The Essential GCP Tools for Smarter Cloud Cost Management

The Google Cloud Platform is currently the third largest cloud provider, and it is on track for continued growth. The report suggests that in 2024, Google Cloud's market share has grown to 28% among the top 10 cloud providers and reached 11% of the global cloud market. Furthermore, Deutsche Bank analysts also affirm that Google’s cloud business is growing impressively, predicting that Google’s cloud revenue could reach $38 billion by 2025.

As your business grows and you scale on the Google Cloud Platform, managing it can get tricky. You might need to add more services and resources, which can make things complicated. That's why it's important to have a good GCP cost management system in place to manage your cloud environment.

In this blog, we'll talk about the essential GCP tools for Google Cloud Cost Optimization that can help you save money and avoid wasting resources on the cloud.

What is Google Cloud Cost Optimization?

Google Cloud Cost Optimization is a continuous practice of identifying and eliminating unnecessary cloud spending while also ensuring that your applications perform optimally. This involves a combination of proactive measures and GCP cost optimization strategies, such as rightsizing resources, optimizing resource utilization, and leveraging cost-effective pricing models, budgeting, forecasting, allocation, etc, and reactive measures like analyzing past spending patterns to identify areas for improvement.

The native Google Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

Google Cloud offers a suite of useful tools to help you with your cloud cost optimization objectives. Let’s discuss the top native GCP tools:

1. Google Cloud Billing Reports

The GCP tool provides detailed reports on your spending which allows you to pinpoint cost drivers, identify unexpected spikes, and understand where your money is actually going. It’s a great GCP tool to provide answers to questions such as:

• Where is the majority of my Google cloud spending occurring?
• Which GCP services are the biggest cost drivers?
• Are there any unexpected cost spikes?
• Are we spending more or less than the last billing period?

Features of Google Cloud Billing Reports:

• Granular cost breakdowns by service, region, and project.  
• Customizable reports to analyze spending trends and identify anomalies.
• Get forecasted spending based on historical usage patterns.

2. Google Cloud Pricing Calculator

As a cost or ROI continuous business, before you launch a new project or scale existing workloads, you would usually like to get an idea of how much a specific deployment costs. Or maybe what are the pricing options for different services and configurations? This GCP tool provides great help in estimating the cost of various GCP services based on your specific business/ project needs. You can experiment with various configurations, compare pricing plans, and choose the best-suited plan for your business. This proactive approach saves you from unexpected charges by planning in advance, and your projects do not exceed their budgets.

Features of Google Cloud Pricing Calculator:

• Allows you to estimate costs for Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and other GCP services.
• Helps with budgeting and cost forecasting.
• Also helps to choose the best storage locations. Thus, organizations using BigQuery can significantly benefit from this GCP tool.

3. Google Cloud Recommender

This GCP Tool works like your personal cloud optimization advisor. It analyzes your GCP usage patterns and provides personalized recommendations for improving resource utilization, rightsizing instances, optimizing storage, and more. These recommendations are based on Google Cloud Platform's best practices.

Features of Google Cloud Recommender:

• It identifies underutilized resources and rightsizing options.
• It provides tailored recommendations based on your specific usage patterns.
• It can be integrated with Google Cloud FinOps Hub to provide better cloud cost-saving recommendations.

Read the full article - https://www.cloudkeeper.com/insights/blog/gcp-tools-cloud-cost-management