So obviously this is an extreme, but I worked for a company that had long dismissed third party cloud providers as too expensive (customers would be routing all of their network traffic through our data centers, so obviously the bandwidth costs would just be too dang high). Then that company got purchased by a certain mega corporation who then negotiated an exclusive deal with GCP, and the math flipped. It was now far too expensive to run our own set of datacenters. Google was willing to take such a low margin on bandwidth that it made no sense not to.
So in this case, hundreds of billions. But the principle stands at lower company sizes, just with different numbers and amounts of leverage.
I don’t remember if our first enterprise agreement was at $1M or $2M, but it was low and in that neighborhood [but also 10 years ago, well before cloud was the default and had growth baked into it].
Cloud providers are looking for multi-year term, commitment to growth as much as/more than exact spend level now.
In my experience with GCP, go through a Google partner (that will aggregate multiple clients to get discounts) and you'll be able to get commitment discounts with $500K/year or even less. But don't save too much money during your commitment period: if you don't expend your commitment, you'll pay for it anyway, and you might even lose some discounts.
Also, one trick to inflate your commitment expenses is asking your SaaS providers if it's possible to pay them through AWS or GCP marketplaces: it often counts against your commitment minimum expense, so not everything has to be instances and storage.
You can commit right there in the console - no need to work with a partner unless you want “flex” commit where saving is less. Even with 3y commit its still nowhere near cheap compared to buying servers and renting colo space especially for bandwidth and storage
It's not the same commitment. When doing a commitment through a partner, you're doing an expense commitment (let's say, 600k in a year) in ALL your expenses. Well, except for Google Maps API it seems :P. So not tied to an specific product or type of instance, as the typical commitment, but to your whole GCP billing.
From this, you get a wide range of discounts in a bunch of products, not just instances. And I think those discounts go on top of some of the other discounts you regularly have, but I'm not sure and I'd had to check our billing.
