Google Cloud cost management courses (Google Skills)

What it is

Google Skills (formerly Google Cloud Skills Boost) has a two-part set of courses on billing and cost management for Google Cloud. Both mix short videos with hands-on labs that run in temporary Google Cloud projects, so you work with real billing tools without risking your own account.

The two courses

• Understand Your Google Cloud Costs (introductory, about 1.5 hours): for people in technology or finance roles who manage Google Cloud costs. You set up a billing account, organise resources and manage access, then view invoices, analyse billing data in BigQuery, work with Google Sheets and build dashboards. Completing it earns a skill badge.
• Optimize Your Google Cloud Costs (intermediate, about 2 hours): the second part. You control and optimise costs by setting up budgets and alerts, managing quota limits and using committed use discounts.

Why take them

The labs give you real billing data to query, which is otherwise hard to get as a student with a nearly empty bill. Querying a billing export in BigQuery is one of the most practical FinOps skills on Google Cloud, and these labs teach it directly.

How to use them well

Do the first course before the roadmap's "reading the bill" stage and the second before rate optimisation. After each lab, write down the BigQuery queries you ran, then turn on the billing export in your own project so you have your own data to repeat them on later. Remember that billing export only collects data from the day you enable it for single-region datasets.

Prerequisites and time

Basic Google Cloud knowledge (projects, the console) and a little SQL. About three and a half hours together.

Free or paid

The course pages are free to start. Google Skills labs sometimes require credits or a subscription; check the course page before you begin.

Best for: learners on the Google Cloud path of the FinOps roadmap.