ALEXIS MOUSSINE-POUCHKINE: Understanding cost
can be intimidating when trying out a cloud provider.
And you may not be willing to spend money just
to try things out.
In this video, we'll talk about Google Cloud Platform's
free trial, and the Always Free tier,
and why you should not confuse the two.
Let's start with a free trial.
When you get started with GCP, we
suggest that you sign up for the $300 free credits.
This will require you to create an account, if you don't
already have a Google account, and to provide credit card
or bank account details.
The trial is free, and your credit card will not be billed.
You will receive billing statements
at the beginning of each month that
detail how much of the $300 credit
you spent in the previous month.
This gives you early data points to understand
how much your future service will end up
costing when running on GCP.
And it helps you see where you're consuming the most.
You can also practice budget management
by setting budget alerts on your billing account
or on a specific project that you're working on.
Keep in mind, these are alerts, not limits, so pay attention
to where they notify so you can take action
if costs ramp out of control.
Once enrolled in the free trial, you
will be able to spend the credits on the entire platform
for any location.
You are using the real stuff, not some sandbox environment.
You are, however, not able to request quote increases,
and you cannot mine cryptocurrencies.
Sorry.
Things you should try out include
starting your first virtual machine,
transferring some data to cloud storage buckets,
creating your first Kubernetes Engine cluster,
running your Hadoop or Spark workload on Cloud Dataproc,
or even training your own machine learning model
using Cloud AutoML.
These are just examples.
The possibilities are pretty much endless.
Note that you can create multiple projects,
all attached to the billing account
that has the $300 credits.
This could enable you to try different things
in separate environments.
As you explore GCP and come across questions,
we have documentation and community
forums to help guide you, as well as
a free trial troubleshooter.
If you have more specific concerns that
require formal support, you can purchase silver level support
using a portion of your $300 credit
straight from the console in the support section.
This trial remains valid for 12 months, or until you
use all of the $300.
The amount of credit and days remaining
are displayed at the top of the Google Cloud Platform console,
as well as in the billing section.
If you do use all the credits, you will not be charged,
but your resources will be paused,
unless you upgrade to a paid account within 30 days.
You can upgrade to paid account at any time,
and retain whatever's left of the $300.
Once you do this, you become responsible
for the cost of your GCP resources.
Now let's talk about the free tier.
Once you've upgraded to a paid account,
GCP still offers generous free tiers for 16
of its main products.
This is sometimes referred to as free quota.
These products include App Engine, Compute Engine,
Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions,
our Cloud Vision, Speech, and Natural Language APIs,
and more.
These free tiers allow GCP users to use products for free
every month.
For instance, the first 2 million invocations
of Cloud Functions per month are free.
And so are the first 60 minutes of Cloud Speech API,
or the first daily 120 build minutes of CloudBuild.
Some of those services, such as Compute Engine
or Cloud Storage, will be required
to use specific GCP regions.
As the name implies, Always Free does not expire.
If you'd like to find out more about the free trial,
or the Always Free tier, check out the detailed FAQ page.
We hope that the combination of the free trial, the Always Free
tier, and the simple GCP pricing will enable you
to build amazing things on GCP.
If you liked this video, please like, subscribe, comment,
share, and look forward to more GCP Essentials videos.