Case Study: Hidden Serverless VPC Access Costs
My GCP bill tripled because of hidden resources I didn’t notice for months. A simple, structured report helped surface the problem quickly.
Context
Sergey runs a few pet projects on Google Cloud (Odoo websites and a small API). Expected monthly spend: $20–25. Actual bills kept arriving for about $70.
Problem
Standard GCP billing views showed costs by service and SKU (e.g., Compute Engine vCPU, Storage), but not by specific resources. Sergey checked known resources and missed unfamiliar ones like Serverless VPC Access connectors.
Discovery
After months of searching, Sergey tried fAInOps. In under five minutes, the report highlighted 47 idle Serverless VPC Access connectors costing about $48 per month, which standard views had obscured.
Fix
He removed unnecessary connectors in GCP: VPC Network → Serverless VPC Access. The cleanup took minutes.
Result
The following monthly bill dropped from about $70 to $22 (≈ −69%).
Key takeaways
- Always clean up after experiments. Check lesser-known areas like VPC connectors.
- GCP provides tools; cost responsibility stays with you.
- Different perspectives matter. A FinOps view focused on resources can make problems obvious.