Billing Accounts in AWS and GCP
AWS Billing Account
In AWS, when you create an account, it contains a Billing Account. Sub Accounts can be added for recreating an organizational hierarchy. Each sub-account comes with it’s own billing account.
GCP Billing Accounts
In GCP, you just need a single account. Within this single account, you can create as many billing accounts as you like. You can use this to assign cost centers appropriately. Each project that you spin up has to be associated with a single billing account.
This single account in GCP can be either an individual account (tied to a gmail address) or an organizational account (tied to a gSuite domain).
The organizational unit allows for hierarchical resource separation and IAM access policies.
Projects and Billing Accounts in Google Cloud
As shown below, each project requires a billing account to be associated with it. This leads to cleaner separation of concerns within an organization (different departments and different projects within each department can bill individually).
Summary
Billing accounts work a little differently in GCP than in AWS. In GCP, a single parent account can have multiple billing accounts. In AWS, each account (or sub account) gets it’s own billing account.
Anuj holds professional certifications in Google Cloud, AWS as well as certifications in Docker and App Performance Tools such as New Relic. He specializes in Cloud Security, Data Encryption and Container Technologies.
Anuj Varma – who has written 1214 posts on Anuj Varma, Hands-On Technology Architect, Clean Air Activist.
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