Cloud computing is possibly the most prominent IT trend of the decade. It has grabbed most of the business from conventional data centers and has entirely changed the strategy of IT delivery by companies. One of the exceptional benefits of running in the cloud is being able to scale up and down to meet demand and reduce functional spending.
The Cloud Computing Platform offered by Google is Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a retainer of cloud computing services that works on the same structure that Google uses inside for its end-user brands, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it gives a series of modular cloud services, including computing, data analytics, data storage, and machine learning.
Google Cloud Platform provides infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and serverless computing environments.
This article explores the cost challenges that customers may face, the cost optimisation tools that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) uses, the cloud budget issues that may arise, and how Google Cloud Platform (GCP) works with the best cost model. Learn how it works.
Cost Challenges For Customer
There is a delusion that being a cloud user means that you are saving money. In fact, in 2022, one of the top challenges many companies face is reducing cloud costs. Because When companies provide unlimited data access, this leads to an increase in cloud spending.
Some of the primary challenges identified are as follows:
Lack Of Visibility Into Cloud Spend
Lack of visibility into cloud spending practices is the main challenge in cloud cost management. Because some users don’t have the proper drivers to determine cloud spending, they may not interpret cost reports correctly and spend more than they need to. To overcome these problems, give access to cloud expense reports, so everyone understands how their activity affects expenditures.
In addition, implement software with deep visibility capabilities that gives you more perception of your cloud spending. For example, choose a management driver that gives you a comprehensive view of all cost centres in your cloud If you want to manage cloud costs. A universal theory of cost and usage reports could help optimise cloud costs.
Unreliable Budget Forecasting
It is challenging to forecast cloud spending, especially when you have several cloud resources. When new apps are introduced, forecasting gets complex and needs immense proficiency, setting up workflows and processes and the correct data. Thus, causing a challenge for enterprises to manage cloud prices.
Billing Complexity
Cloud billing is complex because the cloud service providers continually vary billing practices and the invoices they provide. Development teams, for example, only focus on efficiency, often forgetting cloud cost management. Therefore, all chargebacks should be made clear to avoid billing complexities.
Poor Cloud Architecture Design
While developing a cloud application, software architects consider the cost associated with particular application features. For instance, the cost of a specific query for a widget installed in a web application may cost thousands of dollars.
Thus, lack of experience and skills often give rise to poorly designed applications for cloud-based platforms, hence affecting the whole cost management.
Over-Provisioning
Over-provisioning is selecting resources more than you actually need to facilitate your business workloads. For example, it causes cloud cost waste and unnecessary expenditures. Investing in custom monitoring, cost management results, and rightsizing can help reduce dependence on over-provisioned assets to save on cloud spending.
Cost Optimization Drivers
The options listed here will help you accelerate your GCP cost optimisation efforts faster than an entire team, providing auditable reports and actionable cost intelligence.
1. Google Cloud Platform – Cost management native solutions
GCP offers about a dozen cost management tools. You can access the tools through Cloud Console. The Cloud Console features two main cost-related pages: Cloud Billing Reports and Cost Tables.
Cloud billing reports help you preview your usage costs and help you identify and analyse resource consumption trends. Use charts to get a simplified view of the products and locations that contributed the most to your spending. However, you can also manage costs based on your organisational structure, displayed as projects, folders, or labels.
2. CloudZero – Granular cloud cost Intelligence
CloudZero is a modern, feature-rich, non-overwhelming cloud cost intelligence platform. Whether you are an enterprise or a startup, CloudZero will help you ingest, analyse, and report on data from multiple sources, including Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery.
CloudZero provides consistent, evident, and actionable cost insights across Google Cloud Services.
3. Ternary – Cost optimisation tool for native Google Cloud services
Ternary builds a platform on Google Cloud for GCP customers to provide transparency and cost optimisation recommendations for services such as GCP compute, storage, BigQuery, Dataflow, Kubernetes, and Dataproc.
Workflows make it easy to assign optimisation tasks, track their progress, and report on anomalies. For example, tools like the Committed Use Discount Optimizer allow you to leverage and optimise 1- and 3-year commitments across all supported Google Cloud services.
4. Looker – Hybrid cloud cost management by Google
Looker Cloud Cost Management combines billing data from multiple cloud providers and teams into one platform. To analyse how your organisation is spending money on projects, resources, and teams, you should use Google Cloud Billing Blocks.
Looker allows you to collect, monitor, and analyse your GCP spending in three ways. First, Looker directly accesses billing data from any cloud data warehouse and integrates cloud spend reporting across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
The next phase aggregates billing and usage data in a cloud data warehouse such as BigQuery. The final step is to turn cloud billing reporting into cloud spend optimisation using tags or labels and cost centres across clouds.
The platform also tracks how credits and promotions are being applied and analyses cost-saving recommendations.
5. Harness – Cloud management service with GCP cost optimisation
Kubecost enables Kubernetes cost optimisation across GCP (GKE). View Kubernetes costs by deployment, namespace, cluster, service, and more. A single API endpoint also provides a unified view of costs across multiple clusters
Kubecost can also integrate cost data across your infrastructure from external tools for even deeper cost insights. Kubecost offers customised and dynamic recommendations like its other GCP cost tools. It allows you to prioritise some optimisations and save money.
Address Cloud Budgetary issues
There are few main reasons that cloud budgets get unmanageable:
- Uncontrolled Cost
The organisation has no idea what it’s spending, really, much lower where the money is going, other than the big bills (or frequently, numerous little credit card bills) that it pays each month. Analyse your cloud bills, apply a cost management tool and ensure it’s useful by enforcing tagging or partitioning discipline.
- No Commitments
The organisation could secure discounts by using public discounting mechanisms, similar to AWS savings plans and Azure reserved instances, as well as making a contractual commitment for a negotiated reduction. But because the organisation feels like it can’t perfectly predict its use and isn’t sure whether it will use all of what it’s operating today, it commits to nothing, thus ensuring that it spends grotesquely more than necessary.
- Unexpected Usage
In this situation, the organisation is the victim of its cloud success. Further, other unexpected cloud systems start showing up, blowing out the original budget estimates for assets.
- Inadequate Design And Implementation
Architects are sometimes unconcious to cost when they design cloud services. They may make worse design choices, or changes in application features and behaviour over time may have turned out to make a design choice suddenly expensive. For example, developers may write inadequately performing code that consumes a lot of structure resources or regulation that makes inordinate (and, cumulatively, expensive) calls to cloud services.
Incredibly the answer to most of these issues is not to apply a cloud cost management tool. Instead, the challenges aren’t as simple as many vendors (and talking heads) make them out to be.
Cloud Adoption with the best cost model
There are few standard cost models used in the cloud, which can combine depending on needs:
- Pay-as-you-go
- Prepaid subscriptions
- Spots instances
- Reserved instances
Every cloud services provider follows one of these models such as:
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) works on a pay-as-you-go pricing structure. In this model, customers pay for cloud services. Cloud services may bill for usage of storage, networking, computing power, etc., and can scale down resources. You only pay for the services you use. No up-front prices. Pricing varies by product and usage of resources.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is a new technological development with the potential to have a significant impact on the world. There are many advantages it offers users and businesses. For example, some of the benefits it provides businesses are the ability to reduce operating costs by spending less on maintenance and software upgrades and focusing on the business itself.
Google Cloud Platform may be “new to market” compared to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, but its offerings are worth serious consideration.
We hope this article helps you get started with Google Cloud and its services and products on Google Cloud Platform.