Load Balancer Forwarding Rule and Data Processing
A Google Cloud load balancer bills in two parts: an hourly charge for each forwarding rule whether or not anything uses it, and a per-gigabyte charge for data it processes. The hourly part is why a forgotten test load balancer costs money for months.
Billed: An hourly charge per forwarding rule (first five priced together, then per rule) plus a per-gibibyte data-processing charge.
What triggers this charge
- Every forwarding rule that exists, billed hourly, regardless of traffic. Zero requests is not zero cost.
- All data processed by the load balancer, on top of any egress charge for the same bytes.
- Ingress controllers in Kubernetes, each of which typically creates its own load balancer — a cluster with many Ingress objects can accumulate a surprising number.
How to reduce it
Delete idle load balancers
Forwarding rules with no traffic for 30 days are almost always left over from a test or a decommissioned service. This is the cleanest saving in the whole networking family.
Consolidate Ingress objects
A single Ingress with host- or path-based routing replaces many, collapsing several forwarding-rule charges into one.
Match the tier to the requirement
Regional and Standard-tier load balancing costs less than global Premium tier. For a single-region service with regional users, the global option is often buying something nobody needs.
Rates
Now find out how much of this you are actually paying.
Finitizer breaks your Google Cloud bill down to the SKU, shows how each one has moved since last week, and separates rate changes from usage changes — so you know whether to talk to engineering or to procurement.