As both the State Of FinOps 2024 and the State Of Cloud Costs In 2024 indicate, reducing cloud waste remains a top priority for cloud-driven organizations. Cloud spenders care more than ever about cost efficiency — and CloudZero is working tirelessly to make cloud savings simpler.
To this end, we’re proud to announce that we’ve added a suite of automated GCP optimizations to our Insights feature. CloudZero Insights combines automated, manual, and provider-generated savings opportunities to function as a single source of truth for cost optimization. From identifying unnecessary on-demand resources to flagging excessive storage and compute costs, Insights makes cloud cost optimization simple.
Let’s take a look at the most recent GCP updates.
CloudZero’s Automated GCP Insights
Standard Storage Class Exceeds Target Threshold
This insight looks at optimizing GCP Cloud Storage classes based on spend. The Standard class is the default and most expensive storage tier, ideally used for frequently accessed data. The threshold for Standard storage spend is 50%, and additional spend over that can indicate that storage is not optimized. Moving data that is not frequently accessed to lower Storage classes can result in savings.
Disk Snapshots Exceeds Target Threshold
This insight identifies when the cost of GCP Cloud Engine disk snapshots exceeds 5% of the total Compute Engine disk storage costs. This may indicate that there are an excessive number of snapshots.
Standard Disk Below Target Threshold
This Insight looks at usage of Standard Persistent Disk storage. Standard Persistent Disks are a type of disk storage in GCP that is suitable for large data processing workloads that primarily use sequential I/Os and are backed by standard hard disk drives (HDD), providing efficient and reliable block storage for a variety of use cases. Changing your storage option to Standard Persistent Disk can result in cost savings. CloudZero has a target threshold for Standard Persistent Disk of 50%.
Multi-Region Storage Exceeds Target Threshold
This insight looks at optimizing GCP Cloud Storage with Multi-Region bucket location by spend. By default, buckets are set to the Multi-Region which is the most expensive and the most redundant configuration option. The threshold for Multi-Region bucket location spend is 30%; additional spend over that can indicate that storage is not optimized.
GCP Recommender Integration
CloudZero now supports ingestion of GCP Recommender which includes insights and recommendations to optimize resource usage. Insights identify issues such as overpayments for reserved instances, while recommendations suggest corrective actions, like modifying your reservation plan. CloudZero already ingests GCP billing data by accessing customer BigQuery tables, and setup is the same for GCP Recommender.
GCP Insights In Action
The true power of CloudZero Insights is that they add a simple method for quick savings wins to the entire CloudZero workflow. Engineers can easily incorporate them into their day-to-day work, making substantial cloud saving a regular, low-effort event.
Let’s look at a few examples.
MedTech: $359,774 Per Year
After examining this customer’s GCP spend, CloudZero created an Insight suggesting that their on-demand compute spend might be too high. The customer reviewed the Insight, and over the course of the next six months, made continuous adjustments to their balance of on-demand and reserved GCP spending, ultimately lowering their on-demand costs by $179,887.29 in six months — $359,774.58 annualized.
SaaS (Digital Transformation Platform): $81,600 Per Year
CloudZero surfaced an Insight related to this customer’s GCP Lambda costs. A few simple steps later, the customer had addressed the Insight, and reduced their five-month Lambda spend by $34,000 — projecting out to $81,600 for the full year.
More To Come
These represent just a fraction of CloudZero’s suite of Insights. CloudZero has automated Insights across AWS, GCP, and Azure, and we’re adding more all the time. Insights are easy to identify, assign, address, and track, and they power a positive feedback loop that rewards engineers for proactive cloud cost management. It’s part of what helped fintech platform Neon boost their engineering engagement by 700%.
CloudZero is the world’s most powerful platform for understanding what’s driving your cloud spending, who’s responsible for it, and how to maximize its efficiency. Schedule a demo to start finding savings wins today.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
