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

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?