How do I set a cost limit in Google Developers Console
You cannot. I asked Google about this, here's their response, from May 7 2016:
(GCE = Google cloud engine. No spending limits.
GAE = Google app engine — yes it has spending limits.)
... you are eligible for support on ... only ...
... [various helpful links] ...That been said, at the moment there is no a feature that allows you to configure a limited budget on GCE. This feature is certainly available for GAE [1]. As you mentioned in your comments, you either can totally shut down your VMs (will depend on your use case) or set the VMs to send you alerts if they reach a certain traffic limit [2].
Sincerely,
Someone's first name
Technical Solutions Representative
Google Cloud Platform[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
[2] https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/support/notification-options
@wmdry, you wrote: "traffic to this link could explode" — I'm afraid of this too. That's why I asked Google about this. And I'm planning to avoid Google's CDN because of this, and use another CDN provider instead, which has spending limits. Because, unlike Nginx, I don't see any way for me to rate limit / throttle Google's CDN.
I do plan to use GCE (Google Cloud Engine) though. Therefore, right now I'm reading about how to rate limit my Nginx server. Because if I just configure Nginx correctly, then those $0.12 / GB you mentioned, cannot possible explode to ... like $10k in a month? What if Google sends a $10k bill when I'm back from an a few week's vacation, just because of my hobby project and a few people downloading a 1 MB movie over and over again forever (because: evil). Hmm, & the bigger & faster my servers, the higher the risk.
I hope Google will add spending limits, because I did want to use Google's CDN.
Update 2020: Apparently this does bite people from time to time — look here:
"Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt", Dec 08, 2020, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372336,
In that case, they could contact Google and in the end didn't need to pay.
I found that Google's documentation now provides two methods to actually limit the cost of a GCP project. It involves the following setup:
- Create a Cloud Function that checks the cost against the budget, and carries out a certain action if the cost exceeds the budget. Google's Documentation provides a sample code snip that can either shutdown all VM instances in a Project or disable the billing for a project. Shutting down all VMs would stop all VM-related cost but you get to keep your data (and still have to pay for the storage). Disabling the billing for a project would effectively zap all cost-related activities and you could lose data. You can name the Cloud Function "budget-enforcer".
- The Google code snip as provided above has a hard coded ZONE variable. Remember to change it to match your zone!
- Create a Service Account to run the Cloud Function "budget-enforcer". For shutting down VMs, the Service Account would need role "Compute Instance Admin (v1)". For disabling billing on a project, the Service Account would need role "Project Billing Manager".
- Set a Topic for the Cloud Function (I call mine "proj-name-stop-vm" and "proj-name-disable-bill").
- Set up a budget alert as usual, and connect it to one of the Pub/Sub topic above.
Please be noted that Google's documentation did mention that there could be a delay between the cost exceeds a budget and the function is triggered, so you should build in a buffer if you have an absolute hard cost limit. I use 90% of the budget as the trigger line for shutting down my instances.
As of July 2017 you can set budgets that send notifications via email but do not cap spending:
To set an alert-only budget, which will not cap spending:
- Go to the Cloud Platform Console.
- Open the console left side menu and click Billing
- If you have more than one billing account, click the billing account name.
- On the left, click Budgets & alerts.
Official help page: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6293540?hl=en