Getting started with Google Cloud

Users can sign up for Google Cloud using their google account or Gmail ID. Google offers a free trial for most of its cloud services for up to 1 year. If you sign up using your company's account, Google will create an organization and will add users from the same domain to the organization so that resources can be shared with your team. You can also use your personal Gmail to sign up as an inpidual user to try the services.

You can sign up for a free trial at this link: https://cloud.google.com/free/. Google currently provides $300 free credit, which is valid for up to 12 months. The free trial requires you to enter your credit card details but you will not be billed until the $300 free credit is spent. When your account runs out of the credit, all the projects are suspended by default and you need to log in and authorize the use of your credit card for further usage of Google Cloud services.

After the successful sign up for Google Cloud, a new project with the default name My First Project is created by Google. We can use this project as a demo in this chapter. The next and most important step is to set up a budget alert for this project as well as all future projects that will be created on the Google Cloud platform. This will help the user to keep track of the budget and monitor any sudden surge in billing.

If your organization does not use Gmail for work, it is advised that everyone using Google Cloud create a Google account using his/her organization's email ID as the login name and link the organization's email ID as the email for that account. It is advised not to add any team member's personal Gmail account to the projects because the organization may forget to remove them from project if they leave the company:

1. Click on the sandwich button on the top left to open the left-hand-side navigation menu.

1. Click on Billing in the left-hand-side menu and the billing dashboard will be displayed with the current billing details:

1. Click on Budgets & alerts and create a budget at the billing account level so that your total expenses across all projects don't exceed the limit.
2. Choose My Billing account in the Project or billing account dropdown and check the Include credit as a budget expense option. These budgets are monthly budgets. The user will receive an email if any of the budget exceeds the limit within that month.

You can see how the billing cycle works for your account by going to Billing | Payment Settings in the menu. Google uses Threshold Billing and Monthly Billing. If the threshold amount is reached within 30 days of your last billing, the payment is triggered. If the amount is not reached, then the payment is triggered 30 days from the last payment.

1. Now, create a project-level budget alert by clicking on Budgets & alerts in the left-hand-side menu; this time, choose the project that was created by Google Cloud in the Project or billing account dropdown and check Include credit as budget expense:

If the project exceeds the billing budget, then disable the billing for that project as shown in the following screenshot. This will stop the project from incurring further costs and suspend all services and resources. If a project is no longer needed, then shut down your project by going to IAM & admin | Settings in the menu and clicking on SHUT DOWN at the top. 

It is important to set up budget alerts both at the billing account level, covering total expense across all projects, and at the inpidual project level so that you can track the billing proactively. Keep your development, testing, and production projects as separate projects on the Google Cloud Platform; this can save some money and also help you to provide permissions for your team members appropriately for each project.

Whenever a project needs a service on the Google Cloud Platform, check out the following details about the service before deciding whether to purchase it:

• Quotas: Understand the quotas allocated to various services. Some quota restrictions will be waived based on the billing tier and additional pricing. Some services include free tier pricing.
• Sub-hour billing: Some services charge customers only for the minutes in which the resources are used and not for entire hours. It is better to understand whether the service you are planning to use is providing sub-hour billing. If it does not provide sub-hour billing, then plan to use the resources in one batch for a few hours rather than using them for a few minutes every hour.
• Sustained-use discount: If a service is being used for more than x number of hours in a month, Google may offer a sustained-use discount. Compute engine VMs and cloud SQL VMs are offered at up to 30% discount for sustained use. The more predictably you use the resources on Google Cloud, the more the discounts you get.
• Pre-emptible VMs: Pre-emptible VMs provide more savings than regular Compute engine VMs. These are short-lived VMs that can be created on the fly to deploy apps and run them. The catch is that these pre-emptible VMs can be reclaimed by Compute Engine anytime and your application will be provided 30 seconds to shut down. Turn off the VMs as soon as the process finishes.

To understand Google Cloud's pricing philosophy, visit https://cloud.google.com/pricing/philosophy/. To understand pre-emptible VMs and save money while executing your batch and scheduled programs, visit https://cloud.google.com/preemptible-vms/.