To optimize your resource usage, and in turn, minimize costs, you can purchase committed use discounts for several different resources.

Notice the table on your screen.

We can see here that we have General purpose E2 commitments, general purpose N2 commitments, general purpose N2D commitments, general purpose N1 commitments, compute-optimized commitments, and memory-optimized commitments.

The E2 commitments allow you to purchase discounts on vCPUs and memory for all E2 machine types, while the N2 commitments allow you to purchase not only vCPU and memory discounts for N2 machine types, but also Local SSD discounts as well. The N2 discounts are also applicable to sole-tenant nodes.

General purpose N2D commitments allow you to purchase discounts on vCPUs, memory, and local SSD for all N2D machine types, while the N1 commitments let you purchase discounts on vCPUs, memory, local SSD, and even some GPUs for all N1 machine types except those that are shared-core. The N1 discounts are also applicable to sole-tenant nodes.

As you might expect, compute-optimized commitments apply to compute-optimized machine types and they allow you to purchase vCPUs and memory discounts, while memory-optimized commitments allow you to purchase discounts on vCPUs and memory for memory-optimized machine types.

So, as you may have guessed by looking at this table, when you purchase a general-purpose commitment, what you need to do is choose which generation you want the commitment to apply to. If you purchase an N2 commitment, that commitment will apply only to your N2 machine types. Likewise, E2 commitments will apply only to E2 machine types. If you plan on deploying memory-optimized machine types, you would want to purchase memory-optimized commitments, while purchasing compute-optimized commitments if you plan to use compute-optimized machine types.

Now, I should point out that when purchasing commitments for GPUs and local SSDs, you have to also reserve those resources when you purchase the commitment. This is required so that Google Cloud can ensure that these resources are always available for you.

Now, my boss is gonna be upset if I actually purchase a 3-year commitment in order to show you how it’s done. That being the case, what I’m going to do is just refer you to the URL that you see on your screen so you can see that actual process, right from the horse’s mouth:

https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed-use-discounts#purchasecommitmentgpuslocalssd

Be sure to join me in the next section, where we’ll take a look at some other cost considerations when trying to optimize use and minimize costs.