GCP for DevOps — GCP Free Tier

GCP Free Tier

Google Cloud offers one of the most generous free tiers among cloud providers. Understanding it helps you learn GCP without spending money.

Two Types of Free

GCP’s free tier has two components:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│               GCP Free Tier Structure                │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                      │
│  1. $300 Free Trial Credit                          │
│     └── Valid for 90 days                           │
│     └── Applies to ANY GCP service                  │
│     └── New accounts only                           │
│     └── Must upgrade to paid after trial            │
│                                                      │
│  2. Always Free Products                            │
│     └── Never expires                               │
│     └── Available even after trial ends             │
│     └── Usage-limited per month                     │
│                                                      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Always Free Products for DevOps

Service	Free Allowance	DevOps Use Case
Compute Engine	1 e2-micro VM (us regions)	Dev/test instance
Cloud Storage	5 GB (US regions)	Artifact storage
Cloud Functions	2M invocations/month	Event automation
Cloud Build	120 build-minutes/day	CI/CD pipelines
Cloud Logging	50 GB/month	Log collection
Cloud Monitoring	All GCP metrics free	Infrastructure monitoring
Artifact Registry	500 MB/month	Docker image storage
Secret Manager	6 active secret versions	Secret storage
Cloud Shell	Free (5 GB home dir)	Browser-based CLI
Pub/Sub	10 GB/month	Event messaging
Firestore	1 GiB storage, 50K reads/day	NoSQL database
BigQuery	1 TB queries, 10 GB storage/month	Cost analysis

Free Trial Limitations

During the 90-day free trial:

Allowed	Not Allowed
Create most resources	Create more than 8 vCPUs per region
Use $300 credit	Add GPUs or TPUs
Create projects	Use Windows Server images
Enable APIs	Request quota increases

After the trial ends, you must upgrade to a paid account. Your resources are NOT automatically charged — GCP deletes them if you don’t upgrade.

Avoiding Surprise Charges

Set Up a Budget Alert

# Using gcloud (limited — full support via Console or API)
# Best done in Console: Billing → Budgets & alerts → Create budget

# Via CLI — create a budget with alert thresholds
$ gcloud billing budgets create \
    --billing-account=0X0X0X-0X0X0X-0X0X0X \
    --display-name="Learning Budget" \
    --budget-amount=10USD \
    --threshold-rule=percent=0.5 \
    --threshold-rule=percent=0.9 \
    --threshold-rule=percent=1.0

Created budget [billingAccounts/0X0X0X-0X0X0X-0X0X0X/budgets/abc-123].

Check Current Spending

# Check billing info for a project
$ gcloud billing projects describe my-devops-lab

billingAccountName: billingAccounts/0X0X0X-0X0X0X-0X0X0X
billingEnabled: true
name: projects/my-devops-lab/billingInfo
projectId: my-devops-lab

Common Cost Traps

Resource	Cost Trap	Prevention
Compute Engine	Forgotten running instances	Shut down after practice
Cloud NAT	~$32/month even when idle	Delete when not needed
Load Balancers	Forwarding rules cost ~$18/month	Clean up after labs
GKE Standard	Control plane: $73/month	Use Autopilot or delete clusters
Persistent Disks	Charged even when VM is stopped	Delete unattached disks
Static IPs	$7.30/month if not attached	Release unused IPs

Cleanup Script

Always run this after practice sessions:

# List all running instances
$ gcloud compute instances list

NAME        ZONE            MACHINE_TYPE  STATUS
test-vm     us-central1-a   e2-micro      RUNNING

# Delete a specific instance
$ gcloud compute instances delete test-vm \
    --zone=us-central1-a --quiet

Deleted [https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-devops-lab/zones/us-central1-a/instances/test-vm].

# Delete all instances in a project (be careful!)
$ gcloud compute instances list --format="value(name,zone)" | \
    while read name zone; do
      gcloud compute instances delete "$name" --zone="$zone" --quiet
    done

Common Mistakes

Mistake	Fix
Assuming everything is free	Check pricing before creating resources
Forgetting to delete resources	Run cleanup commands after each session
Ignoring budget alerts	Set up alerts before starting any labs
Not enabling billing	Enable billing first — required even for free tier
Running GKE Standard for learning	Use Autopilot (no control plane charge) or Cloud Run

Quick Reference

Item	Details
Free credit	$300 for 90 days
Free e2-micro	1 instance in us-central1, us-west1, or us-east1
Free Cloud Build	120 minutes/day
Free Cloud Logging	50 GB/month
Budget setup	Console → Billing → Budgets & alerts
Check spending	Console → Billing → Reports

---

Next → gcloud CLI Setup