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Deployment & Scaling · Foundation

Opening a Google Cloud Project for AI Work Without a Surprise Bill

Projects, billing accounts, budget alerts, quotas, service accounts and Application Default Credentials — the ten-minute setup that prevents the three classic beginner disasters.

  • 55 min lesson
  • beginner level
  • Google Cloud AI Track
  • Narrated presentation

What you’ll learn

  • Project as the unit of resources, IAM and billing attribution
  • Free trial credit vs Always Free tier — and that neither covers Gemini inference for long
  • Budgets alert but do not cap spending; hard caps require a Pub/Sub function
  • Application Default Credentials via gcloud instead of pasted API keys
  • Least-privilege service accounts (roles/aiplatform.user) over Editor
  • Per-project, per-region, per-model quota and why 429s appear early
  • Deleting the project as the only reliable teardown

Inside this lesson

A narrated, slide-by-slide presentation with 1 prediction exercise, 1 knowledge check, 3 videos. You answer as you go, and the platform checks your work.

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