Nowadays, people are migrating to the cloud and it has brought a revolution. Migrating to the cloud is a great way to reduce your infrastructure cost. But where it has reduced the infrastructure cost, it has become equally important to monitor your resources closely and optimize your cloud cost.

What is cloud? The cloud cost is the price you pay to the cloud service provider for the resources provisioned for you. Like sometimes you need to provision a VM. So your cost will depend on the type of configuration you choose for your VM.

Now let us understand why it is important to optimize your cloud cost. It is important to closely monitor the resources because the requirements may vary according to your customer’s needs. If you do not pay attention to the cost optimization part, it may result in heavy bills.

Following are the steps you can follow to optimize your GCP (Google Cloud Platform) billing cost:

Go to the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator.
Choose the resource.

Add the specifications like no. of instances, machine class etc.
Click on the add to estimate button.

An estimate will appear on the right side (see example below) that will tell you the estimated cost of the resources you have chosen.

Google Cloud Pricing Calculator is free to use and provides you options like copy, save, edit or email the estimate. You can use this to optimize your GCP cost for free.