Question

Difficulty: Very hardCreating Billing Budgets, Alerts, and BigQuery Exports

An enterprise cloud engineering team needs to enforce financial governance across their Google Cloud organization. They are tasked with two primary objectives: first, executing automated, custom remediation code whenever project spending exceeds a specific budget threshold; second, performing continuous, detailed SQL analytics on billing data. Which TWO configuration steps are required to implement this architecture? (Select TWO answers.)

  1. Attach a Cloud Pub/Sub topic to the Cloud Billing budget notification settings, and configure an event-driven subscriber such as a Cloud Function to execute automated remediation logic.Answer
  2. Grant the user or service account configuring the BigQuery billing export the Billing Account Administrator role on the billing account and the BigQuery Data Editor role on the project hosting the destination dataset.Answer
  3. C
    Enable the 'Auto-Cap Spending' policy directly within the Cloud Billing budget threshold rules to automatically terminate running virtual machines when budget limits are breached.
  4. D
    Assign the Project Owner role on the destination export project to the Cloud Billing Service Account, enabling automatic creation of the BigQuery export dataset without dataset-level IAM assignments.

Answer

To implement programmatic budget remediation and detailed cost analysis, administrators must connect the budget alerts to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic (which triggers serverless functions) and assign both the Billing Account Administrator role on the billing account and BigQuery Data Editor role on the export destination project.
The correct requirements involve two distinct configurations: First, Google Cloud Billing budgets do not halt billing or terminate workloads natively when a threshold is crossed. To execute programmatic actions, the budget must publish messages to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, which triggers a serverless application (such as a Cloud Function) to disable billing or delete resources. Second, configuring BigQuery billing export requires proper authorization across both scope boundaries: the Billing Account Administrator role on the billing account to configure the export, and the BigQuery Data Editor (or Admin) role on the project hosting the dataset to store the exported tables.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirement for automated remediation upon budget threshold breach.
Identify that Google Cloud Billing budgets are strictly notification mechanisms and do not shut down services natively.
To automate actions (e.g., stopping VMs or capping API usage), budget notifications must be published to Cloud Pub/Sub and consumed by a Cloud Function or Cloud Run service.
2
Analyze the IAM role requirements for setting up BigQuery billing exports.
Determine that permissions are required on both the source billing account and the destination project dataset.
Configuring the export pipeline requires Billing Account Administrator on the billing account to initiate export, and BigQuery Data Editor (or Admin) on the target project to write the tables.
3
Evaluate the incorrect options regarding budget capabilities and primitive permissions.
Reject native budget auto-capping and granting blanket Project Owner roles.
Budget rules lack native auto-cap controls, and least-privilege IAM mandates specific predefined billing and BigQuery roles.

Key Concept

Programmatic Billing Budget Enforcement and BigQuery Billing Export IAM Permissions
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