Question

A FinOps review of your company's GCP environment reveals that a fleet of ~200 Compute Engine VMs running steady-state batch and internal tooling workloads shows CPU utilization consistently below 15% and memory below 20% over the past 60 days. Leadership wants to reduce spend without changing the workloads themselves, and asks the DevOps team for a data-driven approach that minimizes manual guesswork. Which action best addresses this?

Accepted Answer

Apply the machine-type rightsizing recommendations surfaced by the Recommender API / Active Assist in the console, validating each recommendation before resizing the instances

Answer

Purchase 3-year committed use discounts for the current machine types to lock in the lowest possible rate for the fleet

Answer

Convert all 200 VMs to Spot VMs to take advantage of the lowest available pricing tier

Answer

Enable sustained use discounts on the project so the underutilized VMs automatically receive a billing credit