Google Delivers API For Accessing Real-Time Price Catalog For Cloud Services

Google on Tuesday made available through APIs the list prices for its full catalog of cloud services. This makes it easier for partners to accurately predict costs for their customers and deliver efficiencies that save them money.

The new service, Cloud Billing Catalog API, delivers programmatic, real-time access to pricing for all Google Cloud Platform services, and all SKUs within them, including regional availability.

Coupled with Google Cloud Billing API, a service for automating management of accounts, partners will find it easier to "predict bills, estimate costs and reconcile rates," Rachna Vargiya, a Google product manager, said in a blog.

[Related: Apple Confirms Using Google Cloud Platform For iCloud Service]

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

Simon Margolis, director of cloud platform at SADA Systems, said programmatic access to pricing for every GCP SKU, in real-time, will enable the Los Angeles-based Google partner to automate decisions about provisioning cloud resources for customers.

That functionality can be made even more effective in optimizing costs when paired with utilization data coming from other services, such as Google's Stackdriver.

"We're able to suggest architectures that not only achieve the greatest performance and high availability but also the greatest cost-efficiency," Margolis told CRN.

The API-accessible catalog might do more than boost the capabilities of Google's own bill management service.

Princeton, N.J.-based MediaAgility built a custom tool that translates cloud billing into a format easier for customers to understand, taking into account all compute, storage, and network charges and presenting their cost for each batch job.

Now that Google partner is looking at the new Cloud Billing Catalog to see if an integration can upgrade that internal capability, according to its CEO, Rajesh Abhyankar. "We are evaluating how this new API can help us improve that tool with real-time pricing," Abhyankar said.

The API can also be integrated with cost management tools from other vendors, Google's Vargiya said.