How a health data platform cut GCP costs by 80% in six weeks
A federated health data platform operating across two districts in Indonesia saw its Google Cloud Platform bill triple between March and May 2026, prompting an urgent cost audit. The platform, which converts data from 12 source systems into FHIR R4 resources, was processing over 500,000 records per day across 80 source tables. Large upstream data backfills — one pushing 2.27 million rows in a single week — caused the main FHIR resource table to grow from 150 GiB to 201 GiB. A deduplication scheduler scanning the full datastore three times per hour became the system's costliest query as data volume grew, with daily BigQuery scan volume jumping from 2.36 TiB to over 9 TiB within six weeks. The team used billing exports and BigQuery's INFORMATION_SCHEMA to pinpoint the source of the spike before making targeted infrastructure changes that ultimately reduced daily costs by 80%.
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