How to Get the Most Out of Google Cloud Free Services
How to Get the Most Out of Google Cloud Free Services:
10 tips for pushing Google’s free services to the maximum and keeping the cloud meter at zero:
The cloud computing industry loves to offer free samples, and Google is no different from Amazon or Microsoft in this regard.
Companies know that if they give customers a free taste, they will come back when it is time for the full meal.
Google offers two types of free services. New customers receive $300 to spend on any of the hardware or services spread across 24 “cloud regions,” 73 “zones,” and 144 “advanced network edge locations.”
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The credit works largely everywhere across the Google Cloud, from raw computing power
to any of dozens of different products such as databases or mapping services.
But even when that free credit runs out, the free gifts keep coming. There are 24 different products offering ongoing free samples,
billed as “always free.” Even if you have been a customer for years,
you can still experiment. Of course Google adds the caveat that the word “always” in this generous promise is “subject to change.” But until that day comes,
the BigQuery database will answer one terabyte of queries every month and AutoML Translation will convert 500,000 characters from one language to another.
Some developers use the free tier for what it is meant to be: an opportunity to explore without having to beg their manager for a budget. Others are working on a side hustle or a website for the neighborhood kids. When the load is small, it is easy to innovate without dealing with a monthly bill.
Some developers take this to the extreme. They try to stay in the free tier for as long as possible,
perhaps because they want to boast about an incredibly low burn rate. Perhaps it is just a form of modern frugality,
or perhaps they simply have a cash-flow problem.
Either way, working this free angle for as long as possible generally produces lean, efficient web applications that accomplish as much as possible with as little as possible.
When the day comes that they leave the free tier,
monthly bills will remain small as the project scales — something that warms the heart of every CFO.
Here are some secrets for squeezing every last drop of goodness out of Google’s free offering,
or perhaps for being frugal. Maybe you are just waiting to tell your boss until the amazement is fully realized,
or maybe you are simply enjoying it and that is perfectly fine. Whatever the case, there are many ways to save.
Store Only What Is Necessary:
Free databases such as Firestore and Cloud Storage are quite flexible tools that handle document and key-value object disposal respectively. Google Cloud’s always-free tier lets you store the first 1 GB and 10 GB in each product respectively.
But the more details your application retains, the faster those free gigabytes run out. So stop saving information unless you absolutely need it. That means no obsessive data collection just in case you need it for debugging later.
No extra timestamps, no large cache stuffed with data you keep just to be prepared.
Compression Is Your Friend:
There are dozens of good pieces of code for adding a compression layer for your clients. Instead of storing fat blobs of JSON,
the client code can run the data through an algorithm such as LZW or Gzip before sending it over the wire to your server instances,
which store it without decompressing it. This means faster responses, fewer bandwidth problems,
and less impact on your free monthly data storage quota. Be a little careful because some very small data packets can actually grow larger when the overhead from compression is factored in.
Go Serverless:
Google is more generous with intermittent computing services billed per request.
Cloud Run will launch and run a stateless container that answers two million requests every month for free.
Cloud Functions will trigger your function in response to another two million requests. That is more than 100,000 different operations every day on average.
So stop waiting and start writing your code to the serverless model.
Note:
Some architects will object to the idea of using two entirely different services. It may save money but it will double the complexity of the application, which means it will be harder to maintain. This is a real risk, but often you can mirror the function-as-a-service structure for Cloud Functions inside your own container, making it possible to merge the code later if you plan to do so.
