Finops Sketchnote 3 - Cost and value optimization on Google Cloud

If you’re looking for tips to optimize cloud costs, you’ve come to the right place! Remember, optimizing your cloud expenses isn’t just about cutting costs. It’s about knowing where to invest your money to maximize business value.

The balance between value and cost is crucial. Instead of focusing solely on cloud costs reduction, you must also consider per-unit costs and key performance metrics. What value are you providing to your customers? What’s the average cost incurred to provide that value? How can you optimize all the spend correlated with that value? This is where your true business value lies.

Maximizing your cloud investments hinges on understanding the origin of your costs. Put simply, cloud costs are the product of the resources you use and their rates. So, cloud cost optimization comes down to efficiency in your usage and/or pricing. At a high level, there are three primary ways to optimize your cloud costs: optimizing resources, pricing, and architecture.

• Optimizing resources | In short, this is a practice in using what you need and ensuring that you’re paying only for the resources you’re actually using.
• Optimizing pricing | When you know what you’re using and when and how you’re using it, you can make informed decisions and leverage spend-based and/or resource-based discounts.
• Optimizing architecture | Our customers tend to realize the greatest business value when they rearchitect their application technology stack. With greater visibility and understanding of your cloud costs, you can continuously optimize and improve the total cost of ownership for the value you provide.

Kickstart your journey to getting better value from your Google Cloud investments by taking advantage of some simple yet effective changes. You can start with actions requiring minimal effort that yield significant savings, such as autoscaling, BigQuery slot reservations, or committed-use discounts (CUDs).

Remember, cloud cost optimization is a continuous, iterative process. As you continue on in your journey, you can implement more complex changes for maximum impact. For deeper dives in cost optimization strategies and how real-world enterprises like CME Group, Priceline, and General Mills have successfully challenged the status quo and saved their companies millions, checkout Optimize your cloud costs with proven data-driven approaches. And stay tuned for more FinOps Sketch Notes from Google Cloud.