Five quick ways to optimize your cloud spend with Google Cloud FinOps

The economic climate is unpredictable, with factors such as rising inflation, supply chain disruptions, and increasing costs compelling businesses to optimize expenses and implement financial resilience strategies. While it is widely acknowledged that leveraging the cloud can lead to reduced IT capital expenses, it is worth noting that a well-executed cloud strategy can also facilitate operational cost reduction, while simultaneously fostering innovation and the development of new capabilities.

By 2030, it is projected that Fortune 500 companies will experience a value of over $1 trillion from cloud technology. However, according to the Flexera™ 2023: State of the Cloud survey, respondents estimate that their cloud expenditure wastage still exceeds 28%. Our goal is to help you get the most out of your cloud investment by identifying innovative ways to reduce or eliminate unnecessary cloud costs, which will help you optimize your operational expenses (OpEx) and capital expenditures (CapEx).

To help you on this journey, we’ve put together this guide, Achieving cloud financial resilience with Cloud FinOps, which you can download for free. It helps guide you get a jumpstart by focusing on low-effort changes so that your company may quickly achieve significant results. As you continue to gain momentum in your FinOps journey, this guide can help you stand up governance function to incubate a cost-conscious culture within your organization to drive sustainable business outcomes.

Let's take a quick look at a few essential cloud cost optimization methods that you can easily implement using Google Cloud, which we cover in the guide in more detail, along with many other FinOps strategies:

1. Remove idle resources

If you can find them, idle resources are a great place to start trimming excess cloud spend. That’s why Google Cloud FinOps Hub gives you proactive alerts when resources like VMs, databases, disks, IPs and more are idle.

2. Rightsize your cloud resources

One of the best ways to optimize cloud spend is to make sure you’re only paying for the resources that you’re actually using. Rightsizing can be surprisingly challenging if you’re not using the right tools, so we’ve made it easier to rightsize through Google Cloud FinOps Hub and the GKE Cost Optimization center.

3. Make the most of committed use discounts

Committed use discounts (CUDs) provide great discounts in exchange for your commitment to use a minimum level of resource or spend for specified term — commit longer, save more. Our resource-based CUDs apply to VMs, whereas spend-based CUDs can be applied to VMs, databases, managed services and more.

4. Move to managed services

Google Cloud offers many managed service versions of several popular workloads, which often result in a much stronger ROI than running them on-prem. Just a few examples include GKE for containers, Cloud SQL and AlloyDB for databases, and BigQuery for data warehouses.

5. Use billing tools

How do your teams know how much they’re spending if they can’t see the numbers? In Google Cloud, you have access to Console Billing Reports and cost breakdowns that provide visibility to analyze spend, budgets and alerts to keep your costs in check, cost estimates to drive better forecasts, and more.

The five quick wins listed above are a good place to start, but as we mentioned, there is much more that can be done! To learn more about the five quick wins and how to continue your FinOps journey, download the full complimentary guide, “Achieving cloud financial resilience with Cloud FinOps”.