Upgrade the term of commitments

You can upgrade the term of your 1-year commitments and convert them into 3-year commitments to get a higher discount rate for your committed resources and continue receiving committed use discounts (CUDs) for a longer time period.

This document shows you how to upgrade the term of your commitment from 1 year to 3 years.

How a term upgrade works

When you upgrade the term for your commitment, the expiration date of the commitment moves into the future by two years. The upgraded commitment term becomes valid at 12 AM US and Canadian Pacific Time (UTC-8, or UTC-7 during daylight saving time) on the day following the upgrade operation, and you begin to receive the new CUD percentage that is applicable for your upgraded term.

Upgrading your commitment's term changes the term extension eligibility window for your commitment. After the term upgrade takes effect, Compute Engine updates the eligibility window to remain open up to 1 year from the start date of the ongoing term. Upgrading the term doesn't affect the following properties of your commitment:

• Name
• Start date
• Region
• Project
• Commitment type
• Auto renew status
• Committed resources

The process of term upgrade remains the same regardless of whether your commitment has a preset term length or a custom term length. Any attached reservations for your commitment continue to exist throughout the lifetime of your upgraded term, unless you manually replace them.

Example of an upgraded commitment

The following table shows an example where the term of an existing commitment (commitment-1) gets upgraded by 2 years:

Quota considerations

You don't typically need to request additional quota when you upgrade your commitment's term. However, if you upgrade a commitment's term on the same day that it expires, you must verify that you still have sufficient quota available. That's because on the day that a commitment expires, whatever quota the commitment was using up gets released back into your pool of available quota, and it might get used up by your other business needs.

Pricing implications

Your commitment fee is the sum of the discounted prices of all your committed resources. When you upgrade your commitment's term, Compute Engine applies the new 3-year CUD percentage and recalculates the discounted price for each committed resource. To do this recalculation, Compute Engine uses the prevailing on-demand price of each resource on the day your original term became active. This new discounted price for each resource stays the same until the end of your upgraded term, even if the on-demand prices change.

Limitations

• You can upgrade the term for only active commitments.
• You can't upgrade the term for software license commitments.

Perform a term upgrade

Upgrade your commitment's term by using the gcloud CLI, Google Cloud console, or the Compute Engine API.

gcloud compute commitments update COMMITMENT_NAME \
    --plan=36-month \
    --region=REGION \
    --project=PROJECT_NAME

gcloud compute commitments update commitment-upgrade-example \
    --plan=36-month \
    --region=us-central1 \
    --project=project-upgrade-example

PATCH https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/regions/REGION/commitments/COMMITMENT_NAME
{
  "name": COMMITMENT_NAME,
  "plan": "THIRTY_SIX_MONTH",
}

PATCH https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/project-upgrade-example/regions/us-central1/commitments/commitment-upgrade-example
{
  "name": "commitment-upgrade-example",
  "plan": "THIRTY_SIX_MONTH",
}

What's next

• Learn how to renew commitments automatically.
• Learn how to extend the term length of resource-based commitments.
• Learn how to merge and split resource-based commitments.
• Learn how to analyze the effectiveness of your resource-based committed use discounts.