Google Cloud Adds Cloud Cost Management Resources to Tool Belt
Find out how your customers may be able to benefit (one option is not open to Partner Advantage buyers).
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Signing the dotted line for three, five or 10 years’ worth of cloud computing may be financially smarter and more predictable in the long run, but short-term, these commitments can be problematic — especially with all the macroeconomic uncertainties that seem to be going nowhere.
That’s why Google Cloud now offers flexible purchasing, according to the company. These deals “enable customers to migrate their workloads to the cloud with no up-front commitments,” wrote Kelly Ducourty, vice president of go-to-market strategy and operations, and Joe Matz, vice president of business planning and pricing, in a Feb. 15 blog.
And these users won’t miss out on incentives including discounts for monthly spend and committed use, as well as cloud credits and access to professional services. Note, however, that customers buying through the Partner Advantage program will not be eligible for the monthly spend discount. Google Cloud said incentives under the Flex Agreements will depend on monthly spend and workloads migrated to Google Cloud.
See what else is new on the next slide.
Ducourty and Matz also said Google Cloud has expanded trials for its products. They used Spanner as the primary example. Spanner, which lets developers create Google Standard SQL or PostgreSQL databases, now features a free trial instance good for 90 days. Ducourty and Matz said no commitment or contract is required to take advantage of the offer.
Google Cloud is introducing other plans under its Committed Use Discounts umbrella. Go to the next slide.
On top of the flexibility when it comes to contracts, Google Cloud is adding new pricing. The Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus packaging models will extend more choice for optimizing cloud spend, per Ducourty and Matz.
“For customers running workloads such as those in regulated industries like banking and public sector, the higher-end Enterprise Plus tier will offer compute, storage, networking and analytics services with high availability, multiregion support, regional failover and disaster recovery, advanced security, and a broad range of regulatory compliance support,” they wrote.
The Enterprise tier, meanwhile, will target customers with workloads “that demand a high level” of scalability, flexibility and reliability, Ducourty and Matz said.
Finally, the Standard level will come with “cost-efficient and easy-to-use managed services” that include “essential capabilities.”
Ducourty and Matz cited autoscaling as one of those capabilities, and used examples of services that have saved customers a significant amount on infrastructure spending as a result of autoscaling — i.e., letting the cloud technology automatically choose the right number of instances required to run the jobs and re-allocate more or fewer instances during runtime.
On a related note, Google Cloud has a new autoscaling announcement. See the next slide.
Google Cloud has enabled autoscaling in BigQuery now, as well, “at a more granular level so you never pay more than what you use,” wrote Ducorty and Matz. “This allows you to provision additional capacity in smaller increments, so you never overprovision and overpay for underutilized capacity.”
The new capability is available in public preview via users’ Google Cloud console.
Photo courtesy dennizn/Shutterstock
The update from Ducourty and Matz comes as Google Cloud is planning some key changes to Partner Advantage later this year. Look for the world’s third-largest public cloud computing provider to implement life cycle compensation. That means partners soon will choose their level of involvement in an engagement, throughout its life span, and earn corresponding compensation.
“Partners can participate in some or all of the incentives,” Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of global ecosystem and channels at Google Cloud, told Channel Futures in January. “We’ve gotten very positive feedback from partners. They see this as the future and they like the flexibility.”
Those changes should debut by the middle of this year.
Photo courtesy Sundry Photography/Shutterstock
The update from Ducourty and Matz comes as Google Cloud is planning some key changes to Partner Advantage later this year. Look for the world’s third-largest public cloud computing provider to implement life cycle compensation. That means partners soon will choose their level of involvement in an engagement, throughout its life span, and earn corresponding compensation.
“Partners can participate in some or all of the incentives,” Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of global ecosystem and channels at Google Cloud, told Channel Futures in January. “We’ve gotten very positive feedback from partners. They see this as the future and they like the flexibility.”
Those changes should debut by the middle of this year.
Photo courtesy Sundry Photography/Shutterstock
Following on its recent promise to deliver more “granular” cloud cost management tools, Google Cloud on Wednesday released some updates to its contracts, pricing tiers and capabilities.
“As the saying goes, ’It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future,’” wrote Kelly Ducourty, vice president of go-to-market strategy and operations, and Joe Matz, vice president of business planning and pricing, in a Feb. 15 blog. “Some organizations find it challenging to predict what cloud resources they’ll need in months or years ahead. Every organization is on its own unique cloud journey.”
Organizations need cloud cost management resources now more than ever, too. After two years of COVID-19-fueled overprovisioning, many finance and technology professionals are discovering how much they’ve overspent. As inflation remains high and the economy shows ongoing volatility, organizations are cutting back on hiring and other overhead (and, of course, shedding workers wherever they can — which Google itself also is doing). As channel partners’ customers have fewer people to manage their IT environments, cloud cost management has morphed into a domain desperate for the tackling.
Google Cloud Cost Management
Google Cloud sees the same need. In January, Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of global ecosystem and channels, told Channel Futures that the company would soon implement more of these cost management capabilities. He said Google Cloud doesn’t view these controls “in a negative light. We’re proactively working with the ecosystem, and always have been, to build FinOps practices for our customers.”
Overall, if customers show return on their Google Cloud investments, “that’s what leads to them continuing to invest,” said Ichhpurani.
With that in mind, Google Cloud now offers several new and different ways to ensure cloud cost management. See the slideshow above to learn what the company is doing for end users eager to rein in cloud expenses.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Kelly Teal or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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