Reduce your Google Cloud Spend

Antoine Castex
Google Cloud - Community
3 min readSep 28, 2022

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Trying to reduce your spend seems to be easy, starting by :

  • Shutting down your resources when you don’t use it
  • Deleting your unused resources
  • Control who can enable new resources

But sometimes it’s not enough !

Try to check what are the most used services by looking at your billing export :

There is 2 very interesting services in this list :

  • Cloud Run
  • Cloud SQL

What can we do for these two ?

Committed use discounts (CUDs) for Cloud Run is a 17% discounted pricing in exchange of a continuously use in a particular region for a one year term minimum (up to 3 years max).

  • You commit is in dollars per hour of equivalent on-demand spend.
  • In exchange, you receive a discounted rate on the applicable usage your commitment covers.
  • It’s only counting for one specific choosed Google location
  • Any overage is charged at the on-demand rate.
  • You still receive the same discount percentage on applicable usage in the event of a price change.
  • The commitment fee is billed monthly.
  • It’s automatically renewed.

Now looking at my Cloud Run daily usage :

I can see specific projects which are using Cloud Run in the same Google Cloud location.

I’m choosing an example where I consume at least 500$ per day, that is my secured line (the minimum I can commit without any risk).

Remember that the commit is in USD/hr, so 500$ mean 20$/hr

I can commit that amount of money without taking any risk of under consumption (keeping in mind that my consumption will continue to be at least the same during the next 12 month of course)

After 24h I’m able to see the results of that in the Cloud Console in the CUD analysis :

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/cud-analysis-resource-based

  • grey represent the full Cloud Run consumption for all my projects in the region X
  • green represent the committed Cloud Run consumption that I have purchased.

Please consider also checking the recommendations page where you can find some inputs coming from Google for your next purchasing of discount :

https://cloud.google.com/docs/cuds-recommender

Now check the Cloud SQL which bring the same experience with more discount !

Going back to the CUD purchase page, you can see that for Cloud SQL it’s the same reflexion to adopt.

But this time 1 year of commit give you 25% of discount and 3 years 52%, that’s awesome !!!

Go to save money and don’t forget :

“These monthly fees are non-cancellable and will apply regardless of actual usage”

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