We received an email from Google, “[Correction] Inter-region Data Transfer billing fix from Google Compute Engine (GCE) to Google Cloud Storage (GCS)”. It advises to “Review the cross-region traffic volume from Compute (GCE) to Storage (GCS) for write operations to estimate the changes to Inter-region Data Transfer usage on your bill.”
I’m not sure how to review cross-region traffic volume, though. Is there a particular metric or billing SKU that we can check? In particular, our main GCS bucket is multi-region, and our GCE VMs are in us-central1, and I’m not sure how to check if this upcoming billing change will impact us.
There is a note in the email, “In case of GCS bucket types like dual region (DR) and multi-region (MR), the Inter-region Data Transfer applies only when there is no overlap of regions within the scope of the DR/MR GCS buckets” but it’s not clear to me if there is overlap or not. If I have a US multi-region bucket, and the VMs are all in the US, am I safe?
To check your cross-region traffic volume, you could utilize GCP’s Cloud Monitoring Workload Metrics like compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/sent_bytes_count value and compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/received_bytes_count value which you can filter by your GCE instance source and GCS target bucket.
Based on this documentation, cross-region Data Transfer from GCE to GCS was intended to be charged as Inter-region Data Transfer per pricing policy. If you are using a US multi-region bucket, and the VMs are all in the US, pricing for this Inter-region Data Transfer from GCE to GCS in different regions will leverage the same price as VM-VM Data Transfer between GCP regions.
If you have any other questions and specific concerns when it comes to Billing, you can reach out to our Cloud Billing support directly.
Thanks for the response. One thing is still unclear: “If you are using a US multi-region bucket, and the VMs are all in the US, pricing for this Inter-region Data Transfer from GCE to GCS in different regions will leverage the same price as VM-VM Data Transfer between GCP regions.”
Does this mean that multi-region buckets are always treated as a separate region from the US GCE regions? The majority of our data transfer is from a us-central1-a to a GCS bucket in “us” - will that transfer be treated as inter-region?