Introduction:
As cloud-native businesses scale, infrastructure costs often grow faster than expected. That’s what we experienced running our workloads on AWS — powerful but expensive. After extensive analysis, we made the strategic decision to migrate to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The result? A 30% reduction in infrastructure costs, improved application performance, and better long-term scalability.
Why We Considered Migration from AWS
Running on AWS gave us a solid start, but over time we faced:
- High EC2 and EBS costs with limited transparency
- Complex billing structure with unexpected charges
- Vendor lock-in with limited support for open technologies
- Growing cloud spend despite optimization efforts
We needed a solution that was cost-effective. It also had to be future-ready. That’s where Google Cloud Platform stood out.
Key Reasons We Chose Google Cloud
1. Sustained Usage Discounts (Automatic Savings)
Unlike AWS’s reserved instances, GCP applies automatic sustained usage discounts — no need to pre-commit. This immediately cut our compute spend by 20%+ without changing our workload patterns.
2. Custom VM Types
Google Cloud allowed us to define custom VM configurations — no more paying for unused CPU or RAM. This helped us right-size our workloads and improve efficiency.
3. Preemptible VMs for Dev/Test
For non-production workloads, we leveraged Preemptible VMs, which are ~80% cheaper and ideal for batch or stateless jobs.
4. Innovative Networking Pricing
GCP’s ingress and egress pricing is simpler and often cheaper than AWS. This is especially true when using global load balancing and Cloud CDN.
5. Built-In Cost Management Tools
Google Cloud’s Billing and Cost Insights tools gave us full visibility and control. AWS did not have this capability in its native tools.
How We Executed the Migration
Our phased migration plan looked like this:
- Phase 1: Assessment & Architecture Planning
- Phase 2: Lift-and-shift of stateless services using Migrate to Virtual Machines
- Phase 3: Refactoring apps using Cloud Run and GKE
- Phase 4: Optimization and cost tuning with Cloud Monitoring + Recommender
We completed the transition in 10 weeks, leveraging help from our Google Cloud Premier Partner for architectural validation and automation.
Total savings: ~30% reduction in monthly spend without sacrificing performance.
What You Can Learn from Our Move
If you’re currently on AWS and struggling with growing costs, GCP is a smart alternative. It’s especially attractive for:
- Cloud-native apps running containers or serverless
- Workloads with predictable compute usage
- Businesses that want better TCO with built-in intelligence
Final Thoughts:
Migration can seem intimidating, but with the right strategy and tools, the cost and time savings are real. Google Cloud has matured rapidly, and its pricing, flexibility, and innovation are hard to ignore.
📥 Ready to Explore a Cost-Saving Migration?
We’ve helped several businesses cut cloud spend by 25–40% with customized GCP migration roadmaps.
✅ [Book a Free 30-min Assessment Call]
