GCP Pricing and Free Tier
Google was the primary major Cloud provider to bill by the second instead of rounding up to greater units of your time for its virtual machines as a service offering. This may not sound like a big deal, but charges for rounding up can really add up for customers who are creating and running lots of virtual machines. Per second billing is obtainable for a virtual machine use through Compute Engine and for several other services too.
Compute Engine provides automatically applied use discounts which are discounts that you simply get for running a virtual machine for a big portion of the billing month. When you run an instance for at least 25% of a month, Compute Engine automatically gives you a reduction for each incremental minute you employ it. Here’s one more way Compute Engine saves you money.
Normally, you choose a virtual machine type from a typical set of those values, but Compute Engine also offers custom virtual machine types, in order that you’ll fine-tune the sizes of the virtual machines you use. That way, you’ll tailor your pricing for your workloads.
Free Tier: Google Cloud Platform offers a generous free tier with limited usage of various services, allowing users to explore and experiment with GCP without incurring charges. The free tier typically includes a certain amount of usage for services like Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and more.
What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Before we begin learning about the Google Cloud Platform, we will talk about what cloud computing is. Basically, it is using someone else’s computer over the internet. Examples: GCP, AWS, IBM Cloud, etc. Some interesting features of cloud computing are as follows:
- You get computing resources on-demand and self-service. The customer has to use a simple User Interface and they get the computing power, storage requirements, and network you need without human intervention.
- You can access these cloud resources over the internet from anywhere on the globe.
- The provider of these resources has a huge collection of them and allocates them to customers out of that collection.
- The resources are elastic. If you need more resources, you can get them rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back.
- The customers pay only for what they use or reserve. If they stop using resources, they stop paying.