Projects and billing

Let's also really quickly talk about how billing happens on the Google Cloud Platform. At heart, billing is associated with projects. Projects are logical units which consumes a bunch of resources. Projects are set up within organizations, and we will get to that hierarchy later on in the course. Projects are associated with accounts and accounts with organizations. However, billing really happens on a per project basis. Each project can be thought of as Resources + Settings + Metadata. So, if GCP is a lunch buffet, a project can be thought of as a meal. You select what you would like to consume, how you would like to consume it, and associate all of that information inside this one unit that should then pay for it.

Extending that analogy just a little further: just as you can mix and match food items within a meal, you can easily have resources within a project interact with each other. And so in a sense, a project can be thought of as a namespace. If you have various name resources for instance, those names typically only need to be unique within the project. There are some exceptions to this, which we will discuss later, Google Cloud Storage buckets for instance.

A project is really associated with or defined by three pieces of metadata—the name, ID, and the number. The project ID is unique and permanent. Even if you go ahead and delete a project that ID will not be available for use for other projects in the future.