CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesgoogle-cloud-platform
Nivi
Nivi

Reputation: 89

AWS vs GCP Cost Model

I need to make a cost model for AWS vs GCP. Currently, our organization is using AWS. Our biggest services used are:

  1. EC2
  2. RDS
  3. Labda
  4. AWS Gateway
  5. S3
  6. Elasticache
  7. Cloudfront
  8. Kinesis

I have very limited knowledge of cloud platforms. However, I have access to:

Of the 8 major services listed above are main usage and costs go to EC2, S3, and RDS.

Our director of engineering mentioned that I should be most concerned with vCPU and memory.

I would appreciate any insight (big or small) that people have into how I can go about creating this model, any other factors I should consider, which functionalities of the two providers for the services are considered historically "better" or cheaper, etc.

Thanks in advance, and any questions people may have, I am more than happy to answer.

-M

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1062

Answers (2)

Mahmoud Sharif
Mahmoud Sharif

Reputation: 1103

With GCP, you can benefit by receiving discounts such as the Committed Use Discount and the Sustained Use Discount.

With a Committed Use Discount, you can receive a discount of up to 70% if your usage is predictable.

With the Sustained Use Discount, there is an incremental discount if you reach certain usage thresholds.

On your concern with vCPU and memory, you may use predefined machine types. They are cheaper than custom machine types.

Lastly, you can also test the charges by trying out the Google Cloud Platform Free Tier.

Upvotes: 1

John Rotenstein
John Rotenstein

Reputation: 269826

You should certainly cost-optimize your resources. It's so easy to create cloud resources that people don't always think about turning things off or right-sizing them.

Looking at your Top 5...

Amazon EC2

The simplest way to save money with Amazon EC2 is to turn off unused resources. You can even stop instances overnight and on the weekend. If they are only used 8 hours per workday, then that is only 40 out of 168 hours, so you can save 75% by turning them off when unused! For example, Dev and Test instances. People have written various types of automated utilities to turn instances on and off based on tags. Try search the Internet for AWS Stopinator.

Another way to save money on Amazon EC2 is to use spot instances. They are a fraction of the price, but have a risk that they might be turned off when demand increases. They are great where it is okay for systems to be terminated sometimes, such as automated testing systems. They are also a great way to supplement existing capacity at a fraction of the price.

If you definitely need the Amazon EC2 instances to keep running all the time, purchase Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, which also offer a price saving.

Chat with your AWS Account Manager for help with the above options.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)

Again, Amazon RDS instances can be stopped overnight/on weekends and turned on again when needed. You only pay while the instance is running (plus storage costs).

Examine the CloudWatch metrics for your RDS instances and determine whether they can be downsized without impacting applications. You can even resize them when they are used less (eg over weekends). Everything can be scripted, so you could trigger such downsizing and upsizing on a schedule.

Also look at the Engine used with RDS. Commercial offerings such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are more expensive than open-source offerings like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Yes, your applications might need some changes, but the cost savings can be significant.

AWS Lambda

It is most unusual that Lambda is #3 in your list. In fact, some customers never get a charge for Lambda because it falls in the monthly free usage tier. Having high charges means you're making good use of Lambda (which is saving you EC2 costs), but take a look at which applications are using it the most and see whether they are using it wisely.

When correctly used, a Lambda function should only ever run for a few seconds, so check whether any application seem to be using it outside this pattern.

AWS API Gateway

Once again, these costs tend to be low ($3.50/million calls) so again I'd recommend trying to figure out how this is being used. If you really need that many calls, it would also explain the high Lambda costs. It would probably be more expensive if you were providing such functionality via Amazon EC2.

Amazon S3

Consider using different Storage Classes to reduce your costs. Costs can be reduced by:

  • Moving infrequently-accessed data to a different storage class
  • Moving data to One-Zone (if you have a copy of the data elsewhere, so don't need the redundancy)
  • Archiving infrequently-accessed data to Amazon Glacier, which offers much cheaper storage but does not have instant access

Upvotes: 2

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