Google Cloud Platform is among the major public cloud such as AWS and Azure. Therefore, Google has intensified price as a competitive differentiator for its cloud offering. Its objective is to offer pricing that is both lower and more friendly than other clouds. Cost is a major factor if you’re considering migrating to Google cloud or switching to any other different cloud provider. Google cloud pricing plays a major role in cost management and ensures you spend what you use. We will look at the principles of Google cloud pricing and the various importance
Google Cloud pricing basics
The pricing offered by the Google cloud platform is based on four principles as discussed
- No upfront cost; Google cloud platform denies users to make an upfront investment.
- Pay as you go; Google allows charges only for resources used through computing, storage, and data transfer. This allows users to scale up and down flexibility.
- No termination fees; Google allows users to scale down or shut off without incurring any additional cost
- Free tier; Google offers a 12-month free trial for all its services. There is a free tier offered by Google which provides the major services for free with usage limits. The following are a few services in the free tier
Google offers pricing features that help its users reduce their cloud costs
- Sustained-use discounts. Google offers up to 30% off for workloads that run for most of the billing month on the Google cloud platform
- Committed-use discounts; users can save up to 57% by committing to use an instance for a certain period, with no upfront payment, and with the flexibility to change instances during the commitment period.
- Preemptible VMs—similar to the concept of AWS spot instances, Google offers up to 79% off for Virtual Machines that may be shut down at any time and replaced by others.
- Per-second billing—while other cloud providers charge for services by the hour, Google charges for all services per second, which can add up to major savings when instances are frequently started and stopped.
- ColdLine storage—Google cloud storage provides NearLine and ColdLine storage tiers for archived data, which are significantly cheaper than ordinary storage and offer fast access.
- Custom machine types—GCP is the only major cloud provider that lets users assemble their 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.
Importance of using Google cloud pricing
You only pay for the services you use. There are no up-front fees, and no termination charges.
New users get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.
Google cloud saves you money over other providers through automatic savings based on monthly usage and pre-paying for resources discounted rates.
It helps you control your spending with budgets, alerts, quota limits, and other free cost management tools.
Final words
Google cloud pricing has ensured that clients pay only for what they use differentiating the Google cloud from other clouds hence making it the best.