Cost management with billing reports in GCP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Cost management with billing reports

📖 Scenario: You work in a company that uses Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Your manager wants you to create a simple billing report to track monthly costs for different projects. This will help the team understand where money is spent and plan budgets better.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic Python script that stores monthly billing data for GCP projects, sets a budget threshold, calculates total costs, and flags projects that exceed the budget.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with project names as keys and their monthly costs as values

Add a budget threshold variable to compare costs against

Calculate the total cost of all projects

Identify and list projects that exceed the budget threshold

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use billing reports to track cloud spending and avoid unexpected charges.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and financial analysts often create scripts to monitor and manage cloud costs efficiently.

1

Create the billing data dictionary

Create a dictionary called billing_data with these exact entries: 'project-alpha': 1200, 'project-beta': 850, 'project-gamma': 430, 'project-delta': 670 representing monthly costs in dollars.

GCP

# Create the billing_data dictionary with project costs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys and values separated by colons.

2

Set the budget threshold

Add a variable called budget_threshold and set it to 1000 to represent the maximum allowed monthly cost per project.

GCP

billing_data = {'project-alpha': 1200, 'project-beta': 850, 'project-gamma': 430, 'project-delta': 670}
# Set the budget_threshold variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment statement to create the variable.

3

Calculate total monthly cost

Create a variable called total_cost and set it to the sum of all values in the billing_data dictionary using the sum() function and billing_data.values().

GCP

billing_data = {'project-alpha': 1200, 'project-beta': 850, 'project-gamma': 430, 'project-delta': 670}
budget_threshold = 1000
# Calculate total_cost by summing all project costs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use sum() with billing_data.values() to add all costs.

4

List projects exceeding the budget

Create a list called over_budget_projects using a list comprehension that includes project names from billing_data where the cost is greater than budget_threshold.

GCP

billing_data = {'project-alpha': 1200, 'project-beta': 850, 'project-gamma': 430, 'project-delta': 670}
budget_threshold = 1000
total_cost = sum(billing_data.values())
# Create over_budget_projects list with projects costing more than budget_threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a list comprehension with for project, cost in billing_data.items() and an if condition.