Question

Difficulty: MediumEstimating GCP Costs with the Pricing Calculator

An enterprise architecture team is using the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate monthly infrastructure costs for a telemetry processing system. The workload requires Compute Engine virtual machines to run continuously 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the entire month. The team cannot sign a 1-year or 3-year term commitment, but requires an accurate baseline expense model. Which discount mechanism does the Pricing Calculator automatically apply to the estimated monthly compute cost for these continuously running instances?

  1. Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs)Answer
  2. B
    Committed Use Discounts (CUDs)
  3. C
    Spot VM provisioning discounts
  4. D
    Storage class lifecycle tiering discounts

Answer

Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs) are automatically included in the Pricing Calculator estimate for continuous Compute Engine VM workloads without requiring a term commitment.
Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs) are automatic discounts provided by Google Cloud for Compute Engine resources (vCPUs and memory) that run for a large portion of the billing month. When specifying 100% monthly utilization in the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator, SUDs are automatically calculated and deducted from the baseline hourly rate without requiring any contractual commitment.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the workload operational requirements
The VM instances run continuously (24/7 for a full month) and cannot use fault-tolerant/preemptible instances.
Uptime and workload stability dictate which discount models are technically viable.
2
Evaluate discount constraints
The scenario specifies that no 1-year or 3-year contractual commitment can be made.
This rules out Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), which mandate 1-year or 3-year commitments.
3
Determine the automatic pricing calculator behavior
Google Cloud automatically applies Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs) for vCPUs and memory when instances run for more than 25% of a month.
The Google Cloud Pricing Calculator automatically factors SUD incremental savings into the net monthly estimate when entering full-month continuous execution hours.

Key Concept

Sustained Use Discounts in the GCP Pricing Calculator
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