by Eric Lam, Google Cloud Platform
When you purchase Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), you receive discounted prices in exchange for your commitment to use either a minimum level of resources or spend a minimum amount, for a specified term of one or three years.
There are two types of Committed Use Discounts available with Google Cloud: (1) Resource Based CUDs and (2) Spend Based CUDs.
Resource-based committed use discounts provide a discount in exchange for your commitment to use a minimum level of Compute Engine resources in a particular region. It is ideal for predictable and steady state workload. By default CUDs are scoped at project level so that would be similar to Reserved instances being applied at account level. There is also an option to turn on CUD sharing which allows the discount to be shared across all projects tied to the billing account. The discount is proportional distribution attributes benefit and cost across business entities
Example: 50 vCPU for N2D in us-central1
Spend-based committed use discounts provide a discount in exchange for your commitment to spend a minimum amount ($/hour) for a product or service. It is ideal for predictable spend; measured in $/hr of equivalent on-demand spend
Example: $50 / hour spend in Cloud SQL (Postgres) in us-central1
A useful CUD monitoring tool is the CUD analysis dashboard which helps you to visualize and evaluate the effectiveness and financial impact of the Committed Use Discounts that you have purchased. In addition, you can use the CUDs cost breakdown chart to monitor CUD costs and answer the ever so popular question” how much money are CUDs saving me?”