Traffic Director pricing

Service endpoints

Traffic Director billing is based on service endpoints. Each service endpoint costs $0.0006945 per service endpoint per hour, which is approximately equal to $0.50 per endpoint per month.

A service endpoint is an endpoint or backend of a service that is configured with Traffic Director. When you configure a Traffic Director service (also referred to as a backend service), you assign one or more instance groups, managed instance groups (MIGs), or network endpoint groups (NEGs) to that service. For billing purposes, the following is true:

  • Instance groups and MIGs contain backends that are Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances. Each VM instance in an instance group or MIG backend counts as a service endpoint.
  • NEGs typically contain endpoints that resolve to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Pods. Each endpoint in a NEG counts as a service endpoint.

For a given Traffic Director service, the total number of service endpoints is the sum of backends/endpoints contained in the service's instance groups, MIGs, and/or NEGs. The total number of service endpoints is calculated by adding up the service endpoints for each Traffic Director service.

Example

The following is an example of the standard usage billing for Traffic Director, which is charged at $0.0006945 per service endpoint per hour, which is approximately $0.50 per month.

Traffic Director pricing example.
Traffic Director pricing example (click to enlarge)

In the preceding example, three services are configured with Traffic Director:

  • Payments (Internal) has five endpoints: three in NEG A and two in NEG B.
  • Payments (External) has four endpoints: two in NEG B and two in NEG C.
  • Cart (External) has four endpoints: four in MIG A.

If this deployment is unchanged for a month, the bill is approximately as follows:

$0.50 per service endpoint per month * (5 + 4 + 4) endpoints = $0.50 * 13 = $6.50 per month

The monthly charge may be slightly more or less than $0.50, depending on the number of hours in a month.

Autoscaling and fractional charges

MIGs and NEGs can dynamically increase or decrease in size when autoscaling is enabled. For example, if traffic suddenly spikes, autoscaling creates a new GKE Pod, which is registered as an endpoint to a NEG. If this NEG belongs to a Traffic Director service, you incur a charge for the time during which the service endpoint is registered to the NEG. When the Pod spins down and is removed from the NEG, you are no longer charged for that service endpoint.

As mentioned previously, a service endpoint that exists for an entire month incurs a charge of approximately $0.50. In the case of autoscaling, a service endpoint may be configured for less than a month, and for that month it incurs a fractional charge. For example, if one service endpoint exists for half a month, it incurs a charge of approximately $0.25.

Pricing for GKE Enterprise customers

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