Our guests Justin Lerma and Pathik Sharma join Brian and Mark this week to talk cost optimization techniques for internet projects. Justin and Pathik, both of the Professional Services Organization, work to help customers get the most out of GCP while maintaining their project budgets. They help customers take business success metrics and track them from a cost perspective, allowing the client to get an understanding of how much each business goal actually costs, rather than an aggregate of how much has been spent in total. This information is used to tailor GCP product usage and cost optimization to each client project.

Pathik explains how the Recommender API can help with VM usage by suggesting shrinking or removing a VM altogether for cost savings. With thorough analysis, clients can also benefit from cost savings by paying for longterm usage of GCP products rather than month-to-month. For storage and analysis, BigQuery can offer better performance at a lower cost with partitioning and clustering.

Throughout the episode, Justin and Pathik offer up other tips and tricks to help our listeners save money with GCP, as well as suggested reading materials, videos, and labs to get you started on your cost optimization adventure.



Pathik Sharma

Pathik Sharma is a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud, focusing on proactively guiding enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud. He loves helping customers to maximize their business value by optimizing their cloud spend. 

Justin Lerma

Justin Lerma is a Technical Account Manager with Google Cloud. He has a passion for sharing best practices in operational efficiency as it allows for the proliferation of more experimentation and breeds new ideas.

Cool things of the week


Get started with Google Cloud Training & Certification site
Creating a REST API with Node.js and MySQL - Serverless Toolbox Extended video


Interview


Compute Engine site
BigQuery site
BigQuery Reservations docs
Cloud Storage site
Operations site
Recommenders docs
Google Cloud Support Plans site
Cloud SQL site
Use labels to gain visibility into GCP resource usage and spending blog
GCP Advanced Billing Dashboard site
Stack Doctor Series videos
Cost Management Playlist videos
Best practices for Cloud Storage cost optimization blog
Best practices for optimizing your cloud costs blog
Cost optimization best practices for BigQuery blog
Networking cost optimization best practices: an overview blog
5 best practices for Compute Engine Cost Optimization blog
Cloud Logging and Monitoring Cost Optimization Strategies docs
Codelabs: BigQuery Pricing site
Qwiklabs: Business Transformation with Google Cloud site
Qwiklabs: Understand Your Google Cloud Costs site
Qwiklabs: Optimizing Your GCP Costs site
Business Learning Path site
Cloud Platform Resource Hierarchy docs
Cleaning up unused IP addresses docs
Cleaning up unused and orphaned persistent disks docs
Schedule VMs to auto start/stop with Cloud Scheduler docs


Question of the week

What is the metadata server?