Your ability to shift and change as the business changes matter more than ever. Migrating your resources and applications to Google Cloud will maximize business value while optimizing cost, keeping in mind the most effective and efficient use of cloud resources.
“Buildings that lie so exposed to the weather need a good foundation.”
Your journey to the cloud has to start on a good foundation. As buildings are exposed to bad weather, companies’ infrastructures are vulnerable to incidental or unexpected costs. To give you an idea, over-provisioned resources, idle resources, or part-time idle resources, among others, all play a role in exceeding the set budget by the end of the billing month. Nevertheless, these resources are an easy target for saving costs, as they can be simply scaled down or stopped. To utilize your cloud resources most efficiently, it is essential to understand that you pay for what you provision.
To ensure you do not get surprised by an unexpectedly high bill at the end of the month, this article collects some of the best tools, practices, and principles you can use to make sure your spending in the cloud is transparent, tracked, and stays within your limits.
Approaching Cost Optimization
Cloud Migration Tip 1: Optimizing Data Cost
Data is the new oil, but refining it is what makes it valuable. Utilizing Google Cloud’s BigQuery for data backups and analytics greatly benefits your company as BigQuery is Google Cloud’s serverless, cost-effective, and multi-cloud data warehouse designed to help you turn big data into valuable business insights. You can capture data snapshots that preserve data in a BigQuery table by implementing vital policy requirements to business needs.
In addition, deploying the Table Snapshot functionality, allows the business to capture only the data that has changed since the central backup was created. This approach reduces costs and increases transparency regarding what data has changed over time.
Cloud Migration Tip 2: Cloud Storage Classes
Different data serve different purposes. Correct class categorization of data will lead to better segregation and minimized expenses. The storage class set for an object affects the object’s availability and pricing model.
Google Cloud offers four storage classes: Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive. Each class should be configured to store data from the most frequently used until data archives and online backups, ultimately leading to disaster recovery on the cloud.
Cloud Migration Tip 3: Minimizing Computing Costs
A cost-effective solution when it comes to computing power is utilizing Spot VMs. Spot VMs are instances that exceed Compute Engine capacity. Google Compute Engine is the Infrastructure as a Service component of Google Cloud Platform. Spot VMs would be the perfect solution for fault-tolerant and non-production workloads, as Compute Engine might preemptively stop or delete Spot VMs when it needs to reclaim that capacity.
Utilizing these instances would guarantee at least 60% discounts, and it can reach up to 91% for specific machine types and GPUs – compared to the on-demand standard VMs. Smaller discounts for local SSDs may be achieved as well.
Cloud Migration Tip 4: Commitment Use Discounts & Sustained Use Discounts
Furthermore, Google Cloud offers discounts in exchange for a commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified period. When signing up for Commitment Use Discount, most of the resources like machine types or GPUs can be up to a discounted price of up to 57%, while memory-optimized machines’ prices can come down up to 70%. (source)
In addition, Sustained Use Discounts provide discounts on resources that are used for more than 25% of a billing month and are not receiving any other discounts. A discount is automatically applied for every hour that the resource is continually being used. Simultaneously, the discount incrementally increases and a 30% discount can be applied to the instances that run the entire month. (source)
Prioritizing Recommendations
With how vast and ever-expanding the Google Cloud catalog of services and tools is, it is crucial for you to know where to focus your efforts. Hence, prioritizing cost optimization recommendations is crucial to ensure the environment stays up-to-date while being cost-effective. Strategies like terminating idle resources, Committed Use Discounts, using custom machine types, or utilizing the correct storage class will provide high savings while requiring low effort.
However, before migrating to the cloud, more complex tasks such as utilizing Managed Services, using spot VMs or architecting the infrastructure to use cloud-native services, need to be thoroughly considered as they aid in reducing costs while requiring high effort.
When moving to the cloud, it is crucial to understand that the migration of services will not degrade the quality. On the contrary, cloud computing will completely transform your business’s operations. You control the cost by setting up budgets, quotas, and alerts, clearly defining who is using what service. All this is accessible through built-in reports and cost breakdowns which provide all the information needed regarding usage and cost.
Still unsure about starting your journey to the cloud? Join our Google Cloud experts team on the 7th of December to give you a clearer insight into how the migration would grow your business.
Also, do not hesitate to go get in touch with us. We are ready to guide you through your Google Cloud journey.