This document explains Cloud Composer pricing.
Cloud Composer uses the following pricing models:
Cloud Composer environments are billed in short time intervals, for the actual time period when it was running. For example, if you create an environment, run it for 6 hours and 30 minutes, and delete it afterwards, then the total costs are for 6.5 hours.
Although some pricing is stated in hours or by the month, Cloud Composer is still billed for the actual usage time.
This section describes pricing in Cloud Composer 3.
This section summarizes Cloud Composer 3 costs for different regions. Also see additional costs.
Item | Default* (USD) | BigQuery CUD - 1 Year* (USD) | BigQuery CUD - 3 Year* (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
Cloud Composer 3 standard milli DCU-hours | $0.06 / 1,000 hour | $0.054 / 1,000 hour | $0.048 / 1,000 hour |
Cloud Composer 3 database storage | $0.000232877 / 1 gibibyte hour | - | - |
Cloud Composer Network Data Transfer | Consistent with the VPC network rates | - | - |
If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
Cloud Composer 3 has the following SKUs:
Data Compute Unit is an abstract metering unit that represents computational resources allocated by a Cloud Composer environment at a point in time. Because DCU is a measure of the currently provisioned resources of an environment, costs are charged for the environment's DCU value over time, DCU-hours.
This SKU is measured in milliDCU-hours. For example, if your environment uses 1 DCU for 1 hour, this is equal to using 1000 milliDCU-hours.
DCU-hours represent the usage of the following resources:
If you deploy your own workloads in your environment's cluster, such as when you create Pods using KubernetesPodOperator or execute tasks with Kubernetes Executor, then used resources also count as DCU-hours and follow Cloud Composer 3 pricing model.
The cost of environment's size in DCUs covers the cost of resources used by infrastructure components required to run Airflow. For example, by the Cloud SQL instance (with a separate SKU covering the costs of storage).
This SKU covers the cost of the storage used by the Cloud SQL instance that stores the Airflow database of your environment.
The minimum disk size of the Cloud SQL instance is 10 GiB.
The disk size of Cloud SQL instances increases automatically, following the demand coming from the database storage usage and does not decrease if the size of the Airflow database is reduced later.
This group of SKUs covers the billable outbound traffic generated by the environment's components that run the workloads in your environment.
Cloud Composer network data transfer SKUs cover the following types of traffic generated by workloads runnng in your environment:
For more information about network egress billing and descriptions of the related SKUs, see Network Pricing.
★ Note: If you create your environment from Google API Console, you can choose a predefined environment preset (small, medium, or large). The costs of environments created using these presets follow the regular pricing model for Cloud Composer 3. These presets only determine the starting configuration of your environment. In particular, the Environment size configuration property determines DCU values for the environment size. An environment preset provides the initial value and can be changed over time.
In Cloud Composer 3, highly resilient environments use the same SKUs as standard environments. However, highly resilient environments run extra infrastructure components that provide resilience to zonal failures, which increases environment's costs accordingly.
The following is a description of estimated differences in SKU costs between a highly resilient environment and a standard environment. The actual increase in costs might be higher or lower, based on resource consumption in your specific usage scenario.
Cloud Composer 3 database storage
Costs for the following services are billed in addition to costs for Cloud Composer 3 environments:
For example, you create a Cloud Composer 3 environment in Iowa (us-central1), use it for 10 days to run your workloads, and then delete it. The environment operates during the a month that has 30 days.
As an example, your environment uses the following amount of resources:
In this case, the breakdown of costs is the following:
SKU | First period | Second period | Cost in Iowa (us-central1) | Total cost (10 days) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
DCU-hours (or 1000 milliDCU-hours) | 1440 DCU-hours (12 DCUs for 120 hours) | 1800 DCU-hours (15 DCUs for 120 hours) | $0.06 | $194.4 (3240 DCU-hours) |
Database storage | 1.67 GiBy/Mo (10 GiBy for 5 days out of 30 days) | 1.67 GiBy/Mo (10 GiBy for 5 days out of 30 days) | $0.17 | $0.5678 (10 GiBy for 10 days) |
Additional considerations:
This section describes how the pricing model changes in Cloud Composer 3 compared to Cloud Composer 2.
Cloud Composer 3 follows the path of further simplification and hides most of the remaining infrastructure components including the cluster of your environment and dependencies on other services such as Artifact Registry, Cloud Build, or Pub/Sub.
The overall costs of an Cloud Composer environment are now combined into a fewer number of SKUs:

This section describes pricing in Cloud Composer 2.
The following table summarizes Cloud Composer 2 costs for different regions. Also see Additional costs.
Item | Price (USD) |
|---|---|
Cloud Composer Compute CPUs | $0.045 / 1,000 hour |
Cloud Composer Compute Memory | $0.005 / 1 gibibyte hour |
Cloud Composer Compute Storage | $0.0002 / 1 gibibyte hour |
Cloud Composer Database Storage | $0.000232877 / 1 gibibyte hour |
Small Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $0.35 / 1 hour |
Medium Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $0.55 / 1 hour |
Large Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $0.85 / 1 hour |
Small Highly Resilient Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $0.49 / 1 hour |
Medium Highly Resilient Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $0.77 / 1 hour |
Large Highly Resilient Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $1.19 / 1 hour |
If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
Cloud Composer 2 has the following SKUs:
Cloud Composer Compute SKUs represent Compute Engine capacity used by Airflow schedulers, web server and workers. Airflow workers are autoscaled, and as such the corresponding costs follow the changing number of workers in the environment.
In addition, if you deploy your own workloads in your environment's cluster, then the pricing for these workloads also follows the Cloud Composer 2 pricing model and uses Compute Engine Compute SKUs. For example, pods started in your environment's cluster as Spot Pods follow Cloud Composer 2 Compute pricing model and not GKE Autopilot Spot pricing model.
Associated costs depend on the combined number of vCPUs used by all your environment's components that run on Compute Engine. This includes costs for pods and services in your environment's cluster. For example, all your environment's Airflow workers run in pods in your environment cluster.
This SKU is measured in 1000 mCPU (millicores) per hour. For example, if your environment uses 1 vCPU for 1 hour, this is equal to using 1000 mCPU for 1 hour.
Associated costs depend on the combined amount of memory used by all your environment's components that run on Compute Engine.
Associated costs depend on the combined amount of storage used by all your environment's components that run on Compute Engine.
Associated costs depend on the amount of disk space used by the Cloud SQL instance. The disk size of Cloud SQL instances increases automatically, following the demand coming from the database storage usage.
This SKU component covers the cost of Airflow database storage.
The minimum disk size of Cloud SQL instances is 10 GiB.
Associated costs depend on the size of your environment. The environment size is the scale of the managed infrastructure of your Cloud Composer environment.
This SKU covers the cost of infrastructure components required to run Airflow, including Cloud SQL database, task queue, connection proxies. Environment infrastructure comes in three different sizes: Small, Medium and Large.
These SKU represents the cost of infrastructure components required to run Airflow in a highly resilient Cloud Composer environment.
If your environment is highly resilient, these SKUs replace the Small/Medium/Large Cloud Composer Environment Fee SKUs.
★ Note: If you create your environment from Google API Console, you can choose a predefined environment preset (small, medium, or large). The costs of environments created using these presets follow the regular pricing model for Cloud Composer 2. These presets only determine the starting configuration of your environment. In particular, the Small/Medium/Large Cloud Composer Environment Fee SKU is determined by the Environment size configuration property of your environment and not by an environment preset. The preset provides the initial value that can be changed over time.
Costs for the following services are billed in addition to costs for Cloud Composer 2 environments:
Assume that you create a Cloud Composer 2 environment in Iowa (us-central1) and use the default Small environment preset.
In this case, your environment has the following default parameters that affect Cloud Composer 2 SKUs:
Assume that you run this environment for 7 days and 12 hours (180 hours total). Your environment's load is 1 worker for 50% of the time and 2 workers for the other 50% of the time. After using the environment for this period of time, you delete it. In this case, your Cloud Composer 2 SKUs are:
Cloud Composer 2 SKU | Fee |
|---|---|
Cloud Composer Compute CPUs | $14.175 |
Cloud Composer Compute Memory | $5.906 |
Cloud Composer Compute Storage | $0.126 |
Cloud Composer Database Storage | $0.17 per GiB / month |
Small Cloud Composer Environment Fee | $63.00 |
Total | $83.62 |
This section describes how the pricing model changes in Cloud Composer 2 compared to Cloud Composer 1.
Introduction of Cloud Composer 2 features is accompanied by a new pricing model, enabling you to fully benefit from the efficiency of autoscaling. The new model also provides a clear perspective on a Total Cost of Ownership for Cloud Composer environments.
In Cloud Composer 1 environments, the cost of the Compute Engine layer used to run Airflow is visible as a charge for Compute Engine instances used by environment's GKE cluster.
In Cloud Composer 2 this cost is no longer associated with Compute Engine. Instead, it is included in Cloud Composer 2 SKUs for Compute Engine CPU cores, Memory and Storage. This approach provides a clear perspective on the overall cost of Cloud Composer environments.
Because the pricing model of Cloud Composer 2 is more encompassing than its predecessor, you might notice higher charges for Cloud Composer environments while at the same time seeing lower costs for Compute Engine instances.
Autoscaling introduced in Cloud Composer 2 brings additional efficiency in resource utilization because environments no longer need to be continuously scaled for the peak. The extent of cost savings generated by autoscaling is highly dependent on the pattern of DAG runs and environment configuration.
In Cloud Composer 2, compared to Cloud Composer 1:
This section describes pricing in Cloud Composer 1.
Item | Price (USD) |
|---|---|
Web core hours | $0.074 / 1 hour |
Database core hours | $0.125 / 1 hour |
Web and database storage | $0.000373973 / 1 gibibyte hour |
Outbound data transfer | $0.156 / 1 gibibyte |
If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
Cloud Composer 1 has the following SKUs:
Associated costs depend on the web server machine type of your environment.
Associated costs depend on the machine type of the Cloud SQL instance.
Associated costs depend on the web server machine type and on the amount of disk space used by the Cloud SQL instance.
The disk size of Cloud SQL instances increases automatically, following the demand coming from the database storage usage.
The minimum disk size of Cloud SQL instances is 10 GiB.
Associated costs depend on the amount of network traffic generated by web server and Cloud SQL. For example, making queries to the Airflow database, scheduling tasks and DAGs, and using Airflow web interface generates data transfer costs.
For Private IP environments in Cloud Composer 1, costs related to the web server are doubled. This is because Private IP Cloud Composer environments have two web server instances running behind a load balancer.
Supported machine types
The following machine types are used by components of your Cloud Composer 1 environment.
Environment component | Supported machine types |
|---|---|
Nodes | n1-standard, n1-highmem, n1-highcpu, n2-standard, n2-highmem, n2-highcpu, e2-standard, e2-highmem, e2-highcpu, c2-standard, m1-megamem, m1-ultramem, m2-megamem, m2-ultramem, n2d-standard, n2d-highmem, n2d-highcpu |
Cloud SQL instance | db-n1-standard-2, db-n1-standard-4, db-n1-standard-8, db-n1-standard-16 |
Web server | composer-n1-webserver-2, composer-n1-webserver-4, composer-n1-webserver-8 |
Costs for the following services are billed in addition to costs for Cloud Composer 1 environments:
See Virtual Private Cloud pricing for details.
If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.
Assume that you create a Cloud Composer 1 environment in Iowa (us-central1) and use the default parameters.
In this case, your environment has the following default parameters that affect Cloud Composer 1 SKUs:
These default parameters affect additional costs for your environment:
Assume that you run this environment for 7 days and 12 hours (180 hours total) with 6.5 GiB of outbound data transfer, and then you delete the environment. In this case, your Cloud Composer 1 SKUs are:
Cloud Composer 1 SKU | Fee |
|---|---|
Cloud Composer vCPU time | $26.64 |
Cloud Composer SQL vCPU time | $45.00 |
Cloud Composer data storage | $1.99 |
Cloud Composer outbound data transfer | $1.04 |
Total | $74.67 |