Optimizing your cloud costs is even easier with Committed Use Discount recommendations

Cloud FinOps is an iterative journey, and cost optimization is no different. Since establishing cost optimization isn’t a one-size-fits all quick fix, your optimization tools should adapt and evolve with your business. For iterative, progressive optimization, Google Cloud customers can leverage Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) to reduce anticipated costs with minimum spend or resource commitments over one or three year periods. You can apply resource-based CUDs to save on steady-state usage within a specific machine family and region or Flexible CUDs to access a flat-rate discount that apply across multiple VM families and regions. And now, you can use CUDs recommendations to find new cost-saving opportunities for resource-based and Flexible CUDs.

Save time calculating optimizations with CUDs Recommendations

Committed use discount recommendations automatically calculate commitment purchase amounts and potential savings based on Cloud Billing historical usage metrics. Customers have been using CUDs recommendations to efficiently discover ways to save with CUDs, but today, we’re introducing a customer-inspired experience that includes new Flexible CUDs recommendations, expands our spend-based recommendations for all international customers, and adds configurable recommendations settings.

Find the right dollar amount for your flexible commitments

Flexible CUDs are a perfect complement to resource-based CUDs which offer higher discounts within a specific VM family and region. However, determining the usage from both CUDs types and deciding the right dollar amount for your Flexible commitment requires complex calculations. Enter Flexible CUDs recommendations, where we seamlessly evaluate the usage from all eligible Compute Engine machines and analyze any and all existing commitments to suggest the dollar amount to commit. The recommendation also provides calculations for the monthly savings and potential discount percentage to be realized. Flexible CUDs recommendations consider historical data for the last 30 days of usage to offer you with tailored recommendations.

International spend-based CUDs recommendations 

Until today, recommendations for spend-based Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) were only available for customers who were billed in US Dollars. We are very excited to announce that all our customers, regardless of the currency they are billed in, can now benefit from our spend-based recommendations. Not only our international customers will be able to get spend-based CUDs recommendations but they will also be able to see the estimated monthly savings in their local currency, removing the need to convert figures between local currencies and US dollars to assess if a recommendation is worthwhile.

Spend-based recommendations are available for the following products:

1. Cloud Run

2. Cloud Spanner

3. Cloud SQL

4. Flexible Committed Use Discounts for Compute Engine

5. Google Cloud VMware Engine

6. Google Kubernetes Engine

7. Memorystore

Personalize CUDs recommendations for your goals

As your optimization strategy evolves, so can your committed use discounts. We’ve added configurability to CUDs recommendations so that you can choose the usage coverage levels and commitment durations to best suit your business goals. You can change the usage coverage level, from 1% to 100%, for the engine to generate a recommendation and you can decide if you want to see only recommendations for 1 year term, 3 year terms, or both. 

Once you have established the settings, the configuration applies to all Committed Use Discount recommendations, resource-based and spend-based.

Accelerate your FinOps strategy with recommendations

With CUDs recommendations you can drive your FinOps cost optimization strategy with minimal overhead. CUDs recommendations make it easy to identify on-demand usage to optimize without the need of complex calculations or currency conversions. 

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