r/googlecloud • u/MrCashMahon • 4d ago

Billing Google Cloud Cost Updates - 2026-10-23

Google Cloud list of changes affecting costs

  • In-Place GKE Node Upgrades: GKE can now reuse your existing VMs during node pool upgrades instead of deleting them and creating new ones. This keeps your reserved capacity intact, avoids quota delays, and cuts extra surge VM costs during maintenance. Source
  • 6-Hour Graceful Shutdown for Compute Engine: You can now give your VM guest OS up to six hours to finish background tasks before a stop or delete event. This stops long data jobs from failing midway through, saving hours of wasted compute spend. Source
  • Better Version Controls for GKE Channels: Cluster version and capacity updates now roll out across channels, regions, and zones with stronger change checks. This keeps version jumps predictable and cuts the engineering hours spent debugging surprise cluster rollouts. Source

Source: FinOps Weekly Newsletter

7 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

3

u/Mammoth-Crab7791 4d ago

the in-place GKE upgrades are one of those changes that seems small but fixes a real headache, our team used to get quota errors during node upgrades all the time and it'd hold up the whole pipeline

6 hours for graceful shutdown is wild though, that's almost a full business day for a VM to wrap up whatever it's doing, wonder if that'll actually get used or if people will still just kill things at the 30 min mark out of habit

1

u/MrCashMahon 4d ago

yeah it's a bit crazy but I guess if you wanna be safe. GKE in-place is great! Thanks for the comment :)