Understanding billing terminology

To help us understand the various pieces and parts that play a role in billing, let’s start with a diagram:

Figure 3.1 – Billing and resource management visualization

At the bottom of the preceding diagram, we can see what we want most out of Google Cloud – its resources. The word resource in English comes from the old French word resorse, which means to help or aid. That’s pretty much what the bottom level does – it helps or aids our business by providing on-demand, scalable, metered services. From Pub/Sub messaging, to Compute Engine VMs, to Cloud buckets, the offerings are vast and powerful. Each of these Google Cloud services is logically managed by a single project.

Projects are special types of Google Cloud resources that let you directly enable, create, and logically group services. Every create command for a service, whether it’s used via the UI, the command line, or a Google...