Billing Accounts, Budgets, and Cost Governance

Billing in Context: Why Cost Governance Matters

Billing Accounts and Project Linkage

Hands-On: Creating a Billing Account and Linking a Project

Budgets and Alerts: Preventing Surprise Bills

Configuring a Budget and Alert for a Project

Billing Exports and Reports: Seeing Where Money Goes

Configuring and Querying Billing Export (Conceptual Lab)

There is no heavy coding for billing export, but you should be comfortable with the workflow and simple BigQuery queries.

A. Configure BigQuery billing export (console steps)

1. In Billing, select your billing account.
2. Go to Billing export.
3. Under BigQuery export, click Edit settings or Enable.
4. Choose a project that will own the billing dataset (often a central "finops" project).
5. Create or select a dataset, for example `billing_export`.
6. Save. Google Cloud starts writing tables like `gcpbillingexportv1*` into that dataset.

B. Example BigQuery query

The following SQL answers: "Total cost by project for the last 30 days".

```sql

SELECT

project.id AS project_id,

ROUND(SUM(cost), 2) AS total_cost

FROM

`finops-project.billingexport.gcpbillingexportv1_*`

WHERE

usagestarttime >= TIMESTAMPSUB(CURRENTTIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 30 DAY)

GROUP BY

project_id

ORDER BY

total_cost DESC;

```

C. Example: cost by label

If your teams tag resources with a label `team`, you can slice costs by that label.

```sql

SELECT

labels.key AS label_key,

labels.value AS label_value,

ROUND(SUM(cost), 2) AS total_cost

FROM

`finops-project.billingexport.gcpbillingexportv1_*`,

UNNEST(labels) AS labels

WHERE

labels.key = 'team'

AND usagestarttime >= TIMESTAMPSUB(CURRENTTIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 30 DAY)

GROUP BY

label_key,

label_value

ORDER BY

total_cost DESC;

```

Even if you are not a SQL expert, recognize the pattern: billing export → BigQuery dataset → aggregate by project, service, or label.

Cost Governance Across Multiple Projects

Quotas and Quota Increase Requests

Thought Exercise: Designing a Cost-Safe Project Layout

Apply what you have learned by designing a simple cost governance plan.

Scenario

You are the first cloud engineer at a startup. You expect:

• A production web app with Compute Engine and Cloud SQL.
• A staging environment for testing.
• Several developer sandboxes.

You have one enterprise billing account.

Your task

Pause and sketch (mentally or on paper) answers to these questions:

1. Project structure

• How many projects will you create?
• Which environments or teams get their own project?

1. Budgets

• Where will you attach budgets (per project? per environment)?
• What approximate monthly budget would you set for each?
• What thresholds (percentages) will you alert on?

1. Billing export

• Will you configure billing export to BigQuery, Cloud Storage, or both?
• Which project will own the billing export dataset or bucket?

1. Quotas

• For production, do you need to request higher CPU quotas in the main region ahead of launch?
• For sandboxes, will you intentionally keep quotas low?

Reflection

After you have a rough plan, compare it against these guiding principles:

• Production in its own project, with higher quotas and tighter IAM.
• Staging and dev in separate projects with smaller budgets.
• Sandboxes in a dedicated folder with low quotas and clear budgets.
• One central billing export to BigQuery for all cost analysis.

This type of design question is very similar to what you might see in scenario-based exam items.

Quiz 1: Billing Accounts, Budgets, and Exports

Test your understanding of the core billing concepts.

Quiz 2: Quotas and Cost Controls

Check your understanding of quotas and budgets.

Flashcards: Key Terms for Billing and Governance

Use these flashcards to reinforce the most important terms from this module.