM) usage. These unique pricing discounts enable you to reduce the cost of your resource usage without taking any action. Let’s start by explaining what these discounts entail in order to understand how they can be applied to your cloud environment and how you can take advantage of their cost-saving abilities.

Find more information in the Etsy Case Study. 

One of the early adopters of Google Cloud Billing and Cost Management tools was Etsy, a global marketplace for unique and creative goods. Through careful application of CUDs and the use of cost data and reporting as an optimization tool, Etsy was able to both reduce compute costs by 42% as well as improving cost predictability. Etsy even took it one step further by making cost data available to engineers in order to provide visibility to each and every person throughout the company. With Cloud Billing Reports run through Looker and BigQuery, Etsy was able to make cost data accessible in such a way that made sense to everyone. “The financial team comes to an agreement on the budget, and we integrate that and replicate it on the BigQuery side. That is integrated with Google Cloud’s billing export. People can view the data through a dashboard and receive emails highlighting variance to the budget”, says Jack Perkins, Data Analyst at Etsy. “The ability to add any kind of arbitrary metadata into resource labeling has really helped us map costs to different types of activity, cost centers, things like that. We have noticed that this cost data, these tools, have served us well and helped us identify and fix underlying technical issues”, he explains.

Based on the principles of user friendliness, transparency, predictability, and options for cost savings, Google is committed to price optimization for Cloud usage on a customer-specific level. Would you like to learn more about Google Cloud’s pricing? Please visit https://cloud.google.com/pricing for more details.