GCP Pricing Changes & Ways To Prepare

What to expect?

As the ever-changing industry of cloud computing makes advancements, a few tweaks are required to ensure maximum satisfaction and progress in the right direction. A lot of upcoming changes are designed to be beneficial in a lot of new use-cases as well as applications, such as with the help of additional configurable Cloud Storage choices, data mobility, Persistent Disk snapshots, network load balancing, and a Network Intelligence Center component.

Google is rolling out changes for services in Cloud Storage, Network, Compute, Security, and Persistent Disk offering. These changes will allow users to have the most optimized pricing options considering their workload size and data portability. Although there may be an initial increase in billing, a lot of the changes are made to align services with usage, and if users adapt their portfolios and optimize workloads, they will be able to cut down costs.

Changes in Google’s Pricing Model will be enacted in 6 months, while customers with existing contracts that include a floating or fixed discount will be unaffected by the changes until their contracts are renewed.

Important Service Changes

Google aims to fully support their clients in adapting and optimizing their cloud environment according to the upcoming changes. Pricing is different for every client, and so are their uses. Appropriately mapping out important changes for their GCP workloads, and ensuring preparedness for the billing changes is the key to success. Google is also making Storage Transfer Service free of cost within cloud storage, to help users move their workloads to the best suited locations.

Persistent Disk Snapshots: Instead of a single flat charge, Persistent Disk will now provide a variety of options and price points based on client use cases. Users that need long-term backup for their snapshots may now utilize new archive snapshot SKUs, which are less expensive than Persistent Disk snapshots.  New snapshots will default in the same region as the disk to minimize cost for multi-region snapshots.

• Persistent Disk (PD) now has a new lower-cost archive snapshot option, allowing compliance/archiving workloads to be charged less than compute-intensive DevOps tasks.

Data Mobility: Customers may get improved performance when using dual-region storage with the new product improvements by creating dual regions in a variety of different locations and/or adding on features like turbo replication (for an additional cost). Regions and dual regions, rather than multi-region locations, may be more suited for analytical and general-purpose business workloads, since they allow clients to co-locate computation and storage for improved performance.

• Pricing for data mobility, such as replication of data written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access, will change in Cloud Storage.

Other significant changes include:

The quantity of Always Free Internet egress to each qualified egress destination will rise from 1 GB per month to 100 GB per month.

Cloud Load Balancing now has new outbound data processing price that is in line with other prominent cloud providers.

New Network Topology price, which includes the Performance Dashboard within Network Intelligence Center at no extra cost.

Free of cost Storage Transfer Services

Important Pricing Changes

A variety of pricing changes are to be implemented after the next 6 months, including at-rest storage, operations, data replication, network egress, cloud load balancing, and much more.

At-rest storage pricing

Multi-Region

• Nearline Storage’s at-rest storage cost will rise from $0.010 per GB per month to $0.015 per GB per month in multi-regions.
• Archive Storage at-rest storage cost will drop from $0.0040 per GB per month to $0.0024 per GB per month in the US and EU multi-regions.

Dual-Region

• In the asia1 dual-region, standard storage at-rest storage cost will rise from $0.0460 per GB per month to $0.0506 per GB per month.
• Coldline Storage’s at-rest storage cost will drop from $0.0090 per GB per month to $0.0088 per GB per month in the nam4 and eur4 dual-regions.

Operations Pricing

• The price of Coldline Storage Class B operations will rise from $0.05 to $0.10 every 10,000 operations.
• Coldline Storage’s Class A operations pricing will rise from $0.10 per 10,000 operations to $0.40 per 10,000 operations in multi-regions and dual-regions.
• Class A operations price in multi-regions and dual-regions will be double that of Class A operations pricing in regions for all other storage classes. Standard Storage Class A activities in multi-regions and dual-regions, for example, will rise from $0.05 to $0.10 every 10,000 operations.

Data Replication Pricing

• Default replication cost will rise from $0.00 per GB to $0.02 per GB in the us, nam4, eu, and eur4 regions.
• Default replication fee will rise from $0.00 per GB to $0.08 per GB in the asia and asia1 regions.

Network Egress Pricing

• Reading data from a Google Cloud service in a region on the same continent into a Cloud Storage bucket situated in a multi-region will no longer be free; instead, such transfers will be paid the same as normal data moves between various locations on the same continent.
• The monthly egress traffic from your bucket will no longer affect network egress within Google Cloud. Instead, just the areas involved will decide price.

Helpful Resources

Thankfully, users aren’t just abandoned to their own devices. Google promises thorough technical backup and is actively coordinating with clients to ensure their seamless transition into the prescribed changes.

Here are a few resources that will help you grasp an idea of what your pricing will look like, and how to go about optimizing your cloud environment.

1. Economize’ pricing lists for current pricing details.
2. Google Cloud’s Pricing Calculator, for giving you service usage estimates.
3. Google Cloud’s Pricing List Page, for in-depth current pricing details.
4. Google’s Pricing Changes Announcement page for predicted changes.
5. Google’s Infrastructure Services and Pricing Updates page for FAQ’s and information.
6. Google’s Updates Blog for the latest GCP updates.

Conclusion

A number of planned updates are intended to benefit a variety of new use-cases and applications. Changes are coming to Google’s Cloud Storage, Network, Compute, Security, and Persistent Disk services. These modifications will provide users with the most cost-effective pricing solutions based on the magnitude of their workload and data portability.

Pricing is different for every client, and so are their uses. Appropriately mapping out important changes for their GCP workloads, and ensuring preparedness for the billing changes is the key to success in this upcoming wind of change.