1

Recently, a charge for "Storage PD Capacity" started showing up in Google Cloud. According to the charge, I'm using 7.27 GiB somewhere even though I don't directly use any VMs or Storage Disks.

The only Compute Engine product that I use is 1 Google Cloud Run service which has no persistent storage. My service uses a static outbound IP address which I configured using this guide. This uses a Serverless VPC Access Connector which has 2 f1-micro instances active at all times (it never scales past that). However, I don't see any mention of persistent storage used by these instances on the pricing page (nor can I think of why they would use 7GB).

The only other product I use is Google Cloud API Gateway which I don't think would need storage, especially considering it doesn't even cache responses.

The only thing that I have to go off of is that these charges started appearing on April 16. On this day, I made the following changes:

  • moved my Cloud Run service from us-central1 to us-east4
  • moved my API Gateway from us-central1 to us-east4
  • moved my static IP address from us-central1 to us-east4, following this guide again

By "moved" I mean deleted and recreated from scratch.

$0.32 a day isn't much but just trying to understand where this storage is being used!

Disks Billing

kym
  • 818
  • 7
  • 12
  • The VPC connector are billed as VMs and all VMs uses a disk (PD) so this is the reason. I think the pricing docs only mention that the connectors are billed as VMs and even if those imply all the possible charges of a VM the docs should clarify this. You may want to contact GCP billing support to get an official answer. – Puteri Apr 28 '23 at 02:15
  • @Puteri I considered that, but as mentioned in my post I was using a VPC connector prior to Apr 16 (in us-central1 instead of us-east4) and was not seeing these charges. Also, 7 GB for 2 specialized VM instances seems like a lot – kym Apr 28 '23 at 02:41
  • I recommend contacting Google Cloud Billing support. You are being charged for two disk instances that match the micro VM's regions. What does `view your Serverless VPC Access costs in the Google Cloud console by filtering your billing reports by the label key serverless-vpc-access` show? – John Hanley Apr 28 '23 at 03:37
  • It requires internal support feel free to contact [google support](https://cloud.google.com/support-hub). – Sandeep Vokkareni Apr 28 '23 at 12:36
  • I reached out to google support. I'll update here once I find out more. Thanks everyone! – kym Apr 28 '23 at 20:01

1 Answers1

1

After a few weeks of wasted back and forth with Google Cloud support, I was able to get to the bottom of this.

TLDR; Persistent Disk (PD) Storage has a free tier in us-central1 but no free tier in us-east4. So after moving VPC Serverless Access Connector to us-east4, I started getting charged for PD storage.

VPC serverless access connectors use Compute Engine Instance Groups under the hood. Here's a screenshot from Google support (this seems to be an internal-only view as it's not visible from for me in the console): VPC Serverless Access Instance Group

These are VMs that use Persistent Disk (PD) Storage. When I switched the VPC serverless access connector from us-central1 to us-east4, the PD storage also changed: enter image description here

Previously, I hadn't noticed the "Storage PD Capacity" charge because it was 0. After switching to us-east4, the cost became non-zero and so I noticed it. Based on the SKUs,

kym
  • 818
  • 7
  • 12