Resource Management

Resource Manager

• It let’s us hierarchically manage resource by project, folder and organization
• Resource consumption is measured in quantities, like rate of use, time, number of items, feature use
• Each project is associated with one billing account
• A project accumulates the consumption of all of its resources. It can be used to track resources and quota usage
• Resources can be categorized as:
  • Global: images, snapshots, networks
  • Regional: external IP addresses
  • Zonal: instances, disks

Quotas

• All resources al subject to project quotas or limits
• Example of quotas:
  • How many resources can we create per project (15 VPCs per project)
  • How quickly we can make API requests (5 administrative access per project)
  • Regional quotas (24 CPUs region/project by default)
• If we expect an upcoming increased usage of resources, we can ask for quota increase in cloud console or by creating a support ticket
• Why do quotas exists:
  • Prevent runaway consumption in case of an error or malicious attack
  • Prevent billing spikes or surprises
  • Forces sizing consideration and periodic review

Labels

• Are a utility for organizing gcp resources
• They are key-value pairs which can be attached to resources such as VMs, disks, snapshots, etc.
• Each resource can have up to 64 labels
• We can use labels for search resources, cost accounting or budgeting
• Labels are not tags:
  • Labels are user defined string propagated through billings
  • Tags are user defined strings applied to instances only, primary used for networking (applying firewall rules)

Billing

• Billing accounts store information about how to pay charges for resources used
• Billing is set up at the project level, when we set up a project, a billing account is linked to it
• Billing accounts can be linked to one or more projects
• Projects without a billing account can only use free gcp services
• Billing account can be charged monthly or at a set threshold
• Subaccounts can be used for separate billing for projects
• Several roles are associated with billing. The billing roles are as follows:
  • Billing Account Creator: can create new self-service billing accounts
  • Billing Account Administrator: manages billing accounts but cannot create them
  • Billing Account User: enables a user to link projects to billing accounts
  • Billing Account Viewer: enables a user to view billing account cost and transactions
• Budgets:
  • Budgets can be set at the project level
  • To help with project planning and controlling costs we can set a budget
  • When we exceed a budget limit, we can configure our billing account to send an alert. We can set up a webhook as well for automation
• Budget Alerts:
  • Alerts sent to billing admins after spending exceeds a budget percentage or a specified amount
  • In addition to email, we can use Pub/Sub to programmatically listen to budget alerts
• Reports:
  • We can export and query cost and spending information into BigQuery. We can visualize this data using Data Studio
• Quotas:
  • Designed to prevent over-consuming of resources because of an error or malicious attack
  • They do apply a the level o project
  • We have 2 types of quotas:
    • Rate quota: reset after a period of time
    • Allocation quota: do not reset at interval, we have to free up resources of adhere to these quotas. These quotas can be increased after requesting
  • Some quotas are fixed to all customers