Google Cloud - Costs

One of the most important factor to decide on moving to cloud is Cost savings apart from the flexibility provided by Cloud.

How are costs broken down in Google Cloud?

Fixed Price Models and Consumption based Models.

Consumption based Models implies billing for the resources being used/consumed.

e.g. Cloud storage Billed for the amount of storage

Fixed Price Models implies billing fixed irrespective of the usage.

e.g. VM Instance, GKE Cluster (till you delete)

Costs are based on:

• Data transfer (ingress and egress)
• Ingress is mostly free
• Egress to same zone with Google cloud using internal IP is free
• Egress from one region to another region in Google Cloud is not free
• Capacity (memory/CPU etc)
• Invocations 
• Time (VM running)
• Region wise price difference

Billing account gives you an overview of the total costs (forecasted as well).

On the left hand side menu, you will see multiple options

Reports will give you reports (as expected) and trends per project or services (timeline as well).

Cost Table More details and can download an invoice for a specific month.

Cost Breakdown gives details of the base usage cost and adjustments, credits and taxes.

Commitment is the summary of the committed use discounts by commitment type.

e.g put a commitment of a VM for 3 months etc.

Budget and alerts helps you to avoid surprises by creating a budget and an alert mechanism when the costs are going over board than the set budget (alert levels 50%, 90% or 100% via email or message).