Cost Management and Discounts

Visibility first, then discounts

Start with visibility: Cloud Billing reports break spend down by project, service, SKU and label, and the billing export to BigQuery lets you build your own dashboards. Budgets send alerts at thresholds and can publish to Pub/Sub, so automation can react (for example, notify Slack or cap a sandbox). Then reduce spend. Compute Engine gives sustained use discounts automatically for many machine series that run a large part of the month (not E2 or some newer series). Committed use discounts (CUDs) trade a one- or three-year commitment for large savings, either for specific resources or as flexible spend-based commitments across services. Use Spot VMs for fault-tolerant batch work, scale-to-zero services, Recommender right-sizing suggestions, BigQuery partitioning and lifecycle rules for storage. Watch hidden costs: network egress, log ingestion and idle external IPs.

A budget with alert thresholds

Budgets alert; they do not stop spending by themselves.

gcloud billing budgets create --billing-account=0X0X0X-0X0X0X-0X0X0X \
  --display-name="shop-dev monthly" \
  --budget-amount=20000INR \
  --filter-projects=projects/shop-dev-123456 \
  --threshold-rule=percent=0.5 --threshold-rule=percent=0.9 \
  --threshold-rule=percent=1.0,basis=forecasted-spend

# idle resources and right-sizing suggestions
gcloud recommender recommendations list --project=shop-dev-123456 --location=asia-south1-a \
  --recommender=google.compute.instance.MachineTypeRecommender

Label from day one

Spend that cannot be attributed to a team cannot be managed. Make labels like team and env mandatory in Terraform modules and check them in code review.

त्वरित जाँच: Which discount applies automatically, with no commitment, to eligible Compute Engine VMs that run most of the month?

• Sustained use discount
• Committed use discount
• Spot pricing
• Free tier