Google Cloud announced the availability of Hyperdisk Storage Pools for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, allowing you to save costs through simplified management of Hyperdisk storage. Hyperdisk Storage Pools are a pre-purchased collection of capacity, throughput, and IOPS that you can then provision to your applications as needed. When you place Hyperdisk block storage disks in storage pools, you can share capacity and performance among all the disks in a pool, optimizing for both operations and cost. Hyperdisk Storage Pools help you lower your storage-related Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by as much as 30-50%.
One example of how Hyperdisk Storage Pools can help save money is if you have a demanding stateful application running in us-central1-a, and you want to be able to tune the performance for your workload. You choose Hyperdisk Balanced as the block storage for the workload. Instead of trying to right-size each disk in your application, you use a Hyperdisk Balanced Advanced Capacity, Advanced Performance Storage Pool. You purchase the capacity and performance up front. Pool capacity is only consumed when your application writes data to the disks, and pool performance is consumed when IOPS/throughput usage is observed by the disks in the storage pool.
To better understand how Hyperdisk Storage Pools work, it's important to understand Hyperdisk itself. Hyperdisk is a next-generation network-attached block storage service that allows for IOPS and throughput configuration in addition to capacity. Furthermore, it’s possible to tune the performance of the disks, even after initial configuration, to your exact application needs, removing excess capacity and unlocking cost savings.
Overall, Hyperdisk Storage Pools are a great way to save on block storage costs on GKE. By pooling your storage resources and managing them centrally, you can reduce your TCO while also improving application performance.
