Projects & Billing

Overview

Google Cloud uses a four-level resource hierarchy: Organization → Folders → Projects → Resources.

The Project:
A Project is the fundamental unit of resource organization, API management, billing, and IAM in GCP. Every resource (VM, bucket, database) must belong to a Project.

What a Project Contains:

• APIs: Each Cloud API (Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery) must be explicitly enabled per project.
• IAM Policies: Access control for who can do what on resources within the project.
• Billing Account: One billing account linked per project; all resource charges go there.
• Quotas: Per-project limits on resource usage (e.g., 8 vCPUs per region).
• Labels: Key-value metadata for cost attribution and automation.

Billing Accounts:

• A billing account can pay for multiple projects.
• A project can only be linked to one billing account.
• Billing accounts exist at the Organization level (or standalone for individual use).

Cost Management Tools:

• Budgets & Alerts: Set monthly spend thresholds. Receive email or Pub/Sub notifications at configurable percentages (50%, 90%, 100%). Does NOT automatically stop services.
• Committed Use Discounts (CUDs): 1-year or 3-year vCPU/memory commitments for 20–57% savings.
• Sustained Use Discounts: Automatic discounts up to 30% for VMs running more than 25% of a month — no action needed.
• Labels: Tag resources (e.g., team=payments, env=prod) for granular cost attribution in billing exports.
• Billing Export to BigQuery: Export detailed billing data for custom dashboards and cost analysis.

IAM in the Hierarchy:
Policies applied at a higher level (Organization, Folder) are inherited by all child resources — enabling centralized governance with project-level flexibility.

Practice Linked Questions