What is the GCP pricing model and how do sustained use discounts work?
Answer
GCP uses a pay-as-you-go model billed per second (with some per-minute minimums). Unique pricing advantages: Sustained Use Discounts (SUDs): automatically applied to Compute Engine VMs when they run for more than 25% of a billing month — no commitment required. At 100% usage, you get 30% off. This is automatic — you get the discount just by running VMs continuously. Committed Use Discounts (CUDs): commit to 1 or 3 years for 55–70% savings on VMs and databases. Preemptible/Spot VMs: 60–91% savings for fault-tolerant workloads. Custom machine types: pay only for the exact vCPU and RAM you need. Free tier: certain services have monthly free usage (1 f1-micro VM, 5GB Cloud Storage, 1TB BigQuery per month). GCP generally has competitive pricing compared to AWS, especially for compute and networking egress.