AWS Knowledge
Understanding Google Virtual Private Cloud Pricing
Stuart Lundberg
Dec 16, 2024
At first, Google Virtual Private Cloud pricing may be a bit challenging to wrap your head around. Nevertheless, it’s extremely important for you to learn in order to enhance your cost efficiency with the cloud. Whether you are into IT or a corporate executive trying to stick to the cloud spending limits, this article will explain Google VPC pricing to help you cut costs effectively.
By the end of this article, you’ll get:
A clear breakdown of Google Virtual Private Cloud and its top benefits.
Get a better understanding of their pricing models.
Practical tips and tools to help you cut costs by up to 20-30%.
What is a Virtual Private Cloud?
A Virtual Private Cloud is a secure, customizable virtual network that one can create on a GCP, AWS, or Azure cloud platform. This customization allows you to establish a private enclave for your belongings, guaranteeing that all confidential information is secure and hidden. With a VPC, you can manage your network ecosystem entirely, creating the ability to establish subnets, control firewalls, and configure routing protocols for better optimization and security. A VPC enables the reduction of latency and allows for supporting high performance cloud environments through isolation of resources.
What is Google VPC?
Google Virtual Private Cloud is a networking service on Google Cloud Platform that enables companies to create scalable and secure virtual private networks for their cloud resources. It serves businesses from small startups to large enterprises by offering a secure environment where applications can be hosted, data can be managed, and workloads can be run.
Key Features of Google VPC
Google VPC offers a variety range of features built for flexibility, security, and performance:
Subnets: Create and manage regional subnetworks to organize IP addresses and resources across different regions.
Firewalls: Set up built-in rules to control and protect incoming and outgoing traffic in your network.
Routes: Direct traffic between different network components, giving you full control over how data flows.
Private IPs: Allow cloud resources to communicate securely without exposing them to the public internet.
VPN and Cloud Interconnect: Connect your on-premises systems to Google Cloud resources securely and efficiently.
What Makes Google VPC Unique?
Google VPC is global by default, allowing you to manage subnets across multiple regions as part of a single network. This simplifies operations and enables global-scale connectivity.
How Does Google VPC Compare to Competitors?
AWS Virtual Private Cloud: AWS offers similar features but suffers from the fact that each VPC is associated with a single region, which is inefficient for corporations needing to be globally connected. Google’s VPC has a globally unified model because of its infrastructure.
Azure Virtual Network: Microsoft Azure focuses more on hybrid cloud setups, while Google VPC is optimized for cloud-native environments, making it ideal for businesses already operating entirely in the cloud.
Why Choose Google VPC?
Google VPC provides integration support on top of GCP services enabling reliable performance, scalability as well as secured networking. It’s great for application deployment, big data, or sensitive workloads.
Use Cases for Google VPC
Scalable Applications: Startups are able to quickly and safely deploy resources in protected spaces in minutes.
Enterprise Security: Comply with legal requirements by ensuring private and secure networks.
Big Data Processing: Process extremely large datasets with incredibly low latency on Google’s global infrastructure.
How Does Google Virtual Private Cloud Work?
(Image Source: Google VPC)
Google VPC is designed to efficiently manage resources using private IP addresses, distributed networks, and secure connections to ensure optimal performance. Here's how it works:
Networking Capabilities: Google VPC supports seamless communication both internally (between resources within the VPC) and externally through secure VPN connections, enabling flexibility and scalability for various use cases.
Who Benefits from VPC: Industries like financial institutions rely on VPC for its high-security features to protect sensitive data. E-commerce platforms use it to manage millions of user interactions smoothly, while SaaS tools benefit from their ability to scale effortlessly as user demand grows.
Deep Dive into Google Virtual Private Cloud Pricing Structure
Properly managing costs relies on understanding Google VPC pricing categories and models. Here’s a breakdown of the key components:
Pricing Breakdown
1. Compute Engine Costs
Pay for virtual machine instances (vCPUs and memory).
Example: A standard instance (General Purpose) in the US-eastl1 region costs $0.03465 per vCPU hour and $0.003938 per GB of RAM per hour.
2. Storage Pricing
Persistent disks cost approximately $0.05 per GB per month for standard storage.
SSD storage is available at a higher cost for improved performance.
3. Network Pricing
Network Ingress (Inbound Traffic): Free when data is transferred within the same region.
Network Egress (Outbound Traffic): Charges vary based on the destination and volume. For example: from North America to Asia, the rate is $0.08 per GiB.
Within the same region, VM-to-VM data transfer is as low as $0.01 per GiB.
4. Additional Costs
Static IP Addresses: $0.005/hour for use with standard instances.
Load Balancers: $0.025/hour for the first five forwarding rules, plus data processed costs. For additional forwarding rule at $0.01/hour
Pricing Models
Google Cloud offers flexible pricing options to suit different needs:
On-Demand Pricing: Pay only for what you use, billed by the second. This is ideal for unpredictable workloads or short-term projects.
Sustained Use Discounts: You will automatically receive discounts if you consistently use resources for a significant portion of the month. There is no need to opt in – these savings are applied automatically.
Committed Use Discounts: Save up to 57% by committing to a specific level of resource usage for one or three years. This option is great for businesses with predictable workloads.
Estimating Costs
Using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator makes creating your budget rather simple. Type the details like your region, project specifications, and resource usage and see the cost estimate. It’s a straightforward method of preparing in advance and not getting additional charges.
Additional Pricing Benefits
Google Cloud has various cost-efficient features that will aid businesses in better managing what they spend on the following services:
Maximize Your Savings with These Options:
Free Tier Advantages: Capitalize on Google Cloud’s free tier, which offers up to 50 GB of storage, 1 GB of Cloud NAT data, and other free resources per month, giving the organization an incentive to sign up and try Google Cloud at no cost.
Preemptible VMs: These are low-cost virtual machines meant for batch jobs or other jobs that can be interrupted, saving you money.
Tools for Cost Management
Google offers an array of tools that allow you to better predict and plan your expenses on the cloud platform:
Billing Reports: These help you comprehend your spending habits more clearly. To plan and economize on future spending, you may look into the costs associated with each project, service, or billing period in your budget.
Cloud Monitoring: This application helps you track the use of resources or applications at any given time. For example, a warning can be configured so that when a set usage limit is exceeded, you are informed, which aids in better expense management.
Case Study: Planet’s Move to Google Cloud for Next-Gen Geospatial Services
The planet was willing to translate and maintain reliable satellite data of approximately 12 terabytes on a daily basis while narrowing its expansion costs. They envisioned imaging the globes of the earth every single 24-hour cycle and delivering the insights.
Solution
The planet combined multi-cloud satellite image processing and storage by transitioning to Google Cloud, their image provider. These invited strategies included the following:
Using Google VPC to access a flexible, secure network.
Using preemptible VMs on Google Compute Engine to cut costs by up to 60%.
Adopting managed services like Google Cloud Bigtable and Google Cloud Datastore to handle scaling without adding more staff.
Privacy and performance expectations were met with the use of Google Load Balancer.
Results:
Achieved a 6x increase in processing capacity.
Reduced data processing costs by up to 60%.
Scaled operations to target Over 190+ satellites imaging the earth's pixels on a daily basis.
Affected positive change on Collar wave on processes within all groups and other benefits.
Tools and Tips for Cutting Google VPC Costs
Making small tweaks can help you cut down on Google VPC expenses. Here are some tips that will definitely help you save money by optimizing your Google VPC usage:
Rightsize Instances: Years of using VMs means you have vCPU and memory limits for every VM. Check for trends in usage and adjust your installation accordingly, for example, to suit the workload demands above.
Schedule Resource Downtime: Avoid paying for unused resources by automating their shutdown during idle times. Tools like Cloud Scheduler can help you turn off resources during non-peak hours, saving money without disrupting essential operations.
Switch to Preemptible VMs: If your task can afford interruptions, like Big Data analysis and batch processing, then use preemptive VMs as they would incur fewer costs then switching to regular VMs. These tasks do not require constant uptime so preemptive VMs would be ideal.
Optimize Data Transfers: Make an effort to reduce data transfers between different regions that are interested. You would incur charges not only for transferring data but also for interregional egress transfers, so try to keep resources and workloads within a region.
Conclusion
Understanding Google VPC pricing is a key step toward optimizing your cloud costs. By leveraging the right tools, strategies, and a clear understanding of pricing models, you can efficiently manage your resources while minimizing expenses without compromising performance.
Take the next step by exploring the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator or signing up for the free trial to discover how Google VPC can meet your organization’s needs and drive smarter cloud spending.
Join Pump for Free
If you are an early-stage startup that wants to save on cloud costs, use this opportunity. If you are a start-up business owner who wants to cut down the cost of using the cloud, then this is your chance. Pump helps you save up to 60% in cloud costs, and the best thing about it is that it is absolutely free!
Pump provides personalized solutions that allow you to effectively manage and optimize your AWS and GCP spending. Take complete control over your cloud expenses and ensure that you get the most from what you have invested. Who would pay more when we can save better?
Are you ready to take control of your cloud expenses?
