Reduced Levels of Services

      One way to reduce costs is to accept lower levels of service in exchange for lower costs. In GCP there are a number of opportunities to reduce cost in exchange for lower levels of service, including the following:

      These examples are representative of the kinds of trade-offs we make when opting for a lower-cost service.

      Preemptible Virtual Machines

      One way to minimize computing costs is to use preemptible virtual machines, which are short-lived VMs that cost about 80 percent less than their nonpreemptible counterparts. Here are some things to keep in mind about preemptible VMs when considering business and technical requirements:

      Preemptible VMs are well suited for batch jobs or other workloads that can be disrupted and restarted. They are not suitable for running services that need high availability, such as a database or user-facing service, like a web server.

      Preemptible VMs are also not suitable for applications that manage state in memory or on the local SSD. Preemptible VMs cannot be configured to live migrate; when they are shut down, locally persisted data and data in memory are lost. If you want to use preemptible VMs with stateful applications, consider using Cloud Memorystore, a managed Redis or memcached service for caching data, or a database to store state.

      Standard vs. Premium Tier Networking

      Google Cloud offers two levels or tiers of networking, Standard and Premium.

      Standard Tier networking is the lower-performance option. Performance and availability are typically like other cloud providers that depend on the public internet. There are no global SLAs, and Cloud Load Balancing is limited to regional load balancing.

      With Premium Tier networking, you experience high performance and reliability, low latency, and a global SLA. You can also use global load balancers that can distribute load across regions. Network traffic is carried on Google's network, not the public internet.

      Pub/Sub Lite vs. Pub/Sub

      Pub/Sub is a highly scalable messaging service in Google Cloud. Pub/Sub Lite is also horizontally scalable but costs less and provides lower levels of service than Pub/Sub.

      Pub/Sub provides for per-message parallelism, automatic scaling, and global routing. Service endpoints are global and regional.

      Pub/Sub Lite offers lower availability and durability than Pub/Sub. Messages replication is limited to a single zone unlike Pub/Sub, which provides multizone replication in a single region. Pub/Sub Lite service endpoints are regional, not global. The Lite service also requires users of the service to manage resource capacity.

Pub/Sub Lite can cost up to 85 percent less than Cloud Pub/Sub, but Google recommends that Pub/Sub as the default choice for a managed messaging service.

      Durable Reduced Availability Storage

      Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) Storage is like Standard Storage but with lower performance and availability. DRA Storage has a 99 percent availability, while Standard Storage has greater than 99.99 percent availability in dual-regions and multiregions and 99.99 percent in regions.

      Data Lifecycle Management

      When assessing the application design and cost implications of business requirements, consider how to manage storage costs. Storage options lie on a spectrum from short-term to archival storage.