Cloud Storage Data Egress Costs

[ewuraba]

Hi, what's best practices to limit data egress charges on files in cloud storage? Is it to enable requester pay on the bucket or limit availability to a particular region... considering both have their disadvantages 

[VishalBulbule]

Hi @ewuraba 

First option is not always applicatble when you are using your data for your application and for this feature requester has to provide their billing project in data access request. Enabling Requester Pays is useful, for example, if you have a lot of data you want to make available to users, but you don't want to be charged for their access to that data.

Limiting availanility to particular region would be best option in most of the cases considering below pricing

[ewuraba]

Ok this is helpful considering the free option for the 3rd use case...

Meaning that to use requester pay the data needs to be "important enough/ or one that's really sort after

[kolban]

What are the overall requirements?  I got to looking here https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing and see egress charges appear to be approx 12 cents/GB with the first 100GB free per month.  Do you want to limit data egress by user or do you want to cut-it-all-off after a certain amount for everyone?

[ewuraba]

for everyone

[kolban]

I seem to see that the cost for egress from Google Cloud Storage is identical to the cost for egress from a Google Cloud Compute Engine.  This seems to open up some new alternatives.  It appears you could provide your own front end running on Compute Engine that could monitor the amount of data it has served and when it has served "enough" it wouldn't serve any more.

Another thought is to utilize something like "Cloud Run" to expose your data.  Cloud Run has no egress charges but instead constrains a single response to be 32MB or less.  However, you have now switched the puzzle from constraining network egress charges to constraining number of Cloud Run invocations.   If you are trying to protect against bad actors sending high volume requests and running up your charges, you might want to look into Google Cloud Armor to front end your apps access to the data.  Cloud Armour may be able to intercept bad actors before they reach the app and hence request data egress.

[ewuraba]

ok this helps to consider best solution for the use case thanks...