Enticing advantages like per-second billing and a complimentary 12-month trial plan drive the growing migration of businesses to the Google Cloud Platform. However, this surge in adoption has resulted in increased expenses, particularly attributed to escalating storage costs.
Recognizing this challenge underscores the critical necessity for GCP cost optimization tools. These tools are pivotal in enhancing financial viability, optimizing resource utilization, and generating substantial cost savings.
In this blog post, we delve into a comprehensive exploration of 12 crucial GCP cost optimization tools. These insights are aimed at fortifying your cloud cost management strategy, empowering you to navigate this journey effectively.
We advocate for transparent cloud expenditure, emphasizing the importance of comprehending how your cloud budget is allocated. This transparency is key to recognizing the factors, rationale, and specific components that impact your cloud expenses.
Access to this level of understanding empowers you to make informed decisions. Whether it involves reducing unnecessary costs or strategically increasing investments in areas with high potential returns, this visibility optimizes your cloud financial management effectively.
In line with this perspective, we've recently delved into cost optimization tools available in Azure and AWS. As part of our ongoing commitment to provide comprehensive insights into cost management, we now present an exploration of 12 GCP cost optimization tools in this continuing series.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services encompassing virtual machine server space, internal networks, VPN connections, disk storage, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications for machine learning, and cutting-edge Tensor Processing Units (TPU).
While arriving later to the cloud computing scene, Google Cloud Platform( GCP ) has made a significant impact, hosting over 1.42 million websites, including notable brands like Spotify. Despite competing with industry giants like AWS and Microsoft Azure, GCP has emerged as a strong competitor due to its distinct advantages:
However, this increasing adoption also increases cloud costs primarily due to cloud wastage. According to Flexera's 2021 findings, companies allocated around 30% of their cloud budgets to cloud waste. In the year 2022, they witnessed a discernible upturn, with this percentage rising to 32%. A StormForge study on 131 IT professionals reported that cloud waste is increasing to as much as 47% of the total cloud budget with increased cloud spending. This is why there is a need for GCP optimization tools that can help bring down the cost by ensuring efficient resource allocation.
A GCP cost optimization tool is a software solution created to efficiently manage and optimize an organization's expenditure on cloud services. These tools are designed to tackle the dynamic and intricate nature of GCP environments, where resource consumption and expenses can vary based on demand, application workloads, and various other factors.
GCP cost optimization tools offer a range of advantages for organizations aiming to manage and optimize their cloud expenditure effectively. Here are the key benefits:
Now that we understand the various benefits of GCP cost optimization tools, it is essential to be meticulous in your search for the right tools. There are three types of tools that you should consider investing in.
Let's break down the benefits of the tools mentioned above.
GCP storage can be divided into the following categories:
But why should your optimization focus be on Persistent Disk?
This is because numerous features associated with Persistent Disk add to the overall cloud bill, such as those mentioned below.
Overlooking persistent disk storage cost optimization in GCP can significantly impact the cloud bill, causing increased cloud expenditure, suboptimal resource utilization, budget overruns, and resource waste.
We know what you are wondering.
Can storage have such an impact that it escalates cloud bill?
Yes, storage is one of the significant contributors to the overall cloud cost. As per a Virtana report, 94% of 350 cloud decision-makers agreed that their cloud storage cost is increasing, and 54% agreed that their storage spend is growing faster than their overall cloud bill. To corroborate this study, we conducted an independent audit on over 100 enterprises and found that an average of 40% of the overall cloud cost was spent on storage.
Despite this, many organizations overlook optimizing storage and only optimize compute resources. This is because of the following two reasons.
Hence, while compute resource optimization is essential, storage resource optimization should also be prioritized equally.
Optimizing GCP storage resources has the following advantages:
Cost Savings
Improved Budget Management
Enhanced Performance and Efficiency
Different compute resources are available with GCP, such as general-purpose VMs, Tau VMs, and Shielded VMs. Leaving them unsupervised can result in a high cloud bill. A tool optimizing the cost of computing resources will offer you the following benefits.
Cost Savings
Efficient Resource Utilization
Improved Performance
Visibility and Transparency
Budget Control
In a study on cloud waste by Anodot, 54% of the respondents said that their cloud waste stems from the lack of visibility into the cloud costs. You need FinOps tools to provide visibility and reporting on cloud costs. You need profound insights into the resource usage pattern to strategize and implement an effective cloud cost optimization plan to cut costs and increase ROI. You get the following benefits with a FinOps tool offering visibility and reporting on the cloud cost.
Enhanced Perception Of Expenditure
Instantaneous Visibility
Historical Data Analysis
Cost Attribution
Customizable Reporting
Budget Planning and Management
Cost Efficiency Insights
Hence, reiterating those above, when looking for a GCP cost optimization tool, invest in 2-3 tools, each with their specialty, such as one for optimizing compute resources, one for providing granular visibility, and one for optimizing storage resource optimization.
Now that we have established the significance of having multiple GCP cost optimization tools for comprehensive optimization, let us look at some of them. You can choose the one that best suits your requirements.
As mentioned before, storage is one of the significant contributors to the overall cloud bill. Storage significantly impacts overall cloud costs, yet its complexity often leads organizations to overlook its optimization. Many resort to overprovisioning to ensure ample storage for variable needs. While beneficial during peak demands, this approach often results in underutilized resources during periods of reduced requirements, leading to increased costs for idle resources.
Beyond cost implications, overprovisioning causes inefficient resource allocation. To address these challenges, prioritizing storage resource management is a key consideration in finding an effective GCP cost optimization tool. Lucidity stands out as such a tool, recognizing the inefficiencies and errors inherent in manual provisioning.
Lucidity offers two automated solutions, Lucidity Storage Audit and Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler, designed to streamline resource management, minimize waste, and mitigate errors associated with manual processes.
Lucidity Storage Audit: Lucidity Storage Audit addresses the common challenges organizations face in understanding the impact of storage on cloud bills. Traditionally, discovering the root cause behind escalating storage expenses involved manual analysis or reliance on monitoring tools, both demanding significant investment in cost and effort from DevOps teams. Lucidity tackles this issue by providing an automated Storage Audit solution.
This comprehensive tool simplifies the storage auditing process, offering an automated, user-friendly, and easily accessible executable. Users gain valuable insights into their disk health and usage by replacing intricate manual assessments. With this information, optimizing expenses and minimizing the risk of downtime becomes effortless.
The Lucidity Audit tool uses GCP's internal service to collect crucial storage metadata, including metrics such as:
This data gives users a deeper understanding of storage usage, facilitating informed decision-making to streamline costs.
Lucidity Storage Audit equips you with valuable information, including:
Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler: Lucidity block storage auto-scaler eliminates overprovisioning by automating storage expansion and reduction based on evolving requirements. This tool streamlines the process, enabling rapid adjustment of storage resources within minutes.
Deploying the auto-scaler is remarkably simple - it's effortlessly set up with just three clicks. Once activated, the auto-scaler dynamically adjusts your storage, optimizing utilization to maintain a healthy 70-80% range. This proactive approach ensures immediate cost savings.
Expanding storage capacity becomes seamless with this tool. Scaling up takes just one minute, ensuring your infrastructure is always prepared for unexpected traffic surges or workload spikes. This swift response guarantees consistent and adaptable storage capacity, enhancing your system's resilience and responsiveness to demand fluctuations.
Lucidity Block Storage Auto-Scaler offers the following benefits.
Achieve uninterrupted operations: Ensuring seamless operations, Lucidity's Auto-Scaler optimizes costs and simplifies the complexities of manual provisioning. This tool guarantees uninterrupted user experiences by dynamically adapting storage resources to evolving needs, eliminating disruptions, and maintaining continuous system availability.
Customized Policies: Enhance storage optimization with Lucidity's customizable policies, designed to maintain uninterrupted operations. These policies enable proactive prevention of storage shortages by allowing users to set preferred disk utilization and buffer configurations.
Lucidity streamlines policy setup, offering a user-friendly experience. Users can input policy details, including name, utilization preferences, maximum disk size, and buffer size with a few clicks on the' Create Policy' button. This straightforward approach tailors policies to specific usage and loading conditions.
Lucidity diligently adheres to these policies, ensuring efficient instance management aligned with your criteria. This high level of customization enhances performance, improves cost-effectiveness, and delivers a robust, tailor-made storage solution.
Effortless implementation: Lucidity Auto-Scaler streamlines deployment, ensuring a swift and hassle-free experience. Its lightweight nature, consuming just 2% of CPU or RAM usage, seamlessly integrates without straining resources.
Automated resource scaling: The tool eliminates guesswork from resource management by automatically scaling storage based on changing demand. Lucidity adeptly adjusts storage resources to optimize efficiency, accommodating dynamic workload demands, whether facing sudden spikes or reduced activity.
Experience 70% Reduction in Storage Costs: By leveraging Lucidity's automated scaling, users unlock substantial savings of up to 70% on storage expenses. Disk utilization sees a notable improvement, increasing from 35% to an impressive 80%. This efficiency empowers users to achieve substantial reductions in storage costs.
GCP Native Tools
Now, let us look at some GCP native tools that can help with cost optimization. Cloud-native cost optimization tools aim to efficiently manage and optimize expenses in cloud environments while adhering to the principles of cloud-native architecture.
The Google Cloud Console is Google's proprietary interface for managing and controlling your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources. The platform efficiently manages and offers valuable insights into all the integral aspects that empower cloud applications. This encompasses various components such as web applications, data analysis, virtual machines, datastores, databases, networking, and developer services.
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Cloud Billing Reports provide insight into usage expenses, simplifying the detection and examination of resource consumption patterns. They aim to assist businesses in their development, innovation, and scalability by providing open and flexible technology that avoids vendor lock-in.
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The Cost Table report offers more than just superficial information. It provides an in-depth breakdown of expenses for each invoiced month in a table format.
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Google Looker offers hybrid GCP cost optimization and management capabilities beyond conventional limitations. It effortlessly amalgamates billing data from numerous cloud services and diverse teams, establishing a cohesive platform.
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If You Are Looking To Optimize Compute Resources
Cloud compute resource optimization tools are designed to improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of computing resources in cloud environments. These tools utilize various techniques and strategies to ensure that computing resources are utilized to their fullest potential.
Densify offers monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing costs for various workloads across multiple cloud and virtualization platforms. The platform caters to Kubernetes environments, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), AWS, Azure Cloud, OpenShift, and VMware infrastructure.
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CloudCheckr is an integrated platform that combines cost analysis and security automation. Its purpose is to assist users in effectively managing cloud expenses, safeguarding their environment, and ensuring optimal cloud infrastructure performance. A multi-cloud cost optimization platform, CloudCheckr offers cloud cost analysis and optimization for GCP, Azure, and AWS.
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CloudBolt provides a comprehensive cloud management service powered by artificial intelligence (AI). It seamlessly supports and enhances cloud management experiences, whether the infrastructure is based on Terraform or Ansible or is spread across GCP, Azure and AWS.
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If You Want To Enhance Visibility And Reporting
These tools offer comprehensive analysis, enabling organizations to make well-informed choices, pinpoint areas of inefficiency, and execute specific enhancements. Consequently, this results in substantial cost reductions and improved resource utilization.
CloudZero assists in effortlessly taking in, evaluating, and presenting data from various origins, like Snowflake and Google's BigQuery. CloudZero provides a platform that delivers consistent, visually appealing, and actionable cost insights for a wide range of cloud services.
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Built on Google Cloud for GCP customers, Ternary offers visibility and cost optimization recommendations for GCP computing, storage, BigQuery, Kubernetes, and more.
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Harness is a hybrid cloud cost optimization tool with capabilities such as tracking cost across the cloud, cost monitoring, anomaly alerts, custom recommendations, and more for comprehensive cloud cost optimization.
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Kubecost is a cloud cost management tool designed explicitly for Kubernetes that aims at reducing cloud costs.
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The demand for GCP cloud cost optimization tools is growing with the increasing adoption of GCP due to its dynamic nature that presents opportunities and challenges for managing cloud expenses. The varying workload and fluctuating demand lead to inefficient resource allocation and usage, thus spiking the cloud bill. With GCP cost optimization tools that offer insights into cloud spending and analyze, monitor, and optimize cost, organizations can save significantly on their overall cloud bill.
If your cloud cost is suspiciously increasing and you can't seem to pinpoint the reason, book a demo with a Lucidity representative to understand how much of your overall bill comprises storage cost and optimize it with automation.