Using a public cloud provider, such as the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), has some important financial advantages—notably, that you can pay for what you use, and thus avoid large upfront financial commitments. However, public cloud services are not particularly cheap or easy to use. If you are not careful about how you use them, you can easily find yourself faced with a large, hard-to-understand bill. The risk of being nickel-and-dimed is real: like a traveler on an economy airline, you might find yourself paying for facilities that you have entirely taken for granted until now. This chapter is meant to help avoid sticker-shock and sudden unpleasant surprises.

We will cover the following topics in the chapter:

• The actual pricing models for different GCP services are interesting and very varied
• For any serious cloud architect, it makes sense to experiment with Google's very transparent pricing calculator and get a sense of the sensitivities of pricing to different usage parameters

All screenshots in this chapter are from Google's cloud pricing calculator, which is available at https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/. The pricing and rates of these services keep changing, so you should be aware that these screenshots are all dated May 14, 2018. Please do your homework on the latest prices and policies when making real-world decisions. Also, in the comparisons provided in this chapter; we have considered lowest to quite high pricing extremes for the most part. It is trivial that your nature of application and requirement of resources will vary immensely so make sure to make your choices wisely.