Cost Planning and Estimation Using Pricing Calculator

In the last section, we covered some important network services. We have covered all the 3 pillars of cloud computing. As you have learnt so many GCP services you should be able to estimate the cost of the services before you start implementing them. In this lesson, we will learn how to use the GCP pricing calculator and its benefit.

Introduction

The “cost planning and estimation” is a crucial step of any cloud deployment cycle. Once you have a solution to the client or even for your own project you should no what could be the monthly cost or your architecture and how many months you can sustain if you are starting a new business.

Also, one cannot remember pricing for all the services. The calculator provides you with the right estimates by applying any discounts or free tier usage if available for that service.

Sample architecture

To make this lesson more interesting, we will refer to the architecture for an ETL pipeline. ETL (Extract Transform and Load) pipelines are increasing day by day because of a lot of traditional companies moving towards cloud data warehouses for minimizing cost.

This architecture does not contain all the GCP services. And no solution or project will contain all the services. This architecture diagram is to give you the idea of how to calculate the solution cost for a certain time period.

Also, this architecture uses some extra services which we haven’t covered yet. But in the upcoming lessons, we will learn these services one by one. Services like “Cloud PubSub” are utility services but are very powerful and play a significant role in every decoupled architecture.

You can get the code for this architecture from the official Google Cloud repo.