CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-cloud-platform
Jademalo
Jademalo

Reputation: 373

GCP External IP Address Costs

After experimenting with GCP for the last couple of days, I've been trying to see if I can use it to fulfil my needs entirely on the free tier. However, I'm not able to entirely figure out the situation regarding External IP addresses.

According to their free tier usage limits;

Google Cloud Free Tier does not include external IP addresses.

However, after running an f1-micro instance for the last couple of days, I'm not being charged for the static IP that I have assigned to the VM. Looking into Billing reports, I've got an External IP Charge on a Standard VM - 21.72 hour, but the cost is 0.00. This isn't even a situation where my free credit from the trial is being used, it's not being charged at all. I would have expected this to incur a charge by now, so I'm fairly confused by this.

Does anyone know why this is the case? I was under the impression that all IP addresses cost now regardless of whether or not they were assigned to an instance, so this is rather confusing.

In addition, I can't figure out what counts as an unused IP address. According to their VPC pricing;

Static IP address (assigned but unused) $0.010
Static and ephemeral IP addresses in use on standard VM instances $0.004

If I have a stopped VM with an address associated to it, is this classed as assigned but unused, or in use? Initially I assumed that it would be assigned but unused if the VM is stopped, Or am I misunderstanding this and is it in use even if the VM is stopped, and "assigned" specifically means assigned to you but not associated with a VM?

Thanks

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1402

Answers (1)

jccampanero
jccampanero

Reputation: 53381

Basically the idea is to persuade you to only reserve a static external IP address if you really need it to avoid unnecessary misuse of resources.

So, if you have a static external IP associated with a VM, no matter whether it is running or not, you will be charged for that static external IP. Please, see the clarification between In use or not in the GCP documentation:

Google Cloud considers a static external IP address as in use if it is associated with a VM instance whether the instance is running or stopped. If the instance is deleted or if the IP address is dissociated from the instance, Google Cloud considers the static IP address as not in use.

Upvotes: 4

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