Pay-As-You-Go Billing in the Google Cloud

With the festive season wrapped up, so too concludes much of the associated web-based commercialism we’ve all grown to love and hate. And while this period may be a boon for businesses, it can be a challenging time for the IT departments responsible for the upkeep of these e-commerce websites and targeted marketing campaigns. You see, these kinds of seasonal activities are short-term projects, meaning that acquisition of the infrastructure and services required to support these applications on a perpetual, CapEx basis can be difficult to justify with finance departments.

For many, leveraging the public cloud and its promise of enhanced operational flexibility through an OpEx based consumption model is a more enticing alternative when compared to purchasing dedicated servers for private data centers; resolving the infrastructure aspect of this problem.

But what of the supporting application services?

To architect an optimal solution, both the infrastructure and services should be equally flexible, allowing both to be spun up (or down) whenever, with no long-term commitments or constraints--simply paying for what was used and nothing more.

This functionality has been offered for F5’s application delivery and security services via Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) consumption models in both the AWS and Azure public clouds for some time now, but today, F5 is pleased to announce this same licensing flexibility in the Google Cloud.

Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) BIG-IP Virtual Editions have been available in the Google Cloud since mid-2017 through F5’s Good, Better and Best product bundles with each supporting up to 5Gbps of throughput – affording customers the freedom to employ an individually tailored solution. F5’s new PAYG BIG-IP VEs for the Google Cloud follow suit, offering the same degree of licensing flexibility with identical product bundles and throughput options.

And seasonal fluctuation is just one example where an OpEx model may make more sense than the traditional CapEx based model, but there are others. For instance, we appreciate that choosing an ADC provider can be a difficult task, often involving numerous stakeholders and a large, up-front investment. This new licensing model empowers you to ‘try before you buy’, enabling you to experiment with the BIG-IP VE and its comprehensive array of services without making any long-term commitments, and allowing you to make a much more informed decision on any longstanding purchases.

Alternatively, maybe you’re an existing F5 customer currently utilizing the BIG-IP in a private data center, while also investigating a possible move to the public cloud. With PAYG BIG-IP VEs you can quickly and easily replicate your on-premise architecture in the cloud for development or test purposes, allowing you to more confidently lift and shift applications and application services to the cloud when the time comes. And this process can be further sped up and simplified when used in conjunction with F5’s Google Deployment Manager templates, which facilitate fast, reliable and replicable BIG-IP VE deployments in the Google Cloud.

For more information on F5 in the Google Cloud, check out this solution overview, or head straight over to our new PAYG listings on the Google Cloud Launcher.