How should we approach a TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) analysis for migrating from Azure to GCP?

Google Cloud Compute Infrastructure
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have Azure infrastructure and usage metrics across more than 20 subscriptions. I’ve been asked to perform a TCO analysis for migrating these workloads to GCP.

The challenge is that there is no clear architecture documentation, no complete billing invoices, and only partial information available for only a few subscriptions.

My questions are:

  • Is it practical to produce a reliable TCO analysis with this level of information?

  • What is the right way to approach this situation?

  • How should I estimate the migration timeline to GCP?

  • Is it better to request more information, or should I proceed by making reasonable assumptions, mapping Azure services to equivalent GCP services, and estimating GCP costs based on those assumptions?

This is a mid-sized enterprise environment.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

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Hello @Mohamed_rasvi,

What a great project!

First, if not already done, check Migrate from Azure to Google Cloud.

Now, for your questions:

Is it practical to produce a reliable TCO analysis with this level of information?

Kind of. If you want something approximate but still reliable, you definitely need to use the Google Cloud’s pricing calculator. You have to plan your GCP usage based on the one on Azure. Don’t forget to include commitment if possible as they can drastically lower the bill.

You can also use the Google Cloud Platform SKUs catalog to explore the cost with a higher granularity.

If you’re not really comfortable doing all that by yourself, which is understandable, you can request a GCP salesperson to help you.

What is the right way to approach this situation?

I would say, following the above recommendation and definitely go with a GCP salesperson because they will make their best effort to make you move by enabling every possible reduction and they may offer you the possibility to have an external company to supervise/assist you with the migration. GCP has partnerships with external companies specialized in TCO.

That said, if you’re confident in your skills, you can (should?) keep your sovereignty. The company you’re working for may refuse such partnership anyway.

How should I estimate the migration timeline to GCP?

Very hard to say with the information provided. If it’s a mid-sized enterprise (50-250 employees?) with 20 subscriptions, you should plan to have resources duplicated until the migration is done and keep the old one on Azure until you’re certain everything works perfectly.

Since the cloud enables it, you don’t really have to worry about wasting physical computers over time. You can just boot it whenever you need it, even to just test it.

So, the timeline depends on you, the services used, and the management. Time is key and you don’t have to migrate everything at once.

Is it better to request more information, or should I proceed by making reasonable assumptions, mapping Azure services to equivalent GCP services, and estimating GCP costs based on those assumptions?

Depends on your level of confidence. Ask for help if you’re not certain or just go with everything written above. To me, I think that you can make some assumptions pretty easily since you have an existing infrastructure on Azure that can show what the real usage is.

Hope this helps!

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