In April-2021, Google released1 for Preview a BigQuery enhancement supporting Table Sampling2. This feature allows you to process a subset of the data in a BigQuery table while reducing costs associated with scanning and processing the entire table or partition.
Read more →
In March-2021, Google released1 for General Availability a Dataproc enhancement supporting Stop/Startable Clusters2. This feature allows you to stop an inactive Dataproc cluster, to later be re-started when it is needed again.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at this feature, with an aim to better understand its cost implications and to help you determine if it will be helpful to your cost-reduction efforts.
Read more →
In November 2020, Google released1 a Pub/Sub feature called Message Filtering2. This feature can help reduce unnecessary invocations of an HTTP endpoint and reduce egress traffic, both of which can help you reduce infrastructure costs.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at this feature, with an aim to better understand its cost implications and to help you determine if it will be helpful to your cost-reduction efforts.
Read more →
“Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors… and miss."
- Robert Heinlein
You may be paying more tax on your cloud expenses than is necessary. Don’t assume Google or your reseller knows the correct amount to charge.
Read more →
“Trust dies but mistrust blossoms”
- Sophocles
When you have responsibility for a significant expense it is important for you to manage that expense. If you do that poorly, you can lose the trust of your organization’s executive team. In this article, we look at what poor cloud cost management looks like, and we look at the problems it can lead to that hold your organization back.
Read more →
…Penny wise but pound foolish…
…Tripping over dollars to pick up pennies…
It’s foolish to give up $100 to save $1. Yet that’s what happens when we over-invest in cost optimization. We save $1 and miss an opportunity worth $100.
Read more →
BigQuery is a flagship Google Cloud product. It is a managed data warehouse service. Its integration into Google and 3rd party ecosystems makes it a powerful tool for democratizing data. It can become one of your largest Google Cloud Platform (GCP) costs - and brings unique management challenges.
Read more →
Negligent trust is when someone depends on another to take care of something, but the other doesn’t know that they need to take care of it.
We’ve learned, through some difficult lessons, that this ambiguous attitude toward responsibilities doesn’t work with Information Security.
Read more →
People hate budgets. They hate budgeting. A common attitude is that budgets are only useful for being rolled up to hit people over the head with when things don’t go as planned. They’re only created when Finance demands them. Minimal effort is put into their creation “because too many unknowns”, and once created, they’re completely ignored until the cycle is repeated next year.
Read more →
No one likes to be surprised by a large expense. With cloud infrastructure, a simple mistake left unattended can result in an unexpectedly high bill. This is true of small $5 a month personal accounts and it is true of the largest accounts.
Read more →