Understanding costs and billing in Terra
In order to control costs when working in Terra, it is critical to first understand the Google Cloud Platform costs and how you will be billed for working on the platform. The article outlines what operations have a GCP cost and how Terra bills for those costs. This information can help resource owners and managers assign roles to control access to funding, data, and other resources.
Contents
What has a fee - and who is billed - when working in Terra?
The 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 examples
What has a fee (and who is billed) when working in Terra?
Terra is open source and there are no fees for using the Terra platform infrastructure or for contacting support. Viewing showcase workspaces or browsing the Data Library are free.
However, there are costs - paid by Terra to Google Cloud Platform - associated with operations such as:
- Accessing data in Requester Pays buckets
- Storing data in workspace buckets
- Running workflows
- Running interactive analyses (Jupyter Notebooks; RStudio)
All these operations are done in a Terra workspace under a Terra Billing project. Each Terra Billing project is ultimately covered by a GCP Billing account.
For example, the workspace below stores data for the AnVIL. The workspace Billing project that pays for storage is "AnVIL-data-storage" (highlighted).
Costs are per workspace, not per user. For billing, it doesn't matter what user does the work, it only matters what Billing project is assigned to the workspace where the work is done. Who can perform an action that has a cost depends on their "permission" in the workspace, not on their billing permissions. For example, a users with "read" permission can open the workspace, but cannot run an analysis or copy data into the workspace bucket.
Terra's billing structure in a nutshell
The structure of billing in Terra has three levels: at the top is the GCP Billing account; under the Billing account are one or more Terra Billing projects; under each Billing project are one or more project workspaces.
Work is done in (and charged by) the workspace. The cost is ultimately billed to the GCP Billing account via the Terra Billing project.
Terra Billing projects versus GCP Billing projects
Billing account owners will see all the associated Terra projects in the GCP console:
What does access to billing resources allow you to do (and not do)?
Access to billing allows you to create in the level below your billing access.
- GCP Billing account owners, admins or users can create Terra Billing projects, which allows them to create workspaces where they can perform operations that cost money
- Billing project owners and users can create workspaces to do work in
| 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, that directly allow you to do things that have a cost in Terra.To learn more about how to manage resources (including billing), see this article. |
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 costs, 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:
However, they can still charge costs to the Billing project they have just been removed from - in two ways!er
- By operating in any workspaces that have been shared with them
- By operating in any workspace they created when they were still a Billing project user
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.
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.