Use case
Reducing GCP Cloud Costs by 48% with Cloud Cost Optimization
- Rampat Sitaram Varma
About the Customer
BeQuinzo is an AI-driven platform that automates the process of converting long-form video content into short, engaging clips optimized for social media platforms. The company leverages Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its core operations, with a substantial footprint across GCP services such as Compute Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL. BeQuinzo relies heavily on cloud resources to power its mission-critical applications and operations. As their cloud infrastructure matured, so did the need for improved financial governance and operational efficiency.
Customer Challenge
As cloud usage scaled, the customer began to encounter rapidly rising cloud expenditures, particularly in services like Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Cloud SQL. A lack of resource controls in both production and non-production environments led to inefficiencies and inflated operational costs. Furthermore, there were no data lifecycle policies in place, leading to unnecessary accumulation of stale data and prolonged storage costs.
The absence of real-time visibility into usage and cost patterns also hampered decision-making, making it difficult for stakeholders to identify optimization opportunities. Without a clear strategy in place, the cost inefficiencies threatened to impact the company’s operational budgets and long-term cloud sustainability.
Solution
IAMOPS collaborated with the customer to deliver a comprehensive cloud cost optimization initiative, focused on GCP. The project spanned from July 2024 to December 2024 and involved a detailed IAMOPS performed the cost analysis, proactive optimization actions, and implementation of cost-control best practices.
Key Steps Taken:
- Cost Analysis and Reporting by IAMOPS: A detailed breakdown of GCP usage and cost trends over the six-month period was compiled. Monthly reports highlighted key cost drivers, revealing a reduction in spend from $65,263.07 in July to $32,438.50 in December 2024.
- Compute Optimization with Spot Instances: By migrating both staging and production post service instances from on-demand to spot instances, the customer realized significant savings in Compute Engine usage without compromising workload reliability. Reduced monthly cost cloud expenditure from around $18,000 to $7,000.
- Scheduled Shutdown of Non-Production Environments: IAMOPS implemented automated schedules to shut down non-critical development and testing environments during off-peak hours. This prevented unnecessary resource consumption while maintaining developer productivity during active hours. Reduced monthly Cost was around $5000.
- Database Resource Right-Sizing: The production Cloud SQL database was optimized by reducing CPU allocation by 50% while maintaining storage, ensuring cost efficiency with no degradation in performance. Reduced monthly Cloud SQL from around $13,300 to $6,000.
- Cloud Storage Lifecycle Management: Policies were applied to automatically delete outdated data, effectively halving the customer’s cloud storage consumption and costs. Reduced monthly Cloud Storage Cost from around $23,726 to $14,000.
- Optimization of Security Command Service Subscription: Their plan was premium, however after checks according to customer needs from security prespective the free tier was found as suitable as none of the premium feature was mandatory for them and they were not using it.
- Reduced monthly Security Cost from around $5,000 to $0.
Results & Benefits
| Title | Description | Cost Reduced (July-December) | Percentage Reduction |
| Compute Engine | Migrated to spot instances, reducing on-demand compute usage without compromising workload reliability. | -$11,000 | 66.67% |
| Non-Production Environments | Automated shutdown of non-critical environments during off-peak hours, optimizing resource consumption. | -$5,000 | 100% |
| Cloud SQL Database | Right-sized the database by reducing CPU allocation by 50%, optimizing resources without affecting performance. | -$7,300 | 53.85% |
| Cloud Storage | Applied lifecycle management policies to delete outdated data, reducing storage consumption. | -$9,726 | 39.13% |
| Security Command Service | Switched from premium service to free tier, maintaining essential security features without extra costs. | -$5,000 | 100% |
| Total | -$38,026 | ||
- Significantly improved visibility into cloud expenditure, enabling informed decision-making.
- Strengthened governance over GCP resource utilization.
Analysis Performed by IAMOPS:
IAMOPS performed a full Total Cost of Ownership assessment across all major GCP services. Key insights included:
- Identification of top cost drivers: Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL.
- Discovery of underutilized resources and opportunities for de-provisioning or scheduling.
Learning from the Project:
- Regular Cost Audits are essential to maintain budget control and cloud efficiency.
- Real-Time Monitoring is critical for identifying trends and acting on anomalies before they escalate.
- Automation of Resource Management, like scheduling shutdowns, is a simple but powerful way to control costs.
- Right-Sizing and Spot Instance Utilization significantly lowers compute costs while preserving service quality.
Best Practices Involved:
- Cost Visibility: Enabled with detailed, ongoing cost monitoring and reporting.
- Automation: Implemented scheduled shutdowns for dev/test environments to avoid idle cost.
- Resource Optimization: Strategic rightsizing of compute and database resources.
- Data Lifecycle Management: Automated deletion policies for stale Cloud Storage data to reduce accumulation and cost over time.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
