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hey everyone welcome to eyes on
enterprise where I'm bringing on
Googlers to talk about the tech
strategies and best practices that are
influencing enterprises today my name is
Stephanie Wong developer advocate and
today I have Matt Leonard billing and
cost management product manager we're
gonna be talking about how you can
adjust to new billing concepts with the
cloud and take advantage of some new
cost optimizations so Matt thanks for
being here thank you so first off I want
to dive right into it because you know a
lot of people don't know that there's a
full product suite with billing and cost
management usually they think it's just
budgets and you know paying your invoice
at the end of the month so can you tell
me more about how you can help customers
get insight into their environments sure
that's a great question Google Club cost
management supports a number of features
that help customers manage their cost
and spending in the cloud it's not just
the invoice to you point its tools
around reporting so the understand real
time costs budget so that you can
monitor and keep control of your
environment and detailed billing
exploits so that you can enable those
trash bag scenarios a butcher aren't
dashboards in a different set of
totaling outside of the cloud so it
sounds like that's pretty different from
on from licensing because with that you
have an own variable for a year number
of course seats spot but with the cloud
it's not as predictable you know you
have to think about queries ran API
requests gigabytes of storage so you
know how do you kind of explain this new
concept to people yeah I mean cloud has
really transformed the way that people
think about infrastructure going as a
traditional process where you're
essentially building at large data
centers that have long life cycles and
you're moving to a world where anyone
can spin up a workload and that workload
potentially could have runaway costs
right like this is the great fair of
CIOs and ceos is that so it's going to
spin up a workload that's gonna cost
them $100,000 and and you know they were
expecting to spend a thousand dollars on
that workload so what we've had to build
and cost management is tooling that
enables you to organize and monitor this
environment so that you don't have
runaway costs and that you should really
spend what you need to in order to
manage your business yeah for them it's
a huge change in thinking but I know
that they also see the benefit of the
cloud technologies with services like
server lists that let their developers
focus on the code and not the
infrastructure and then operationally
they can scale those resources down
zero so how has this changed in thinking
really influenced billing and cost
management for people from pure
development standpoint I mean cloud has
opened up all sorts of new opportunities
to solve new and interesting problems
but you can also take your legacy
applications and move into the cloud and
really right-size them whereas before
you might have had to deploy an extra
large database for your peak what cloade
now you can scale up dynamically as you
need to as you hit that peak load and
and only pay for what you need in order
to manage your environment and what
we're seeing over time is that as
services re-architected that they start
to take advantage of cloud native
services like kubernetes that allow you
to automatically or dynamically scale
your service to exactly what you need to
consume so let's talk about some
examples of that of ways to optimize
costs in the cloud I've heard of things
like right sizing machines preemptable
machines committed use discount
sustained use discounts so can you
explain the differences in when you
would use each of those sure yeah
there's really two big buckets of how
you would do cost optimization of a
cloud one is really about resource
optimization and the other one is
pricing optimizations so in the case of
resource optimization you have a few
different options that we support within
Google cloud or costs your environment
one is this effectively identifying
underutilized resources so that can be
through right sizing so if you have a
focal machine and you really on any one
court your peak capacity you can
downsize that to a Wankel machine spend
less money idle instances or idle
resources that are essentially abandoned
we'll identify them - you can shut them
down or even resource scheduling if you
have a cyclical pattern of usage we can
help you automate the life cycle of that
resource so that's what we call resource
optimization and then the second big
bucket is really pricing optimization
how can I do the same amount of work but
for less money and that's when things
like sustained use discounts which
automatically calculate the lowest
possible cost and give you a discount
for continually running machines or
committed use discounts if you plan to
have a steady state over a long period
of time you can make a commitment which
Nets you a large discount in terms of
the the day to day running of that
machine
and we have more models like that that
allow you essentially to buy down the
cost of that
machine relative to the lifecycle of it
that's great so those are cost
optimization but how do you actually
organize your business in the cloud to
take advantage of those things so it's a
great point actually uh about fifty
percent of all the inbound calls that we
get for help like is how do we even get
started how do I organize my business on
Google cloud you can't do cost
optimization if you're not already
organized and so where we've seen
customers struggle in the past is that
they've organically grown on the cloud
without really thinking about their
business structure and so we offer a
variety of mechanisms to help you like
segregate your business into business
units and so we have what we call the
resource hierarchy was just folders
projects and then ultimately user labels
which attach to resources you can use
any or a combination of these in order
in order to organize your cost
once you have workloads organized into
discrete units at that point you can
start to think about optimizing either
as an individual workload or across all
of your workloads in totality does it
make a difference depending on the
structure of your business though
absolutely actually we we see customers
using and organizing their business
differently on Google cloud depending on
what's most important to them and their
workloads we have some customers whose
is really important that they have
autonomous control of the business units
and so they might completely segregate a
set of resources from another set of
raceless from a cost standpoint in order
to delegate control financially for that
workload we see how the customers who
need all of their workloads to coexist
within the same organizational bucket
and in those cases they tend to use user
labels as the strategy for organizing
that cost but in those particular cases
it's really important that you've
thought about like what is the hierarchy
of my labels on those resources because
again your organization is in the single
layer and so therefore your costs
organization strategy should also not be
a single layer so think about that first
before you do anything else so like an
example could be not just Devin test
environments but may be organized by
project or teams for HR finance etc
absolutely all potentially organized by
line of business right take Google for
example we're not just Google cloud
where we consist of YouTube and add to
many other businesses and so as we
started to organize our business running
on top of
Google cloud we would put it in
operating divisions and then we would
potentially segregate protein production
and development environments within that
or within different teams depending on
who's managing the cost now that you
know where the costs are coming from in
this case how do you actually get
visibility into controlling those costs
because I can imagine with so many teams
our Google - you might have mushrooming
costs that are inadvertent you spin up a
VM and it just spirals in terms of costs
how do we control that yeah it's a
challenging problem I would say the
first thing that you want to do is you
probably and it depends on your
organization but but delegating control
to the onus of the workloads is a really
good place to start and within Google
cloud with a net cost management tooling
we have a bunch of different tools that
allow you to delegate that control
through our reporting frameworks and you
can delegate at any level of your
organization but we have reporting that
gives you visibility through time series
visualizations that you can break down
by environment by product by SKU
essentially however you've organized
your workloads we also have detailed
billing exports that allow you to get
access to the data and build your own
dashboards that you can view the data
and lastly we have financial governance
controls and I think that's really
important in probably way you were going
with this is how do I build that
financial governance into my plan for
cloud so within that we have tooling for
budgets which allow you to monitor costs
over time per workload or across your
organization well we have quota which
allows you to essentially set a limit
for for how many resources an individual
workload can consume or what a division
can consume and essentially what that
does is it sets the Apple limit or the
upper threshold for per resource
consumption
I could see visibility still being a big
challenge with hundreds of teams you
have per second per minute billing cost
up up up so how do you identify root
causes and trends identifying the root
cause of cost can be challenging part
what we offer you and the cost
management tooling is the ability to
drill into cost so starting at the old
global at the at the highest level like
where's my cost coming from and my
monitoring for spikes out tolling
actually allows you to drill all the way
down to individual SKUs by what globe by
environment depending on how you've
organized your costs and we provide
hourly level data now it's not per
second because honestly like trying to
consume that amount of data and and
react at that level it's not really
something a human can do and because of
the
we offer these financial government
tools that actually allow you to monitor
so they monitor for conditions and so
when you set a budget for an environment
it's not just looking at your actual
cost it's looking at the full cost of
cost as well and as your costs change
over time you can get real-time
notifications to say hey Stephanie your
your workload is changing like you
should probably come take a look see if
something changed in your environment
that you want to maybe make a change and
response to I imagine all these
activities could be pretty challenging
to keep track of at enterprise scale so
for example if I had a team where we
were running 8v CPU machine and then we
had a database team and analytics team
running queries against 8 terabytes of
data another team you know with requests
ml api's how do you really optimize for
costs in all those scenarios yeah it can
be really challenging right like if
you've got a really complex like
discounting mechanism like Yuma that
uses account which operates on
microsecond increments
just the sheer thought of trying to
rationalize that data and think about
like what kind of a commitment do I want
to make I'm signing my organization up
can be very complex that's why we have
what we call recommendations where we
want to service to you the correct
recommendation for committed use
discount so it takes the guesswork out
of it we have the tools that allow you
to drill down to that level of
visibility with accurate cells sometimes
broken down into a lowly chunks but
let's make it easy let's give you the
tools that allow you to make those those
decisions for your organization without
having to have a PhD in billing that's
really funny I was the first time here
that actually yeah it's it's it's one of
those things that that cloud Billings
often accused of being far too complex
and one of the things that we've really
been driving in Google cloud is how do
we simplify the experience overall so
that users can understand the
discounting mechanisms that we're using
and they don't need to have this deep
understanding of how the mechanics work
under the hood what about access
controls and policies and rolling that
down throughout your auric hierarchy
like for example if I had a database
team or analytics team how do I prevent
them from spinning up you know hundreds
of nodes for a spanner database yeah Wow
that's one scary
so quarter is the first way that you do
that right like so by setting a quota
limit you can set the resource limit for
a given team how much can they consume
you also use Identity and Access
Management in order to ensure Lisa
which within your organization and
that's something that you should be
actively managing and then from a pure
cost standpoint we we allow access to
what cloud owners to view the cost data
so they can manage it themselves but we
also provide aggregate views of that at
the organization level so that your your
billing administrators or your all
Gabon's can view the costs on an ongoing
basis
seems like you have to pull in the right
people in many ways to the development
teams and the actual billing management
teams as well and kind of control it
from various perspectives it's
definitely a team effort it helps if you
start with a policy in mind of how you
want to organize and govern your
business and then you can apply that you
can automate it right you can use
terraform in order to create policy in
the form of budget in the form of quota
and Identity and Access Management so
that that when your team's going to do
development that they have the right
level of control I want to talk a little
bit about chargebacks because I know
this can be pretty common with large
organizations and lots of teams spinning
up resources so is do you see it being
common to do chargebacks or separate
invoicing so that's gonna really depend
on your business and what you're
optimizing for we've we've got very
large customers who have a single
billing account and single invoice for
their entire business they essentially
use the organizational constructs we
talked about earlier of folders and
projects for each of the different
business units and they use chargeback
through the reporting and detailed
billing exports that we provide in order
to create the visibility and charge back
that they need for their business we
have other customers who basically are
managing via purchase order and because
of that may need separate billing
accounts which means separate invoices
and that allows them the autonomy within
each of those business units to instead
of using charge back to get individual
invoices now even in those customers is
still an element of charge back right
like that that individual invoice might
represent multiple operating entities
within the team might be different
applications it might be different teams
actually within the structure of that
and the tooling the reporting the
exports they allow you to drill down to
that fine-grained level within your
invoice so we have support for either of
those use cases absolutely we want to
give you the flexibility to build your
business on top of Google Cloud the way
that you needed to operate okay so how
about contracting because I know this is
very important for a company that works
with a cloud vendor how do we help
provide them with
complex pricing so Google Cloud provides
a variety of mechanisms for discounting
we have I'll split it into what we call
custom contracting and what would cool
self-service discounting so things like
committed use discounts bigquery flat
rates these are things that customers
can negotiate effectively on their own
if you come into a console experiences
you can actually think about your
environment and purchase those without
the assistance of an account team then
we have what we call custom contracting
within a custom contracting we can
negotiate discounts for specific
workloads specific products and you work
through an account team in order to
finalize that and then those discounts
will flow through all of your billing
data and to all of you so that you can
understand and rationalize like the
impact of your contract relative to the
cost of cloud so we just covered a lot
but what can people do to get value out
of cost optimizations today great
question I would recommend that you stop
by visiting the Google cloud cost
management page which has a repository
of all about content including white
papers links to our videos from next
talks and beyond the bill video series
that explain basic concepts for your own
class management you can check out the
playlist below awesome well thank you so
much for being on the show thank you
well everyone if you have any questions
about billing cost optimizations or any
new hacks that you want to learn comment
in the section below and check out the
links thanks again and join us next time
for eyes on enterprise
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