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Module 3 - Planning and Configuring A Cloud Solution

Google's Pricing Calculator allows users to estimate costs for different Google Cloud products without having to configure those products first. It contains a multi-section form where users can input possible configurations and see pricing estimates. This helps with budgeting, which is one of the first stages in setting up a new project.

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Daniel Reyes
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180 views

Module 3 - Planning and Configuring A Cloud Solution

Google's Pricing Calculator allows users to estimate costs for different Google Cloud products without having to configure those products first. It contains a multi-section form where users can input possible configurations and see pricing estimates. This helps with budgeting, which is one of the first stages in setting up a new project.

Uploaded by

Daniel Reyes
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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One of the first stages in setting up a new project is budgeting.

Because there can be quite a number of variables that go into pricing a particular Cloud product,
having a way to pull all of that information together into a unified report - without having to
actually configure that product first - is very helpful.
This is where Google’s Pricing Calculator comes into play.

https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

The pricing calculator is a multi-section form.


Once you have some possible configurations in mind, you can use it to estimate costs for the
different products you will be using,
Cloud Storage lets you choose among four different types of storage classes: Regional,
Multi-regional, Nearline and Coldline. Here’s how to think about them: Multi-regional and
Regional are high-performance object storage, whereas Nearline and Coldline are backup and
archival storage. That’s why I placed that heavy dividing line between these two groups. All of
the storage classes are accessed in analogous ways using the Cloud Storage API, and they all
offer millisecond access times. Now let’s talk about how they differ.

Regional Storage lets you store your data in a specific GCP region, us-central1, europe-west1
or asia-east1. It’s cheaper than multi-regional storage, but it offers less redundancy.

Multi-Regional Storage, on the other hand, costs a bit more, but it’s geo-redundant. That means
you pick a broad geographical location, like United States, the European Union, or Asia, and
Cloud Storage stores your data in at least two geographic locations separated by at least 160
kilometers.

Multi-Regional Storage is appropriate for storing frequently accessed storing data: website
content, interactive workloads, or data that’s part of mobile and gaming applications. People use
regional storage, on the other hand, to store data close to their Compute Engine virtual
machines or their Kubernetes Engine clusters. That gives better performance for data-intensive
computations.

Now let’s talk about backup and archival.

Nearline storage is a low-cost, highly durable storage service for storing infrequently accessed
data. This storage class is a better choice than Multi-Regional Storage or Regional Storage in
scenarios where you plan to read or modify your data on average once a month or less. For
example, if you want to continuously add files to Cloud Storage and plan to access those files
once a month for analysis, Nearline Storage is a great choice.

Coldline Storage is a very-low-cost, highly durable storage service for data archiving, online
backup, and disaster recovery. Coldline Storage is the best choice for data that you plan to
access at most once a year, due to its slightly lower availability, 90-day minimum storage
duration, costs for data access, and higher per-operation costs. For example, if you want to
archive data or have access in the event of a disaster recovery event.

The availability of these storage classes varies, with multi-regional having the highest availability
of 99.95%, followed by regional with 99.9% and nearline and coldline with 99.9%.

As for pricing, all storage classes incur a cost per gigabyte of data stored per month, with
multi-regional having the highest storage price and coldline the lowest storage price. Egress and
data transfer charges may also apply.

In addition to those charges, Nearline storage also incurs an access fee per gigabyte of data
read, and Coldline storage incurs a higher fee per gigabyte of data read.
Load balancing is when two or more identical servers or server clusters have been created so
that if the load becomes too great, or if one or more servers should fail, then the remainder can
assist with or take over handling the load.
This is one way to create applications and services that are “highly available.”
Load balancing allows multiple servers (or clusters of servers) to function as a single computing
resource.
Load balancers can also be configured to add, or remove, these servers or server clusters from
the system to better meet demand.
This is known as “autoscaling.”
If you need cross-regional load balancing for a web application, use HTTP(S) load balancing.
Cloud load balancer considerations can be divided up as follows:
Global versus regional load balancing
External versus internal load balancing
Traffic type
Use global load balancing when your users and instances are globally distributed, your users
need access to the same applications and content, and you want to provide access using a
single anycast IP address. Global load balancing can also provide IPv6 termination.
Use regional load balancing when your users and instances are concentrated in one region and
you only require IPv4 termination.
Global load balancing requires you to use the Premium Tier of Network Service Tiers. For
regional load balancing, you can use Standard Tier.
GCP's load balancers can also be divided into external and internal load balancers.
External load balancers distribute traffic coming from the internet to your GCP network.
Internal load balancers distribute traffic within your GCP network.

The type of traffic your load balancer will handle is another factor in determining which load
balancer to use.
HTTP and HTTPS traffic require global, external load balancing.
TCP traffic can be handled by global, external load balancing; external, regional load balancing;
or internal, regional load balancing.
UDP traffic can be handled by external regional load balancing or internal regional load
balancing.
In this hands-on lab, you'll learn the differences between a network load balancer and a HTTP
load balancer, and how to set them up for your applications running on Google Compute Engine
virtual machines.

This lab is part of the Qwiklabs Cloud Architecture Quest.

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