Hello, Cloud Gurus. I'm Mattias Andersson. And this is GCP this month for March, 2022. This month, Google has announced a number of, um, pricing changes, but thankfully it's not all bad news. We also have new products and features becoming generally available custom voices for Text-to-Speech and a significant cost saving for committed Cloud Spanner users. But let's just rip off the bandaid to get it done with. Okay, I'm not gonna sugarcoat this and tell you that it's good news because it's not, but it also might not be as bad as you fear.

So let's be levelheaded and look into the pricing changes that Google has recently announced. Now let me start by making sure that you know, that this is advance warning about changes that won't come into effect until after September, 2022. October 1st is the first day of the new prices we'll be discussing. Also, you might have missed this if you were only following Google's blog because their blog got the fairly bland title, unlock more choice with updates to Google Cloud's infrastructure, capabilities and pricing, and they neglected to even list this at all in their what's new with Google Cloud post - even though that promises to be all the latest from Google Cloud in one handy location. That said to be fair, they have emailed customers about these pricing changes and that email did include the theoretical impact to those customers' specific bills.

So do go and ask whomever is in charge of your GCP billing, what the impact will be on your individual situation. But, okay, let's look at some specifics. The first thing is Google Cloud Storage's multi-region buckets. These might have seemed too good to be true, and apparently they were in particular, Google Cloud customers will now pay for data replication of Cloud Storage buckets, just like the other clouds already make you do. Well you still get the benefit of Google managing all of the hassles for you as an abstraction.

But the higher costs will now leak through into your architecture. Google will begin charging 2 cents per gigabyte to replicate data in the US and EU based multi regions and dual regions and replication for such regions in Asia will cost 8 cents per gig. So whenever you write data into such a bucket, you will trigger this charge. On top of that, all data reads from multi-regions will now cost too - no more free reads from Google Cloud services located in the same continent. Prices here, range from two to 14 cents per gigabyte, depending on the locations.

And these are priced the same as general data moves between different locations on the same continent. There are also a bunch of changes for the storage at rest pricing for multi-regions. These are mostly up, but some down. So check out the specifics in Google's announcement of upcoming pricing changes for Cloud Storage that is linked from that article I mentioned. This page also covers some changes to operations. The part where you're billed by how many requests you make, rather than the size of the objects. Now, to be fair,

this is already charged and generally makes up a very small part of most GCS bills. But if your system does a lot of mattering on very small and maybe short-lived objects, then the upcoming doubling or quadrupling of these operations charges will matter. And unlike most of the other charges, this applies to single region locations too. Anyway, in a way I find it a bit simpler to think of this sweeping set of price changes to multi-regions more like a service deprecation, really. Google Cloud Storage multi-region version one is end of life and going away and the completely different Google Cloud Storage multi-region version two will take its place on October 1st. Different service, different pricing.

So you should figure out what to do about your system's architecture and make sure your data is somewhere that you'll be happy for it to live at after that time. And that is exactly where another part of the announcement comes in a good part this time. Starting April 2nd, 2022, and until December 31st, 2022 transfers using Storage Transfer Service will not result in Cloud Storage charges for transfer between Cloud Storage buckets. Google's Storage Transfer Service itself is all about managing the hassle of moving your data around for you. And it is generally itself free, but because it does a bunch of stuff for you in Cloud Storage that can result in charges. Well, it will basically, of course, they need to make money somehow,

right? Well, it's these GCS charges that are waived until the end of 2022, including rewrite operations to move data between Cloud Storage buckets, a getobject request per object transferred, retrieval charges when reading nearline, coldline and archived storage class objects, network egress charges, when transferring between different locations, listing operations at source and destination and early deletion charges, when removing objects earlier than their minimum retention times. Of course, you always need to double check everything against your own situation. But I think this could be a very interesting opportunity to move things around. And maybe not even just because of the upcoming pricing changes, right? This is your chance to rearrange things like buckets or objects that you eventually realized had the wrong storage class or location, but couldn't really justify changing because of the early deletion charges. Another set of price changes will be around persistent disk snapshots.

Now by nature, these changes are way less likely to matter to your overall bill. I mean, you're not generally using disk snapshots for general data storage now are you, but you should know that the prices are going up. Regional snapshot prices are almost doubling and multi-regional ones are going up two and a half times. Oh, and of course any restores from multi-region snapshots will now incur cross region data transfer costs as well. As an attempt to counterbalance, maybe I guess, Google has also announced a new 90 day minimum archive class of snapshots that will be slightly cheaper than the original prices for the normal ones.

Archive snapshots are due to release later in 2022. The last big price increase I want to cover is the one for Cloud Load Balancing or CLB. Previously Google's CLBs only charged for the volume of incoming data and not outgoing. This is definitely not the case with other clouds. Well this gap is being closed and Google will start charging symmetrically for both ingress and egress data processed by the Cloud Load Balancer. Now it may seem like this is a big deal charging for something that was previously free, but it's actually not because free in this case really means that it was included. Included in the general cost of data egress from GCP.

And since these new CLB egress fees are still an order of magnitude smaller than the ones you're already paying, this won't have nearly as large of an impact on your bill as other pricing changes could. Sure the cost is definitely going up, but not proportionally as much. Okay. With all that out of the way, let's take a look at some much more fun announcements. And now for something completely different, Google has just released as generally available custom voice functionality for Cloud Text-to-Speech or TTS. This lets us train the API on our own voices so that the output will sound like us instead of like one of Google's predefined voices. Now,

since this thing is video that I'm doing right now and not just audio, I'll probably have to keep filming them myself, but Hmm, maybe I'll use this to pull off a podcast or something. This month Google has made a bunch of things generally available or GA meaning that they are fit for production systems and they now get full support. So for let's run through those, the read replica support in Cloud Memorystore for Redis is now GA. Also GA is Google's Managed Service for Prometheus product to take care of all that Kubernetes monitoring for you. Google's managed private certificate authority product, Certificate Authority Service is now also GA.

One more Dataplex is now generally available. As Google describes it: this is an intelligent data fabric that enables you to centrally manage monitor and govern data across data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools. All right, it's not new this month or anything, but I wanna highlight Google's Access Transparency and Access Approval functionality. It might have flown under your radar before. And it's something that you could bring to the conversation when people raise concerns around third party liabilities. Something they might well do, given the recent non-Google news about a security breach, traced back to a third party identity provider's support person, eh? Anyway Access Transparency gives you visibility into and Access Control gives you control over what Google's support personnel can do in your systems.

You get near real-time logs when Google Cloud administrators access your content and you can approve or dismiss requests for access by Google employees working to support your service. Definitely reassuring. Okay, let's finish this episode off with some happy news about pricing. If you use the cloud Spanner relational database to take advantage of its infinite scalability and up to 99.999% availability guarantee, not to mention its global reach, then you might also be interested in its new committed use discount options. If you lock in a certain amount of compute capacity usage for one year, you'll save 20%. And if you lock in for three years, you'll save 40%.

Cloud Spanner is one of those key differentiators for Google Cloud. So this is very nice to see. Well, alright. This has been a pretty heavy episode and I'm very interested to hear what you think about all of this. How much would your bill change if you didn't do anything? And what changes are you now planning to make to your architecture? Now that Google's prices are more similar in some ways to the other clouds, does that change how you feel about it overall? Well, that's all I've got for now. I hope that wherever you are, you're doing well. Stay safe, take care of those around you and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.