In the vast digital world, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leaders in intelligent and cost-effective cloud solutions. Amidst the cloud giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, GCP has found its niche, attracting attention for its unique approach to saving cloud resources and money.
GCP’s popularity is not casual – it’s grounded in the platform’s ability to meet the needs of modern businesses seeking efficiency and strategic cloud usage. With tools made available by GCP, one can find a range of practical features aimed at helping users keep their cloud costs under control.
Let’s draw an analogy with a car journey where every mile you drive counts, and you only pay for the exact distance covered without a penny squandered on idle time. This is the essence of the Google Cloud Platform’s pay-as-you-go pricing model. GCP’s suite, particularly Google Cloud Storage and Compute Engine, was designed for cost efficiency, like a well-tuned car that can adjust its fuel consumption based on the road ahead. They empower you to scale your resources seamlessly, ensuring you never overspend on unnecessary capacity.
GCP offers another feature, pre-pay discounts for those who love to plan. By committing to specific resources over a set period, you not only “freeze” today’s prices but also enjoy substantial savings – up to 37%.
The reduced need for on-premises infrastructure maintenance makes things much easier for your IT team and significantly slashes operational costs. And the resources saved from not using physical servers can be reallocated to drive innovation and growth.
Besides, GCP offers a diverse spectrum of tiny but essential services designed to optimize various dimensions of cloud usage. From Google BigQuery, a data processing powerhouse that streamlines costs, to Cloud Functions, enabling swift and efficient code execution – these services form the GCP toolkit and are tailored for each task, ensuring optimal cloud efficiency.
Moreover, GCP analyzes how businesses spend money on the cloud, shifting the focus from just using the cloud to using it efficiently and budget-friendly.
Now, let’s take a look at the success stories of businesses that have used GCP to manage their costs better. Instead of abstract theories, we’ll focus on real examples, seeing how Google’s cloud platform has made a difference by reducing bills and helping companies grow, serve customers, and innovate.
Vendasta's cost optimization journey with GCP
Vendasta is a long-time customer of Google Cloud that recognized the significance of cost optimization as it navigated the peculiarities of cloud-based operations. With a focus on delivering digital services to local businesses through channel partners, Vendasta’s partnership with Google Cloud amplified its efficiency and revolutionized its approach to cost management.
Vendasta’s cloud cost management journey started with using Cloud Billing Reports. Thanks to them, the company gained real-time insights into its expenditure trends, which enabled better forecasting and resource allocation. Besides, the transparency provided by these reports allowed the company to avoid unwelcome budget surprises at the end of a billing period, fostering a culture of fiscal responsibility across IT teams.
Vendasta’s list of cost management practices didn’t end there. Leveraging the power of BigQuery and Looker Studio, the company created customized cost dashboards that gave different teams granular views of their expenses, increasing their accountability and helping developers align their efforts with business objectives.
The company’s cloud cost optimization efforts led to a 25% reduction in cloud expenses, which was attributed to a combination of higher cost transparency and the insights gained from the Google Cloud cost management tools. Remarkably, this cost reduction was accompanied by a 32% growth in business over a year.
Vendasta actively used Google Cloud Billing Reports to optimize its engineering practices. The reports acted as early warning signals, notifying teams of cost spikes that could indicate software glitches or inefficient resource utilization. This approach improved engineering practices and contributed to a more stable and cost-effective environment for the long term.
As often happens, Vendasta’s story emphasizes the value of cloud cost management beyond mere expense reduction. The company successfully aligned its technical strength with smart financial choices by embracing transparency, accountability, and innovation. Overall, Vendasta’s story serves as an example of how a strategic partnership with a cloud provider can empower businesses to achieve remarkable cost efficiency and growth while staying ahead of the curve.
How Carousell achieved efficiency, innovation, and sustainability with GCP
Carousell is the largest online classifieds marketplace famous for transforming how people buy and sell. The company used GCP to not only streamline cloud cost management, optimization, and transparency and scale its operations but also be able to focus on creating an ecosystem of second-hand goods for sustainability and a greener future.
For the sake of efficient resource utilization, Carousell started its cloud cost optimization journey with the adoption of Spot VMs. Funds saved through this approach were reinvested into customer-focused features. Additionally, up to 70% of engineers’ time was liberated from infrastructure tasks, allowing them to concentrate on innovative projects rather than routine maintenance.
Central to Carousell’s success story is the strategic use of machine learning models powered by TensorFlow on Google Cloud ML Engine. These models have refined user experiences through personalized recommendations and fraud detection and empowered Carousell to address business challenges with data-driven precision.
What helped Carousell’s growth and expansion is Google Cloud’s ability to seamlessly scale architecture to accommodate millions of users, coupled with the ease of management provided by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). By simplifying service discovery and ensuring a smooth user experience, GKE played a crucial role in enhancing the company’s efficiency and performance.
By and large, Carousell’s success story illustrates how the alignment of cloud technology and values can reshape industries, cultivate customer trust, and propel businesses toward a more promising future.
How Banco BV drove efficiency and savings with GCP
Banco BV, a stalwart in Brazil’s financial landscape for over three decades, has worked its way of transforming its cloud operations, achieving cost savings, and fostering a culture of financial optimization through a FinOps framework on GCP.
Banco BV, one of the country’s largest private banks, opted for GCP because of the need for enhanced flexibility and resource allocation, which is critical for its ambitious technological evolution. The company’s long-term vision aimed to harness data intelligence to redefine customer experiences, nurture open platforms, craft novel digital products, and sharpen data science models.
With the launch of the FinOps department in early 2021, Banco BV has committed to efficient cloud cost management. To increase its efficiency, the company used several GCP solutions. First and foremost, Google Looker Studio helped enhance financial accountability by distributing cloud consumption stats across teams. Leveraging BigQuery, the bank gained insights into its operations, particularly the chargeback process, offering a granular view of GKE utilization.
Banco BV’s cloud revolution bore fruit. The FinOps culture led to higher competitiveness, agility, and value generation for customers. Scalability and cost optimization became realizable thanks to pay-as-you-go models. The bank’s thoughtful asset reservation management, pricing strategies, and efficient resource utilization yielded a 30% reduction in monthly cloud costs.
A real turning point was the inception of Fórum FinOps, a platform facilitating regular result presentations and discussions. This platform enabled data-driven decision-making and adopted the FinOps culture in the organization, even for recruits, through a comprehensive onboarding process.
Wrapping it up, Banco BV’s story is an excellent example of how embracing a FinOps framework within GCP can reshape financial efficiency, technological innovation, and customer-centricity, moving an already prominent and prosperous institution towards a future of even more possibilities.
In conclusion
So, through the stories of Vendasta, Carousell, and Banco BV, we’ve witnessed how GCP’s intelligent features and strategic partnerships can revolutionize cloud cost management, drive growth, and redefine customer experiences.
But the cloud optimization things don’t end there. Beyond GCP’s native tools, numerous third-party solutions offer even more excellent opportunities for businesses to optimize their cloud costs. Among these, Hystax OptScale emerges as an open source powerhouse for FinOps and MLOps, empowering GCP users with an extended set of capabilities that, among other things, encompass multi-cloud strategies.
The OptScale standout platform provides an integrated FinOps platform ideal for managing cloud workloads. This system allows companies to monitor their cloud spending, enhance resource utilization, and guarantee cost-effective operations. Additionally, its MLOps features are invaluable for ML/AI teams, presenting tools for experiment tracking, improving performance, and cutting expenses. Essentially, OptScale efficiently harmonizes your cloud and AI workflows, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency in both areas.
Moreover, as businesses increasingly and inevitably adopt multi-cloud strategies, Hystax OptScale’s hybrid cloud migration tools become indispensable. With the power to execute cross-cloud disaster recovery in mere seconds, users can confidently pursue optimization while ensuring data integrity and continuity.
Cloud cost optimization implementation may be challenging, but with tools like Hystax OptScale, FinOps teams gain the complete transparency and real-time visibility required to achieve financial efficiency and strategic excellence. As we’ve learned from the success stories of Vendasta, Carousell, and Banco BV, the right partnerships and the right tools can drive businesses toward a future of innovation and growth.
💫Dive into OptScale today and experience the future of optimized cloud and machine learning operations → https://github.com/hystax/optscale
