Stage 1 · Lesson 1 of 7
What you are billed for: time, quantity and requests
Almost every cloud charge is a quantity multiplied by a unit price. Virtual machines are billed by the second or hour they run. Disks and object storage are billed per GB per month, whether you read the data or not.
Serverless functions and APIs are billed and per unit of compute time. Data leaving a region or going to the internet is billed per GB. Managed services often combine several of these, plus a charge per hour for simply existing.
Once you see each line as "how much, of what unit, at what price", a bill stops being a wall of numbers.
Common trapthinking a stopped VM costs nothing: its disks, and public IP addresses keep billing.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CourseFreeIntroduction to FinOps (free course)
FinOps Foundation · Beginner
Free: the FinOps Foundation's own first course, so you start with the right picture of what FinOps is
- CourseFreeGoogle Cloud cost management courses (Google Skills)
Google Cloud · Beginner
Start "Understand Your Google Cloud Costs": billing accounts, invoices and resource organisation