Understanding costs and billing in Terra
FollowThis article outlines what operations in Terra have a GCP cost and how you will pay for GCP charges with a Terra billing project. It also explains the billing structure (GCP and Terra), how GCP calculates and bills Terra users for charges, and how Terra Billing projects act as a pass-through to pay for the GCP costs of your work in Terra.
To learn more about these costs and how to control them when working on Terra, see this article.
Contents
Understanding GCP fees in Terra
The GCP/Terra billing structure in a nutshell
Billing projects on Terra versus GCP
What does access to billing resources allow you to do? and not do?
Some billing examples
Understanding GCP fees in Terra
The Terra platform is free to use; you can browse showcase workspaces and the Data Library free as soon as you register for an account. There are no fees for contacting or working with the Terra support team. However, there are GCP costs associated with operations in Terra such as:
- Storing data in workspace buckets ( GCP storage rates)
- Running workflows ( GCP compute rates)
- Running interactive analyses (Jupyter Notebooks; RStudio) (compute and disk)
- Accessing data in Requester Pays buckets (GCP egress rates)
Terra passes along GCP charges with no markup through a Terra Billing project (the links above will take you directly to the GCP pricing pages).
The Terra/GCP billing structure in a nutshell
There are three levels to the cost structure in Terra. Each level has its own function, and users/collaborators can be included with different permissions at each level in order to do different things.
At the top is a GCP Billing account, which is what ultimately pays GCP for storage, compute and egress costs. At the bottom is a project workspace, where you actually do the work - store and move data or run an analysis. In between is a Terra Billing project, a pass through between GCP and Terra.
Terra Quirk - GCP costs are calculated per billing project,
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Each workspace has a Terra billing project, which you assign For GCP accounting, it doesn't matter who does the work, it only Think of your workspace like a car. The cost to fill the car with |
For example, the workspace below stores data for the Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-Space (AnVIL). GCP storage fees are paid - by the GCP Billing account - via the workspace Billing project (highlighted). Note that the billing project here is sometimes called the "workspace".
What does access to billing resources allow you to do (and not do)?
Access to billing allows you to create resources in the level below. Owners control who can create Billing projects and workspaces by assigning the appropriate permissions (see the chart below).
Permission/role |
Can access cost breakdown (GCP console) |
Can create Terra Billing projects (Terra UI) |
Can create workspaces |
Can store and analyze data |
Billing account admin, owner, user |
✔ |
✔ |
✔ |
Depends on workspace role |
Billing project admin, owner, user |
x |
x |
✔ |
Depends on workspace role |
Note: It is workspace permissions, not billing permissions,
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To learn more about how to manage resources (including
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Terra Billing projects versus GCP Billing projects
Note that this process works in only one direction. You must create Billing projects in the Terra interface. It is not possible to create a Billing project in GCP console and move it to Terra.
Billing account owners will see all the associated Terra projects in the GCP console:
Some billing user examples
It's not always intuitive how this billing structure plays out. Below are three examples - and what happens in each case - to help clarify the structure of billing.
What happens when owners remove a user from a Billing account?
They will also not be able to see detailed cost breakdowns and reports in GCP console.
However, they can still charge costs to the Billing account they have just been removed from in two ways!
- By creating workspaces under any Billing projects they created or where they are still users and
- By performing operations in any workspaces they created or that were shared with them
To learn about how prevent these charges, see this article.
What happens when owners remove a user from a Billing project?
If they have been removed from all Terra billing projects, they will get the following message when they try to clone a workspace:
However, they can still charge costs to the Billing project they have just been removed from in two ways!
- By operating in any workspace that has been shared with them
- By operating in any workspace they created when they were still a Billing project user (as long as that billing project is connected to a valid GCP Billing account)
To prevent this, Billing account owners will need to disable billing on all Terra projects created by this user, and remove them from any shared workspaces. To learn about how to disable Billing projects, see this article.
What happens when you remove a user from a workspace?
When can you link a Terra Billing Project and a Google Cloud Billing Project?
- Terra will always create a GCP project when you create a Terra Billing Project
- GCP Billing account owners can change the GCP Billing account associated with a Terra billing project in the Terra UI
- It is not possible to link to an existing Google Cloud Project
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