Billing

Using resources such as VMs, object storage, and specialized services usually incurs charges. The GCP Billing API provides a way for you to manage how you pay for resources used.

Billing Accounts

Billing accounts store information about how to pay charges for resources used. A billing account is associated with one or more projects. All projects must have a billing account unless they use only free services.

Billing accounts can follow a similar structure to the resource hierarchy. If you are working with a small company, you may have only a single billing account. In that case, all resource costs are charged to that one account. If your company is similar to the example from earlier in the chapter, with finance, marketing, legal, and software development departments, then you may want to have multiple billing accounts. You could have one billing account for each department, but that may not be necessary. If finance, marketing, and legal all pay for their cloud services from...