[boulos]

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Thanks jedberg. You've definitely captured how we feel about it.

I will say that while our sustained use discount (SUD) works as you describe, our committed use discounts (CUD) are more similar to the AWS Flexible RIs. For some customers, even if it's obviously cheaper to use on-demand and just get the SUD benefit, they prefer the predictable "let me be sure I pay X" model.

As a note, even though CUDs and Flexible RIs are similar, I prefer ours (obviously). It's just a pile of cores and RAM in a region that you sign up to. That is easy enough to do in arrears that no ETL is necessary, and like you imagine: we want to automate this, too. We also don't play games with upfront payment or not, but most enterprises don't care.