to navigate

to select

to close

On this page

Cost Optimization

GCP costs can grow without governance. Google provides tools and pricing models to forecast, monitor, and optimize spending across projects and teams. Cost optimization is not a one-time exercise — it is a continuous practice shared between engineering and finance, often called FinOps.

Cost Management Tools

Tool	Purpose
Cloud Billing reports	Analyze spend by project, service, label
Budgets & alerts	Set spending thresholds with notifications
Recommender	Right-sizing, idle resource, CUD recommendations
Labels	Allocate costs to teams, environments, projects
Billing export (BigQuery)	Custom cost analysis and dashboards
Pricing Calculator	Estimate costs before deployment

Analyze Spend

  # List billing accounts
gcloud billing accounts list

# Describe project billing
gcloud billing projects describe learning-gcp-dev

# List all projects and their billing status
gcloud projects list --format="table(projectId,name)"

In Console: Billing → Reports → filter by project, service, or label.

BigQuery Billing Analysis

Enable billing export, then query:

  SELECT
  service.description AS service,
  sku.description AS sku,
  SUM(cost) AS total_cost,
  SUM(usage.amount) AS total_usage
FROM `billing_export.gcp_billing_export_v1_XXXXX`
WHERE usage_start_time >= TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 30 DAY)
GROUP BY service, sku
ORDER BY total_cost DESC
LIMIT 20;

  -- Cost by label (team)
SELECT
  labels.value AS team,
  SUM(cost) AS total_cost
FROM `billing_export.gcp_billing_export_v1_XXXXX`,
  UNNEST(labels) AS labels
WHERE labels.key = 'team'
  AND usage_start_time >= TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 30 DAY)
GROUP BY team
ORDER BY total_cost DESC;

Labeling Strategy

Label	Example Values	Purpose
environment	dev, staging, prod	Separate environment costs
team	platform, data, frontend	Team allocation
cost-center	engineering, marketing	Department billing
application	web-app, api, pipeline	App-level tracking

  gcloud compute instances add-labels web-server-01 \
  --labels=environment=prod,team=platform,application=web-app \
  --zone=us-central1-a

# Label at resource creation (preferred)
gcloud compute instances create web-server-02 \
  --labels=environment=prod,team=platform \
  --zone=us-central1-a \
  --machine-type=e2-medium \
  --image-family=ubuntu-2204-lts \
  --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud

Important: Labels applied after creation do not retroactively tag historical billing data.

Committed Use Discounts (CUDs)

Type	Commitment	Flexibility	Discount
Resource-based CUD	Specific vCPU/memory in a region	Low (specific machine family)	Up to 57% (3-year)
Spend-based CUD	Hourly spend in a region	Higher (any service)	Up to 47% (3-year)
Sustained use	Automatic, no commitment	Full	Up to 30%

  # View CUD recommendations
gcloud recommender recommendations list \
  --project=learning-gcp-dev \
  --location=global \
  --recommender=google.compute.commitment.UsageCommitmentRecommender

Purchase CUDs for steady baseline workloads; use on-demand for variable spikes.

Spot and Preemptible Savings

Workload Type	On-Demand Cost	Spot Cost	Savings
Batch processing	$100/month	$9/month	91%
CI/CD runners	$50/month	$8/month	84%
Dev/test VMs	$30/month	$5/month	83%

  gcloud compute instances create batch-job \
  --provisioning-model=SPOT \
  --instance-termination-action=DELETE \
  --machine-type=n2-standard-4 \
  --zone=us-central1-a \
  --image-family=ubuntu-2204-lts \
  --image-project=ubuntu-os-cloud

Budgets and Alerts

  gcloud billing budgets create \
  --billing-account=BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID \
  --display-name="Monthly Dev Budget" \
  --budget-amount=500USD \
  --threshold-rule=percent=50 \
  --threshold-rule=percent=90 \
  --threshold-rule=percent=100 \
  --notifications-rule-pubsub-topic=projects/learning-gcp-dev/topics/billing-alerts

Set budgets per project and per team. Connect to Pub/Sub for automated responses (e.g., shut down dev VMs at 100%).