Google Cloud Discounts

In Google Cloud, it can be very beneficial to always keep track of the available discount options to save yourself or your company money when possible. Today, I’ll cover three of those options, sustained use discounts, committed use discounts, and preemptible virtual machines (vm’s). Sustained use discounts are automatically activated discounts that are initiated once you run a VM instance for a significant portion of a month. For example, once you run a machine for more than 25% of a month you get a 20% to 50% discount on every incremental minute. The discount will increase even more as usage continues to go up. Once again, the great thing about Sustained use discounts is that you don’t have to do anything to activate them; it is automatically applied. However, note that it is not universally available. Sustained use discounts apply to VM instances created on Google Kubernetes Engine and Compute Engine, but does not apply to VMs created by App Engine flexible or Dataflow. Also, note that Sustained Use Discounts don’t apply to certain machine types, for example: E2 and A2.

Next, I’ll discuss committed use discounts. Committed use discounts require a lot more foresight that the previous example but the reward can definitely be worth it. If you can predict your resource needs and commit to 1 or 3 years ahead of time, you can qualify for up to 70% discounts based on machine type and GPUs. Also, Committed discounts have the same restrictions as Sustained use discounts in terms of availability.

Lastly, I’ll cover Preemptible VMs. These are short lived Compute Instances that can be stopped by GCP any time within 24 hours. The instances will get a 30 second warning before stoppage in order to save anything necessary. You can use this option if the application is fault tolerant, cost sensitive, and your workload is not immediate. However, Preemptible VMs are not always available, can’t be migrated to regular VMs, there are no automatic restarts, and free tier credits are not applicable.

All of these options can be accessed at the bottom of the page in the Cloud Console when creating a VM Instance. Take your financial and performance needs into account and make the best and most efficient decision when deciding how to move forward with trying to access a discount.