Google Unveils New Tools for Budgets in Google Cloud

Google has unveiled new budgets for Google Cloud project users in an effort to help customers control their spending and avoid runaway costs.

One of the biggest challenges companies face with the transition to the cloud is the ever-increasing cost as their needs grow. Google Cloud is working to address this by making it easy for customers to set budgets and manage their spending, as the company highlighted in a blog post:

With great power (the cloud), comes great responsibility (the costs). Working with the cloud lets everyone, from individual users to large organizations, access on-demand resources for computing, data, AI, and just about everything else. Of course, these cloud resources naturally lead to cloud spend, and it can be hard to keep track of what you’re spending and where. For medium and large organizations this can become even more unwieldy, with hundreds or thousands of projects!

Thankfully, budgets are the best way to understand and stay on top of your spending. Using budgets, you can choose which projects and resources you want to measure actual spend (or forecasted spend) for, and how you’d like to receive notifications as the spend changes. Here’s a blog post that goes into more detail about how to set up a budget; we highly recommend that you start using budgets if you’re not already.

The company says the new features are specifically targeted at project users, such as Project Owners or Project Editors, giving them the ability to manage their budget without needing access to “higher-level billing account permissions.”

When a user with project permissions, but without billing account permissions, visits the Billing section of the console, they can now create and manage budgets that are tied to individual projects. This brings the power of budget notifications and customization directly to the people who need it the most!

This also gives you the ability to use Notification Channels in new ways. As Project Owners and Project Editors are generally closer to engineers, they can add the team’s group email to receive budget notifications. Making sure the right teams receive timely budget alerts is a great practice to make sure your team can respond quickly.

The new features are boon for cloud users and should help individuals and organizations cut down on the sticker shock that so many experience.