CDL - Billing

Question 1

What is a Cloud Billing Account?

Answer 1

A cloud-level resource managed in GCP console that tracks all costs (+credits) incurred by your GCP usage

Comprised of billing contacts (defined within the payments profiled) and sub-accounts where necessary

Question 2

What is a Payments Profile?

Answer 2

A google level resource that serves more as a document center (invoices, payment history, payment instruments) and connects all your Google services.

Question 3

What is the relationship between a Cloud Billing Account and Payments Profile?

Answer 3

Billing accounts are linked to a payments profile

Question 4

Can a billing account have a sub account?

Answer 4

Yes – attached to resellers so that you can bill resources to be paid by your customers.

Question 5

Do CBA follow IAM rules?

Answer 5

Yes, billing-specific roles and permission used to control accessing and modifying billing-related functions.

Question 6

What are the two types of Cloud Billing Accounts?

Answer 6

1. Self-serve - payments by credit/debit or ACH ( monthly cycle/billing)
2. Invoice (of offline) account - payments by check or wire transfer (must be eligible) ( threshold cycles)

Question 7

What are the two Payment Profile Types?

Answer 7

1. Individual - For personal use; only managed and accessed by you.
2. Business - for institutional use (school, business, partnership); Comes with user profiles to that multiple people can have access to and make payments.

Question 8

What are the two charging cycle options when using self-serve Cloud Billing Accounts?

Answer 8

1. Monthly - Costs charged monthly (automatically assigned; no choice in the matter)
2. Threshold - Costs charges when account accrues a specific amount (billed once monthly and payment terms are negotiated with Google)

Question 9

What are Cloud Billing IAM roles? At what level are they applied?

Answer 9

CB lets you control which users have admin and viewing permissions to specified resources.

Grant/Limit at 1) Org level 2) Cloud Billing account level and/or 3) Project level

Question 10

What are the Cloud Billing roles in IAM? (define)

Answer 10

1. Account creator
2. Account administrator
3. Account User
4. Account Viewer
5. Project Billing Manager
6. Billing Account Costs Manager

Question 11

What are Billing Health Checks?

Answer 11

Recommendations that help you avoid common billing issues.

Created with budget alerts

Question 11

What are Budget Alerts

Answer 11

Thresholds set by clients to reduce spending surprises and unexpected cost overruns.

Question 12

What are some levers that one can pull with regards to Budget Alerts?

Answer 12

One can narrow the budget scope to 1) specific projects or 2) specific resources

You can set multiple thresholds that preemptively warn when approaching budget limits.

Question 13

What are the 4 built-in billing reports?

Answer 13

1. Billings reports
2. Cost table report
3. Cost breakdown report
4. Princing report

Question 13

What is a Billings Report?

Answer 13

An interactive pricing explorer including graph visualization

Question 14

What is a Cost Table report?

Answer 14

A tabular breakdown of costs to analyze details of invoices.

Question 15

What is a cost breakdown report?

Answer 15

At-a-glance waterfall overview of monthly charges and credit

Question 16

What is a Pricing Report?

Answer 16

Access to SKU prices for Google’s Cloud Services

Question 17

What questions can Cloud Billing help you answer?

Answer 17

1. Current month spend trends?
2. What GCP project costs the most last month?
3. What Google Cloud Service (compute, storage, etc.) cost me the most?
4. What are my forecasts future costs based on historical trends?
5. How much am I spending by region?
6. What was the cost of resources with label x?

Note: Be able to match each question to their respective billings reports type.

Question 18

What are Cost Table Reports?

Answer 18

Reports that allow you to analyze the details of your invoices and statements (which are summarized and simplified)

Provides:
1. Project level costs
2. Service IDs, SKU IDs, & Project #s
3. Customizable and downloadable to CSV

Question 19

What is a Cost Breakdown Report?

Answer 19

Provides at-a-glance waterfall overview of your monthly costs and savings.

Includes:
1. Combined on-demand, non-discounted list prices.
2. Savings realized due to negotiation
3. Savings earned with usage-based credits (broken down by type)
4. Invoice-level charges (tax and adjustments)