Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Pricing

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Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Pricing

Last updated on March 20, 2023

GCP Pricing Cheat Sheet

GCP’s customer-friendly pricing allows businesses to pay as you go, without termination fees, and no upfront costs.

Google Cloud Free Program

  • New customers are given $300 free Cloud Billing credits valid for 90 days to explore and evaluate the Google Cloud Platform.
  • Free Tier Limits are also available for all GCP customers on selected Google Cloud services – like GCE, GCS, and BigQuery. The free tier limit does not expire but is subject to change.
  • You won’t be charged until you choose to upgrade your account from a free trial to a paid account through the GCP Console.

Cloud Billing Account

  • In GCP, a project is linked to a Cloud Billing Account that enables customers to:
    • connect a Payments Profile that includes a payment instrument to which costs are charged.
    • pay for resource usage.
  • A Cloud Billing Account can be linked to one or multiple projects.
  • You can manage your Cloud Billing accounts using the Cloud Console.
  • Cloud Billing accounts cannot be deleted.
  • In case you close your Cloud Billing account, the Cloud Billing account information is retained for reporting and auditing purposes.

Pricing Factors

There are three basic pricing factors that influence your costs which are:

  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Egress traffic
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Pricing Innovations

Here are some pricing innovations introduced by GCP.

  • Sustained-use Discounts
    • Automatically get up to a 30% worth of discount on workloads that run for a significant portion of the billing month on Compute Engine and Cloud SQL.
  • Preemptible instances
    • Run instances at a lower price point than normal instances. Perfect for fault-tolerant applications that can withstand possible instance preemptions, which can help you save up to 79% on your costs significantly.
  • Custom Machine Types
    • Customize the type of CPU and memory you use for your instances and save up to 48% compared to fixed machine types from other clouds.
  • Committed-use Discounts
    • This pricing is ideal for workloads with predictable resource needs.
    • When you purchase a committed use contract, you purchase a compute resource at a discounted price in return for committing to paying for those resources for 1 year or 3 years. Savings can be up to 57% without upfront cost or instance-type lock-in.
  • Per-second billing
    • Pay for services by the second with minimum consumption of one minute.
  • Archival Storages
    • Archival storage with the speed of disk at the cost of tape. Archival storages are ideal for data that you plan to be kept entirely for backup or archiving purposes.
  • Rightsizing recommendations
    • Compute Engine monitors the CPU and memory utilization for running VMs and automatically creates a rightsizing recommendation using the last 8 days of data.
    • Unfortunately, sizing recommendations are currently not yet available for instances created using App Engine flexible environment, Dataflow, or GKE, or even for GCE instances with ephemeral disks, GPUs, or TPUs.

GCP Marketplace Pricing Model

The following are the pricing models when provisioning a solution from the GCP Marketplace:

  • Free
    • Customers only pay for the Google Cloud resources that they use, like the cost of running VM instances.
  • Bring your own license (BYOL)
    • Customers pay directly for the solution itself and are billed separately for the resources provisioned.
  • Usage-based pricing
    • Customers pay for software based on metrics that you choose.
    • There are two pricing models for usage-based pricing namely:
      • Fixed Pricing – charged based on the length of time the solution is used, in increments of minutes.
      • Resource-based pricing – charged based on the number of vCPUs, size of the system’s memory, number of GPUs, or a combination of these options.

Pricing Calculator

You can estimate your cloud computing costs using the GCP Pricing Calculator.

Validate Your Knowledge

Question 1

You developed a decoupled application that is set to be deployed on a Kubernetes cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). You need to be able to run on high IOPS for the application’s high-performance computing and you also need to use disk snapshots as part of your disaster recovery strategy. You used the GCP Pricing Calculator to generate a cost estimate and entered some information regarding your cluster, such as the number of nodes, average days, and average hours.

What should you do next?

  1. Enter the number of Local SSDs you want to use. Fill out Persistent Disk storage and snapshot storage fields.
  2. Enter the number of Local SSDs you want to use. Check the option to add the cost estimate for GKE cluster management.
  3. Request for quotation from the GCP Cloud Support Team.
  4. Tick the add GPUs option. Check the option to add the cost estimate for GKE cluster management.

Correct Answer: 1

GKE clusters accrue a management fee, irrespective of cluster size or topology. One zonal (single-zone or multi-zonal) cluster per billing account is free. GKE cluster management fees do not apply to Anthos clusters.

Unlike Persistent Disks, Local SSDs are physically attached to the server that hosts your VM instance. This tight coupling offers superior performance, very high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and very low latency compared to persistent disks.

In the scenario, it states that you should be able to handle high IOPS workload on your Kubernetes cluster. This can be achieved by using Local SSDs. Moreover, you also need to be able to create snapshots and this can be achieved using Persistent Disks.

Hence, the correct answer is: Enter the number of Local SSDs you want to use. Fill out Persistent Disk storage and snapshot storage fields.

The option that says: Enter the number of Local SSDs you want to use. Check the option to add the cost estimate for GKE cluster management is incorrect because the cluster management fee is automatically applied by the Pricing Calculator. There is no need for additional configuration.

The option that says: Request for quotation from the GCP Cloud Support Team is incorrect because the requirement in the scenario is to use the GCP Pricing Calculator. Although you can do this, it’s still best to use the Pricing Calculator when trying to get price estimates especially if you need to have them quickly.

The option that says: Tick the add GPUs option. Check the option to add the cost estimate for GKE cluster management is incorrect because you don’t need to add GPU in this scenario. GPUs do not help in increasing your IOPS performance.

References:
https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/local-ssd

Note: This question was extracted from our Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exams.

Question 2

You have designed a cloud solution that uses a wide variety of Google Cloud Platform Services. Your company agreed to use these cloud services but asked you to provide an estimated cost of running this cloud solution. You need to submit an estimate to properly forecast future expenses.

What should you do?

  1. Deploy the solution on Google Cloud Platform. Leave the solution running for a week. Go to the GCP console and navigate to the Billing Report page. Multiply the 1-week cost by four to determine the monthly costs.
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  3. Provide a list of GCP services of your cloud solution and check its pricing details on the GCP products pricing page. Create a Google Sheet with a monthly estimate of GCP services cost.
  4. Provide a list of GCP services of your cloud solution. Submit an email to GCP support with your GCP services list and ask them to estimate the monthly cost.
  5. Provide a list of GCP services of your cloud solution. Use the GCP Pricing Calculator and input the necessary details to get an estimated monthly cost for each GCP product.

Correct Answer: 4

Operational cost is one big factor that many companies consider when looking at the cloud path. Google Cloud Platform provides a tool that gives its current and potential users an estimated cost of their GCP solution once deployed. In Google Cloud Pricing Calculator, you only need to define all the GCP services along with their specifications to get an estimate. You also have an option to save and send the estimate results via email.

Hence, the correct answer is: Provide a list of GCP services of your cloud solution. Use the GCP Pricing Calculator and input the necessary details to get an estimated monthly cost for each GCP product.

The option that says: Provide a list of GCP services of your cloud solution and check its pricing details on the GCP products pricing page. Create a Google Sheet with a monthly estimate of GCP services cost is incorrect because doing so will take a longer time when compared to using the GCP Pricing Calculator. It is always good to use automated solutions rather than using manual processes that are prone to human errors.

The option that says: Provide a list of GCP services of your cloud solution. Submit an email to GCP support with your GCP services list and ask them to estimate the monthly cost is incorrect because GCP already provided a pricing calculator as a tool for estimating the operational cost of its services. You may want to contact GCP if you need an in-depth discussion on your cloud projects.

The option that says: Deploy the solution on Google Cloud Platform. Leave the solution running for a week. Go to the GCP console and navigate to the Billing Report page. Multiply the 1-week cost to four to determine the monthly costs is incorrect because doing this will introduce potential expenses that are not necessary to estimate the monthly cost of your solution. This will contradict the main purpose of the cost assessment. A better approach is to use the GCP Pricing Calculator instead.

References:

https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator
https://cloud.google.com/pricing

Note: This question was extracted from our Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exams.

For more Google Cloud practice exam questions with detailed explanations, check out the Tutorials Dojo Portal:

Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Practice Exams

GCP Pricing Cheat Sheet References:

https://cloud.google.com/pricing
https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator
https://cloud.google.com/marketplace/docs/partners/vm/select-pricing

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Written by: Jon Bonso

Jon Bonso is the co-founder of Tutorials Dojo, an EdTech startup and an AWS Digital Training Partner that provides high-quality educational materials in the cloud computing space. He graduated from Mapúa Institute of Technology in 2007 with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology. Jon holds 10 AWS Certifications and is also an active AWS Community Builder since 2020.

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