Optimize

The Cost/mo column says what a bucket costs. Optimize says what it could cost instead, and hands you the command that gets it there.

It is on the cost line at the foot of the list: for the folder you are in, or for the one object you picked. It opens a list of what could be done, each with what it saves a month, the biggest saving first.

What it suggests

Action	When it is offered
Switch to a storage class	one row per cheaper class, priced across every object the dialog is about
Switch to one region	a GCS bucket in more than one region, or an Azure account that keeps a copy elsewhere
Remove old versions	a versioned bucket holding noncurrent versions
Abort incomplete uploads	uploads that were started and never finished, still billed as storage

The saving is the net one. A class that some objects are dearer in can still be worth it overall, and the objects that lose are named. Old versions and abandoned uploads need a listing of their own, so those two rows arrive a moment after the dialog opens.

Before you do it

Pick an action and the review says what it touches, what it costs to do, and what it will cost to live with:

• a class with a retrieval fee, or one that keeps data offline for minutes or hours
• a minimum storage duration, and which objects are still inside the one they already have — an early deletion is billed as if it had stayed
• a region move copies every object, billed once as reads and writes, and gives up surviving the loss of a region

It changes nothing

Optimize never touches your storage. The review ends in a gcloud, aws or az command, with a copy button: you read it here, and run it in your own terminal, under your own credentials.

It covers Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage. The prices are the published rates for the bucket's region — see where the usage numbers come from.

Next: the cache.