It’s no big secret that Google Cloud has invested billions in building out their cloud infrastructure. Google has also staked out a clear strategy to be more price competitive than both AWS and Azure.
Thanks to Google’s dramatic cost reductions, the major public cloud providers are all in a state of aggressive price competition. Azure even changed the uptime billing model on their compute engine to per minute basis just recently, while AWS still bills per hour for server uptime.
All of this competition is good for clients. The cloud is becoming more and more affordable for businesses of every size. MSPs need to take note and pivot their focus and attention to the next wave of cloud adoption.
Google and itopia have taken the cloud savings one step further by offering several additional options to decrease the monthly recurring cloud infrastructure costs.
You can schedule the times when you need the servers to be accessible down to the minute. Your instances will be turned on and off exactly on your predefined schedule automatically.
You may be asking, what if my client needs access to their servers all the time? There are a couple of interesting options to cut costs in exactly those cases as well.
Now I will give you some practical information on the best ways to cut the infrastructure expenses with Google and itopia.
Committed discounts
Google lets you “commit” to usage on an annual basis. You can keep the environment turned on to be available to users 24/7 and you get up to 57% discount on your uptime cost for the committed time period you select, either one year or three.
The way the discount works is that you commit to the usage of certain amount of CPUs and memory and that’s the amount of resources that will be discounted. In this case, you are buying a pool of resources that you can then apply to your servers. Any additional CPU and RAM you have or add during the committed time will be billed at the standard price.
The discounts apply to vCPUs and memory simultaneously and there’s no upfront payment required. Even though you have committed to usage, you still get the flexibility of paying for these services on a monthly basis.
Sustained discounts
Don’t like commitment? No problem, you can still save some cash with Sustained discounts.
Unlike committed discounts, with sustained discounts you get the best price automatically without even signing up to it. The main idea is: “the more you use, the less you pay.” The more you keep your instances running, the better per-minute price you get from Google. For example, when leaving your servers on 24/7, you will pay 30% less.
Feel free to check the total cost for yourself in Google Cloud calculator or in the itopia calculator that both already reflect sustained discounts as well as other discount options described here.
Server Uptime Scheduling with itopia
The Committed and Sustained discounts are perfect for the companies whose environments must always be accessible for users. There are, however, clients that don’t require 24/7 virtual desktop availability.
Itopia offers a great way to leverage the uptime server instance scheduling. A great way of lowering the cost is to let itopia automate such tasks as turning the servers on and off right at the scheduled time.
Let’s take an example. You have a client with users that connect during the weekdays regular business hours and don’t need access during the night and weekends at all. You will schedule the uptime from Monday to Friday from 7 AM to 8 PM. With Google’s per minute pricing for server uptime you are looking at 52% savings on compute resources.
The scheduling is very flexible. Another option is to keep just one user session server running outside of business hours. If a very low number of users connect after the business hours but they still need the access, you can just leave one of the user session servers running and schedule to turn the rest of the user instances down.
Whether your clients need access 24/7 or just during their business hours, there’s always a way to lower your infrastructure price with Google.
Calculate what your Google Cloud cost would be here.
