GCP billing - Storage vs Balanced PD capacity

Question

What is Storage and Balanced PD capacity? Is it the persistent disks of cloud VM's and Kubernetes pods persistent volumes? What is the difference between Storage and Balanced? What can be done to reduce the costs?

Answer 1

What is Storage and Balanced PD capacity?

Storage PD Capacity is the line item for Standard Persistent Disks (pd-standard). This is the default disk type selected by the CLI for Compute Engine Instances. This disk type is designed for large data processing workloads that primarily use sequential I/O.

Balanced PD Capacity is the line item for Balanced Persistent Disks (pd-balanced). This is the default disk type selected by the GUI for Compute Engine instances. See below for more information under your other question.

Is it the persistent disks of cloud VM's and Kubernetes pods persistent volumes?

For Google Compute Engine, Kubernetes, App Engine Flexible, yes. For Kubernetes pods it depends. Persistent volumes are a piece of storage. Persistent volumes do not specify the type of storage at the persistent disk level.

What is the difference between Storage and Balanced?

There are basically three levels of storage: Standard, Balanced, and SSD. Balanced storage fits into the middle between Standard and SSD. You have performance that approaches SSD but with a lower cost.

What can be done to reduce the costs?

Choose the lowest/cheapest storage class. That is sometimes the right choice, but often it is not. The choice of storage depends on price, performance, and features.

Google has extensive documentation on storage. Start with this link:

Storage options