When optimizing your resource costs and utilization, it’s important to consider network pricing. This is a cost consideration that is sometimes overlooked. That being the case, let’s take a look at some common network pricing information that you should be paying attention to.

While there are no network costs for ingress traffic, there ARE networking costs associated with egress traffic, external IP addresses, network telemetry, packet mirroring, and other networking resources.

VM-to-VM egress traffic, for example, is billed at $0.01 per GB when that traffic travels from one Google Cloud zone to another within the same region, using internal IP addresses. VM-to-VM egress is also billed at $0.01 per GB when both VMs are in the same Google Cloud region, regardless of zone, when using external IP addresses. Egress traffic between Google Cloud regions within Europe gets billed at $0.02 per GB, while that same traffic between regions within Asia is billed at $0.05 per GB.

So, why is this important? Well, it’s important because, when you are architecting a solution, you can cost yourself far more money in egress traffic charges than you need to, if you aren’t careful about your VM placement.

The table on your screen shows all of the different VM-to-VM egress charges that you might encounter:

Internet egress rates are even higher than VM-to-VM egress rates. As you can see in the chart here, internet egress traffic can cost as much as $0.23 per GB in us-central-1. It’s not difficult to see that traffic can get expensive in a hurry if you aren’t careful in your solution design.

External IP addresses also incur costs. Such costs are associated with both static AND ephemeral external IPs. Even worse, if you reserve a static external IP address but don’t assign it to a resource, you get charged even more for that external IP than you would had you assigned it to a resource. I should mention, however, that you are NOT charged for static external IP addresses that are assigned to forwarding rules.

The table on your screen shows the different types of static IP address charges.

There are even network costs associated with network telemetry. For example, if you wish to do any form of network logging, you are likely to incur charges. As a matter of fact, you are charged for VPC Flow Logs, Firewall Rules Logging, and for Cloud NAT Logging.

The table on your screen shows how these logs are charged.

Data that is processed by Packet Mirroring also comes with a fee. At the time of this course writing, ingress data processed by load balancer for Packet Mirroring is charged at $0.008 per GB in us-central-1.

Many other network resources and services incur charges as well. You can read about them at the URL that you see on your screen:

https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing

So, it’s important to keep these kinds of network costs in mind as you design your solution to run on the GCP platform. If you are careful, and you keep network pricing in mind, you can design solutions in a way that not only meet your technical requirements, but also minimize costs.