You're probably thinking, how can I make sure I don't accidentally run up a big GCP bill? GCP provides four tools to help: budgets and alerts, billing, export, reports and quotas. Let's look at budgets and alerts first. You can define budgets either per billing account or per GCP project. A budget can be a fixed limit or you can tie it to another metric. For example, a percentage of the previous month spend. To be notified when costs approach your budget limit, create an alert. For example, with a budget limit of $20,000 and an alert set at 90 percent, you'll receive a notification alert when your expenses reach $18,000. Alerts are generally set at 50 percent, 90 percent, and 100 percent. But you can customize that. Billing export lets you store detailed billing information in places where it's easy to retrieve for more detailed analysis, such as a BigQuery dataset or a Cloud storage bucket. Reports is a visual tool in the GCP console that allows you to monitor your expenditure. GCP also implements quotas, which protect both account owners and the GCP community as a whole. Quotas are designed to prevent the over-consumption of resources, whether because of error or malicious attack. There are two types of quotas: rate quotas and allocation quotas. Both get applied at the level of the GCP project. Rate quotas reset after a specific time. For example, by default, the Kubernetes Engine service sets a quota of a 1000 calls to its API from each GCP project every 100 seconds. After that 100 seconds, the limit is reset. Allocation quotas, on the other hand, govern the number of resources you can have in your projects. For example, by default, each GCP project has a quota allowing it no more than five Virtual Private Cloud networks. Although projects all start with the same quotas, you can change some of them by requesting an increase from Google Cloud support.