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Google Cloud Next 2026: Recap

Your GCP Costs Were Hiding Opportunities. Here's What We Found.

FinOps to FinOps. Engineer to Engineer.

Thanks to everyone who booked a briefing with Taylor at Google Cloud Next. Missed us? Get the same personalized walkthrough, no event required.

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  • Taylor HouckFinOps Evangelist, PointFive

Google Cloud Next 2026 Has Wrapped

Thanks to everyone who booked time with Taylor at the event. Want the same personalized GCP efficiency walkthrough? Book a demo any time, no conference required.

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Meet Taylor Houck

Taylor has helped hundreds of engineering and FinOps leaders uncover hidden cloud waste and build sustainable optimization practices. This isn't a sales pitch, it's a consulting conversation about your cloud.

Host, FinOps in Action Podcast. Creator of PointFive's Cloud Efficiency Hub. Joined by a PointFive Solutions Engineer for technical deep-dives.

Trusted by the FinOps Community

FinOps in Action Podcast / 63+ Episodes. Taylor regularly connects with the industry's leading FinOps practitioners. Guests from leading organizations:

  • Adobe
  • Deloitte
  • Cisco
  • IHG Hotels
  • Carnival
  • Accenture
  • Alteryx
  • SoftwareOne
  • AWS
  • Procore
  • Euroclear
  • SAP
  • Invesco
  • Sysco
  • Gasunie
  • Avaloq
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What's Hiding in Your Google Cloud?

These are real findings from PointFive customers running on GCP. Each one is missed or only partly covered by GCP's native tools.

Missing Autoclass on GCS Buckets

GCP Recommender suggests per-object class changes but never recommends enabling Autoclass, which automates the entire process. One-line gcloud command to fix. Effort 1 / Risk 1. Seen in 78% of GCP environments.

Suboptimal GCS Soft Delete Policy

A relatively new GCP feature that defaults to 7-day retention. On high-churn buckets, costs compound silently. No native tool flags this. Effort 1 / Risk 1. Seen in 42% of GCP environments.

Underutilized Cloud SQL Storage

GCP Recommender handles CPU/memory rightsizing but doesn't separately analyze storage provisioning vs. actual usage. Over-provisioned storage is invisible. Effort 1 / Risk 2. Seen in 65% of GCP environments.

Suboptimal Managed Instance Group Types

Google's MIG rightsizing recommendations exclude regional, autoscaled, and load-balanced groups. PointFive analyzes MIG templates and recommends machine type changes at the template level across all instances. Effort 2 / Risk 2. Seen in 38% of GCP environments.

Suboptimal Cloud Logging Architecture

Log routing and exclusion configurations that silently accumulate cost. No native tool analyzes Cloud Logging architecture for cost efficiency. Effort 2 / Risk 1. Seen in 55% of GCP environments.

GCP is just the start

  • 500+ detections across cloud and data platforms

    GCP is just the start. PointFive covers AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, and Databricks.

  • Measure the impact

    Prioritize opportunities for your workloads and measure the effect of implemented changes against actual usage and billing.