Under most normal circumstances, the cost of cloud-based services is substantially less than cost of buying the hardware, software, and knowhow to reproduce the service yourself. More and more businesses are relying on this significant cost difference to support their IT infrastructure deployment decisions.

Businesses considering Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for their required cloud services can estimate the monthly cost of those services using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator. By entering the details of required virtual machine instances, storage needs, applications, and special services, businesses can calculate the approximate overall period cost for GCP. Information vital to the decision makers in your business.

SEE: Successful cloud storage projects need a strong data policy (TechRepublic Premium)

Calculate the cost of Google Cloud Platform services

The most important step to remember when using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is to know exactly what cloud services your business will be deploying. Before you start entering details into the calculator you should have clear plan for what virtual machines will be needed, what specifications those VMs should have, what applications will be required, etc. Not having those details could lead you astray as you work through what can be a moderately complex calculation.

For our example, we will keep it simple and start with one standard virtual machine instance. The basic standard VM has one CPU, 3.75GB RAM and a 3.75GB SSD, as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

To supplement our VM, we will add 1TB of standard cloud storage and one standard SQL Server with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM memory with 1TB of storage.

As you can see in Figure B, as you add levels of service to your deployment you can quickly increase the overall monthly cost.

Figure B

For perspective, check out the cost breakdown in Table A. One VM and a standard 1TB of cloud storage is relatively inexpensive, but adding a SQL Server increases the overall monthly cost by another magnitude.

Table A – Example Google Cloud Platform cost breakdown    

The additional cost of adding other GCP services can vary widely. For example, adding a single standard artificial intelligence (AI) Platform to our list of services will add nothing to the monthly cost. However, adding a standard Kubernetes Engine will add another $388.36/month to our GCP bill.

Formulate a plan

As you can see, the overall cost for Google Cloud Platform services can vary depending on what services, servers, and applications are deployed. It is imperative that business decision makers have a clear idea of exactly what services are needed and a solid estimate of how much those services will cost before deploying them.

Because, while it is true that the cost of replicating cloud services yourself is generally more expensive than contracting with a cloud vendor, cloud services can still be expensive. The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator can give businesses some perspective on the overall cost of cloud services and help them make better and more informed decisions.

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