Cost of reading from mulit-region US bucket via US GCE VM with external IP

[ravwojdyla]

If I have a VM with an external IP in say region us-east1-*, that reads data from a multi-region US bucket, would that **read operation** (GCS read operation and networking only) be free or count towards "Download Worldwide Destinations" (due to External IP).

Google doc seem to suggest it's free, but on the other hand this medium post seem to suggest otherwise.

Also asked on SO, but did not get an answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71975366/cost-of-reading-from-mulit-region-us-bucket-via-us-gce-...

[kolban]

I am absolutely not authoritative on this answer 🙂 ...  The way I read it, the case that applies is:

> Data moves from a Cloud Storage bucket located in a multi-region to a different Google Cloud service located in a region, and both locations are on the same continent.

What I would suggest you do is run an experiment and then look at your fine grained billing logs that could be exported to BigQuery.  If you do find that there is a fee, the next thing I'd look into would be examination of Private Google Access.  Using that technology, you should be able to send requests to GCS without ever traversing the Internet (i.e. it doesn't matter whether your VMs have public IP addresses or not).

[ravwojdyla]

Thank you so much @kolban for the answer and suggestion, I appreciate it 🙂 That kind of experiment was definitely on my mind as well as the Private Access. But as you can imagine, it would require time and work (and as you can imagine there's plenty of other things to do that are more important right now). If it comes down to Google/GCP not be able (or not willing) to answer this question (which has been the case so far), I will be forced to do such an experiment myself, even though I would really appreciate an authoritative answer from someone at Google (which would save me time and effort). Is there any way to ping technical team or any other way to get an authoritative answer? Any help to get an answer would be appreciated.