Notes from the team building C3X. Cost estimation for Terraform, the economics of cloud infrastructure, and how to ship FinOps tooling without a SaaS gate.
Event Hubs prices by throughput units for high-volume streaming, while Service Bus prices by operations and messaging units for enterprise messaging. They solve different problems at very different cost curves. Here is how to compare them.
Synapse offers a serverless SQL pool billed per terabyte scanned and dedicated SQL pools billed per hour of provisioned capacity. Which is cheaper depends on how often you query and how much data each query touches. Here is the comparison.
Premium SSD bundles IOPS and throughput into fixed disk sizes, while Ultra Disk bills capacity, IOPS, and throughput as three separate dials. For most workloads Premium is cheaper; Ultra wins only when you need decoupled, extreme performance. Here is the math.
Adding a region to Cosmos DB multiplies your throughput cost by the number of regions, and enabling multi-region writes multiplies it further. Global distribution is powerful but priced per region. Here is how to weigh the cost against the benefit.
Azure Blob lifecycle policies automatically move data to cooler tiers and delete it on a schedule, turning manual tiering into ongoing savings. The rules are free to run; the savings come from data landing on the right tier. Here is how to build them.
Azure Databricks bills a DBU rate for its platform on top of the underlying VM cost, and the DBU rate varies by workload type and tier. Understanding DBUs is the key to controlling Databricks spend. Here is how they work.
Google Cloud applies sustained use discounts automatically to Compute Engine VMs that run for a large fraction of the month, cutting the effective rate by up to 30 percent with no commitment. Here is how they work and how they stack with committed use discounts.
Compute Engine custom machine types let you pick vCPU and memory independently instead of taking a predefined shape, which can cut cost when your workload does not match a standard ratio. Here is how the pricing works and when custom pays off.
Every GKE cluster carries a flat management fee of about 0.10 dollars per hour, roughly 73 dollars a month, on top of the compute it runs, with one free cluster per billing account. Here is how the fee works and when it matters for your cost.
GKE Autopilot bills you for the CPU, memory, and ephemeral storage your pods request, not for nodes, so cost tracks your resource requests directly. Here is how the per-pod rates work and how to keep requests honest.
Cloud Run scales to zero by default, but setting a minimum number of instances keeps them warm to avoid cold starts, and those idle instances bill continuously at a reduced rate. Here is what min instances cost and when they are worth it.
Cloud Run offers two CPU allocation modes, one that bills CPU only during requests and one that keeps CPU always allocated, and the choice changes both cost and behavior. Here is how each is priced and which fits your workload.
Cloud Functions 2nd gen runs on Cloud Run and Eventarc under the hood, which changes its pricing from the 1st gen model. Here is how 2nd gen bills, how it differs from 1st gen, and how to keep function cost low.
Enabling high availability on Cloud SQL provisions a standby instance in another zone, which roughly doubles the compute and storage cost of the database. Here is exactly what HA adds and when the resilience is worth the price.
Cloud Spanner is priced by processing units, where 1000 units equal one node, letting you provision capacity in increments as small as 100 units instead of whole nodes. Here is how processing units are billed and how to size them.
Bigtable lets you pick SSD or HDD storage per cluster, and the choice changes both storage cost and performance significantly, with HDD storage far cheaper but much slower. Here is how the two compare and when each fits.
BigQuery lets you stream rows in for immediate querying, but streaming ingestion is billed per gigabyte on top of storage and query costs, unlike free batch loads. Here is what streaming costs and how the Storage Write API changes the math.
BigQuery editions let you buy query capacity as slots with autoscaling, so you pay for compute that follows demand instead of a flat commitment or unpredictable on-demand scans. Here is how slot autoscaling is priced and when it beats on-demand.
Persistent Disk snapshots are incremental and billed per gigabyte of stored data, so their cost depends on how much changes between snapshots, not the disk size. Here is how snapshot billing works and how to stop snapshots creeping up your bill.
Filestore comes in tiers from Basic HDD to Enterprise, with per-gigabyte prices that vary several-fold and minimum capacities that set a cost floor. Here is how the tiers compare on cost and which fits your file workload.
Dataproc Serverless runs Spark jobs without a standing cluster, billing per compute unit for the duration of each job, which eliminates idle cluster cost. Here is how it is priced and when it beats a managed Dataproc cluster.
Pub/Sub bills per gigabyte of message throughput with no capacity planning, while Pub/Sub Lite bills for provisioned capacity at a much lower unit rate. Here is how the two compare on cost and when Lite's savings justify its extra management.
Moving data between Google Cloud regions is billed per gigabyte, with rates that depend on whether the regions are on the same continent or across the world. Here is how inter-region egress is priced and how to design around it.
Google Cloud offers two kinds of committed use discount, resource-based and spend-based flexible commitments, and the flexible kind trades some discount depth for the freedom to change machine types and regions. Here is how they compare on cost.