All About Cost Optimization and FinOps in GCP
A collection of insightful articles about cost optimization and FinOps in GCP
Today, I am putting together a list of helpful GCP articles related to FinOps. I want to improve our coverage of the #3 cloud provider and figured this is a great place to start! I might do these for the other cloud providers—let me know what you think in the comments if you thought this was helpful.
Next ‘24 FinOps Update
We’ll start with the newest one first! At Google Next 2024, the GCP FinOps team announced a series of new innovations for customers of the platform. The top 3 include:
Improving billing and cost data to be timelier and more digestible via BigQuery queries
AI cost anomaly monitoring with RCA across projects
Unified Committed Use Discount (CUD) analysis in FinOps hub to improve cost strategies
Read more about it here: FinOps news from Next ‘24 | Google Cloud Blog
FOCUS BigQuery View
This is tangentially related to the second announcement in the previous article, but I wanted to shout out GCP providing a way for you to view cloud bills across multiple CSPs (not just GCP). This is intended to be a neutral, standardized format for you to view your cloud bills using BigQuery. This is part of Google’s move towards an “open” standard for cloud billing. Interesting stuff.
Read more here: New BigQuery cloud billing view based on FOCUS | Google Cloud Blog.
Ultimate Guide to GCP Cost Optimization
This was published not so long ago, and I found it to be a great summary of cost optimization in GCP. One part I thought was insightful is the part regarding data warehouse cost optimization. I don’t see this topic covered much and have a lot to learn myself about it. Among other topics, this article is fairly exhaustive.
Check it out here: Ultimate Guide To GCP Cost Optimization (lucidity.cloud)
Compute Engine Cost Optimization
This is admittedly a little basic, but what’s wrong with that? Coming over from another cloud, this is a great starting point for learning about Google Compute Engine-specific cost optimization tools and terms.
Learn more: How to save on Google Compute Engine | Google Cloud Blog
Google Kubernetes Engine Cost Optimization
From the good people over at Spot by NetApp, we have a concise review of cost optimization options for GKE. Many organizations opt to use Google as their primary cloud for K8s based workloads (they invented it of course), so I was happy to find this article with GKE guidance. Not complicated and straight to the point.
View here: GKE Pricing Models Explained and 4 Ways to Optimize Your Costs - Spot.io
Maximizing GKE Discounts
Who doesn’t want to save as much as possible? Here’s a further exploration of the previous topic but on Google Blog instead, outlining all the various ways to leverage CUDs as well as spot VMs. It also includes a link to the State of Kubernetes Cost Optimization, which might be a good place to look if you need the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage of this particular topic.
Read about it here: Maximizing GKE discounts: Kubernetes cost optimization strategies | Google Cloud Blog
Cost Optimizing Google Cloud Storage
If you have the time available, consider hopping over to Youtube for this video about best practices for storage cost optimization in GCP. If you want to skip to the crucial stuff, jump over to 41:10 and check out the key takeaways about what influences storage costs and best practices to mitigate them.
Watch it here:
Best Tools for Google Cloud Cost Optimization
The kind folks at CloudZero put together a sweet little list of native and 3rd party tools for GCP and what they each do. Of course they put themselves as #1, but regardless it gives you a nice lay of the landscape of tools that exist for GCP so far. I know it says 2022, but apparently, it’s been updated for 2024 so these tools should still be relevant to you right now.
Check it out here: The 15 Best GCP Cost Optimization Tools (Updated 2024) (cloudzero.com)