MARK MIRCHANDANI: One of the greatest advantages
of the cloud is how easy it can be
to scale your usage up or down.
However, if you're working with a predictable compute workload,
you can save some money with committed use discounts.
On this episode of "Beyond Your Bill,"
we'll talk about what committed use discounts are
and how you can maximize your usage of them.
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Committed Use Discounts, or CUDs for short,
are basically contracts saying you'll
commit to a certain amount of Compute Engine resource
for a one or three-year period.
In exchange for your commitment, you'll
get a significant price discount, even as high as 70%,
in some cases.
You can make these commitments on typical compute resources
such as vCPUs and memory, but also on GPUs and local SSDs.
It's worth noting that committed use discounts aren't
the same thing as sustained use discounts, which
are separate discounts that can't be combined
with committed use discounts.
There's a link below with more information on those.
Let's look a bit more on how to set up commitments.
And then explore the committed use discount analysis
report, which allows you to visualize your commitments.
This report is meant to help you answer questions like,
how much of my eligible Compute Engine usage
is covered by my commitments?
How much are my commitments actually saving me?
And am I fully utilizing my existing commitments?
To start, you can purchase commitments in the Google Cloud
Console by using the top left navigation
and clicking on Committed Use Discounts under Compute Engine.
From here, click on Purchase Commitment
to enter the specifics, such as the time frame
and which resource you want to purchase.
Each commitment is purchased for a specific project and region.
Commitments for vCPUs and memories
are applied simultaneously, but you
can have separate commitments for GPUs and local SSDs.
You'll also get an estimated cost
to let you see how much you'll pay each month
and how much the commitment would save you.
If you run into issues purchasing a commitment,
you may need to make sure that you have a quota for it.
There's also a link below with more information for that.
Once you've made the commitment, you'll
start to pay for that commitment over its lifetime
with each billing cycle, even if you don't
have any resources active.
In this example, a certain amount of vCPUs and RAM
have been used by a Compute Engine instance.
The amount that's covered by a commitment
will be credited back and the lower commitment rate
will be applied for that usage.
However, if you've got lots of resources and commitments,
it can be confusing to see exactly what you're spending
and which commitments you have active,
especially since commitments don't auto renew.
That's where the committed use discount analysis
report comes in.
It helps you visualize all of your commitments
alongside your compute resources.
Using the Google Cloud Console, choose
a billing account and click on the Commitments option
to get to the report.
You'll need to be a billing account
administrator or a billing account viewer
to see this report.
Unlike billing reports, you won't
be able to get access to this report
just by being a project owner, though you will
be able to filter by project.
Let's step through the different areas
to see how the report works.
The resources are split up by type.
So you can see vCPU, RAM, SSD, and each type of GPU
separately with your usage and the relevant commitments.
You can toggle between them by clicking the tabs here,
but we'll start with vCPUs.
Above the graph, you can see a quick summary
of your commitments.
The left side lets you see if you're looking at all regions
or if you're only looking at a specific region, which
I'll show you how to do in just a second.
The middle shows the current number
of active commitments, which may take
a day or two to update when a new commitment is purchased.
The right side shows you the utilization of your commitments
by comparing the amount of eligible usage being covered
by your commitments to the total number of commitments
that you have.
You can also hover over the question mark
for the specific resource counts.
The stacked bar chart itself shows you
the resource uses for each day, the amount that
was covered by a commitment, and a line that
shows you the current quantity of commitments.
You can hover over each column to see the exact usage
numbers for every day.
There's also a summary table below the chart.
Let's take a look at a specific subset of days.
Here you can see the usage narrowed down to a few days.
On the first day, all commitments
were fully utilized.
And there were additional eligible resource usage
on top of your purchase commitments.
If you often see resource usage above your additional
commitments, it may make sense to purchase
additional commitments to cover that usage and save some money.
However, you can also see that on the next few days,
the commitments haven't changed, but the amount used has.
Since this is the cloud, it makes sense
that resource usage can fluctuate.
But how can we find out why these resources weren't
covered?
Let's drill down using the filters.
You can also change the time ranges here,
if you want to see more dates.
We'll change the view to Region and see the specifics split up
by each region.
This is the US Central One region,
but the graph is still showing the same usage pattern.
Remember that committed use discounts
are specific to a project and a region.
So let's use the filters to select a specific project.
With this filter, we can see that less vCPUs were
used for a few days in this project, which
led to the commitment being underutilized.
Understanding more details about commitment utilization
can give you a much better idea of how to plan
for future usage of resources.
Or even where you may want to purchase
additional commitments.
As you've seen, committed to use discounts
can save you money on your Compute Engine resources,
especially if you have a lot of consistent usage.
It's also important to use the committed use discount analysis
report to see how your existing commitments are sizing up
and if it makes sense to purchase
additional commitments.
Check out the links for more information
and try out the report for yourself in the GCP console.
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