Billing accounts and budgets in GCP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Billing Accounts and Budgets Setup in GCP

📖 Scenario: You are managing cloud costs for a small company using Google Cloud Platform (GCP). To keep track of spending and avoid surprises, you need to set up a billing account and create a budget with alerts.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple billing account configuration and a budget alert in GCP using Infrastructure as Code style. This will help monitor and control cloud expenses effectively.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a billing account dictionary with exact fields

Add a budget threshold percentage variable

Create a budget configuration using the billing account and threshold

Complete the budget alert configuration with notification channels

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use billing accounts and budgets in GCP to monitor cloud spending and avoid unexpected charges.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and financial operations teams set up budgets and alerts to manage costs and optimize cloud resource usage.

1

Create the billing account data structure

Create a dictionary called billing_account with these exact entries: 'account_id': '1234-5678-9012', 'display_name': 'Company Billing Account', and 'open': true.

GCP

# Create the billing_account dictionary with specified keys and values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary and include the keys and values exactly as shown.

2

Add a budget threshold percentage variable

Create a variable called budget_threshold_percent and set it to 0.8 to represent 80% of the budget.

GCP

billing_account = {
    'account_id': '1234-5678-9012',
    'display_name': 'Company Billing Account',
    'open': True
}
# Create budget_threshold_percent variable and set to 0.8
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment to create the variable with the exact name and value.

3

Create the budget configuration dictionary

Create a dictionary called budget with these exact entries: 'billing_account_id' set to billing_account['account_id'], 'amount' set to 1000, and 'threshold_rules' as a list containing a dictionary with 'threshold_percent' set to budget_threshold_percent.

GCP

billing_account = {
    'account_id': '1234-5678-9012',
    'display_name': 'Company Billing Account',
    'open': True
}
budget_threshold_percent = 0.8
# Create budget dictionary with billing_account_id, amount, and threshold_rules
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the billing_account dictionary to get the account_id and create a list with one dictionary for threshold_rules.

4

Complete the budget alert configuration

Add a key 'notifications' to the budget dictionary. Set it to a list containing a dictionary with 'pubsub_topic' set to 'projects/my-project/topics/budget-alerts' and 'schema_version' set to '1.0'.

GCP

billing_account = {
    'account_id': '1234-5678-9012',
    'display_name': 'Company Billing Account',
    'open': True
}
budget_threshold_percent = 0.8
budget = {
    'billing_account_id': billing_account['account_id'],
    'amount': 1000,
    'threshold_rules': [
        {'threshold_percent': budget_threshold_percent}
    ]
}
# Add notifications key to budget with pubsub_topic and schema_version
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Add the notifications key with a list containing a dictionary for the alert settings.