It’s easy for cloud costs to spiral out of control. But it’s possible to spend smarter in the cloud, from leveraging native tools built into Google Cloud to working with a partner who can continuously optimize your environment.
But shifting from fixed to variable costs, based on a utility usage model, makes it hard to predict—and contain—costs. Add to that ad hoc purchases of cloud resources across an enterprise, and it’s a recipe for complexity. At the same time, IT is often under pressure to do more with less.
Gartner research has found that only 22% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are confident that their cloud spending is under control. And 77% of enterprises have been “surprised” by sudden spikes in cloud costs.
These unexpected costs “may arrive as ballooning monthly bills that destroy return on investment (ROI), as short-term spikes that interrupt critical projects, or as erratic swings that force the business into emergency budget adjustments,” according to Gartner.
While you want to optimize your cloud spend, you don’t want to compromise on performance or functionality to save a few bucks. Here are some strategies and best practices for efficiently managing and reducing expenses when using Google Cloud services.
Tools, processes, and best practices
Google Cloud comes with built-in tools to help you gain visibility into current cost trends and forecasts, control costs with governance policies and permissions, and optimize costs and usage with intelligent recommendations. Here are some key features available:
- Quotas and limits: Resource quotas and limits act as a proactive cost control mechanism to prevent runaway costs.
- Access control: Enforce organizational policies with granular permissions to control the use of specific services.
- Reports: See current cost trends and forecasts with reports in the Google Cloud console.
- Dashboards: Create custom dashboards for various stakeholders with Looker Studio.
- Budgets: Set budgets to monitor costs and alert you when exceeding defined thresholds.
- Automated actions: Use programmatic budget notifications to throttle resources and cap costs.
- Recommendations: View intelligent recommendations for optimizing costs and usage.
Optimize cloud costs with a FinOps partner
While several cost-optimization tools are built directly into Google Cloud, understanding the recommended opportunities can still be challenging—since they may or may not make sense for your particular use case. And you may not have the staff, resources, or expertise to fully leverage these opportunities.
It’s possible to build these capabilities in-house—such as expertise in cloud architecture, cloud services, and cloud cost models. But you can also partner with a Google Cloud managed service provider to do the heavy FinOps lifting, while you focus on what’s core to your business.
For example, Pythian’s FinOps Cost Management & Optimization is designed to eliminate the pain points of cloud—including utility pricing—through a fully managed service. It provides advanced data, analytics, and a powerful combination of AI/ML tools and deep human expertise to continually identify, interpret, and enact cloud savings opportunities.
This can maximize the value of your cloud spend while generating an average monthly cloud cost savings of 20 to 35%—and providing comprehensible, predictable bills that hide unnecessary complexity.
Key features of Pythian’s FinOps service include:
FinOps maturity assessment: Evaluates your current FinOps practices and capabilities, and develops a roadmap for improvement.
Data collection: Collects and consolidates data and metrics generated by your company’s cloud deployments across Google Cloud, including cost and usage information, billing information, and health and status metrics about deployed resources.
Visibility into cloud costs: Provides granular visibility into your cloud environment, so you can track and visualize cost and usage patterns, with reporting and dashboards tailored to various roles and requirements.
Cost optimization: Leverages AI/ML-based recommendations with human expertise to maximize cost savings, capacity reservations, volume discounts, and other advanced procurement methods.
Governance and compliance: Automatically monitors and enforces technical and budgetary thresholds, and prevents spending surprises through ML-based anomaly detection.
Financial accountability: Helps build a culture of financial accountability through increased access to customized reporting and analytics.
FinOps enablement and expert advice: Provides access to a dedicated Cloud Advisor who helps to train, manage, report, and interpret the data to maximize cost savings while ensuring business goals are met.
To find out more, visit Pythian’s FinOps page or contact one of our Google Cloud experts.
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