How do Google charge for adding AEAD encryption to BigQuery?

Question

Hope someone can point me towards a calculator or a reference document. We are considering adding AEAD encryption to some of the data elements / columns in BigQuery but we can not workout how this would effect our BQ compute costs. Is it separated out ? or is the cost bundled into the query costs ?

Are there any rules of thumb we can use to estimate ?

I have reviewed the GCP docs and cost calculators but am unable to find an answer.

Answer 1

You found nothing because there is nothing. In BigQuery, you have 2 types of pricing model:

• Pay as you go: pay the volume of data that you process. The slots (computing units) are not charged but limited to 1600 slots max
• Reservation: pay the slots (autoscale or baseline) and process the volume of data that you want.

In both case, the processing speed will be limited by the number of slots available

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That being said, AEAD encryption functions consume computing power (i.e. slots).

• If you are in pay as you go, it's won't cost more, it could be slower
• If you are reservation based: If you use baseline, it won't cost more, it could be slower. If you use slot autoscale, it could cost more because more slots are used for the encryption process and it could be slower also.

In the end, there is no dedicated cost for this feature. It could cost more according to your billing model, but not sure!