Google Cloud will be making a change to how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot billing is reported.
On September 1, 2025, Google will change the units used for billing GKE Autopilot resources. Please note, this is a change in reporting units only and is designed for simplification. It will not impact the actual price you pay for your workloads.
In summary, what does this mean?
- What’s Changing? Billing for resources like CPU and GPU will switch from milli-units (e.g., milli-CPU) to whole units (e.g., CPU).
- When? The change will take effect on September 1, 2025.
- Will This Increase My Bill? No. There will be no change to your actual costs. A workload that costs $10 today will still cost $10 after this change.
- Do I Need to Do Anything? If you only review your total bill amount, no action is needed. If you have custom billing dashboards, reports, or scripts that analyze GKE usage, you will need to update them.
Understanding the Change in Detail
To help you understand exactly what is changing, here’s a simple breakdown.
Before September 1, 2025 (Current Method):
Resource consumption is measured in “milli-units,” which are 1/1000th of a whole unit.
- Example: A pod requesting 1.5 CPUs for one hour is currently billed as 1500 mCPU hours.
After September 1, 2025 (New Method):
The same resource consumption will be measured in whole units, which can include fractions.
- Example: The same pod requesting 1.5 CPUs for one hour will be billed as 1.5 CPU hours.
This change also applies to other resources like GPUs (e.g., milli-GPU to GPU).
Why is Google Making This Change?
This update is designed to simplify billing and create consistency across the Google Cloud ecosystem. By aligning Autopilot’s billing units with other services like Compute Engine (which already bills for whole vCPUs and hours), it becomes easier to understand and compare resource consumption and costs across your entire cloud infrastructure.
Who Needs to Take Action?
This change will primarily affect teams that perform detailed analysis on their billing data. You should review your setup if you use:
- Custom Billing Dashboards: Tools like Looker Studio, Grafana, or other BI platforms that ingest and visualize detailed Google Cloud billing exports.
- Financial Reporting Scripts: Any internal scripts or applications that parse billing data to allocate costs or forecast spending.
- Third-Party Cost Management Tools: If you connect a cost management platform to your billing data, you may need to ensure it can handle the new unit format.
Recommended Actions
We advise taking the following steps to ensure a smooth transition:
- Identify Your Tools: Audit your organization’s financial and technical operations to identify any custom dashboards, reports, or scripts that rely on GKE Autopilot billing data.
- Review Calculations: Examine these tools for any calculations that assume resource usage is in milli-units. These will need to be adjusted to work with whole units. For example, any formula that divides by 1000 to get to a whole CPU unit will no longer be necessary.
- Plan for the Update: Mark your calendar for the September 1, 2025 transition. All usage for the month of September will be reported in the new whole-unit format.
We are here to help you navigate this change. If you have any questions or need assistance reviewing your billing dashboards and reporting, please don’t hesitate to reach out.