Workstation costs¶
A workstation runs in its build environment's Google Cloud project, so its resources are billed to that project at Google Cloud's rates for the region. This page says what is billed, roughly what a month comes to, and where to see what you actually spend.
What a month costs¶
The console shows these figures beside each size when you create or resize a workstation.
| Size | CPU and memory | A typical month | Running all month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 2 vCPU · 8 GB | about US$27 | about US$54 |
| Medium | 4 vCPU · 16 GB | about US$54 | about US$108 |
| Large | 8 vCPU · 32 GB | about US$108 | about US$216 |
A typical month is 8 active hours on each of 22 workdays, plus the memory kept while it sleeps. Running all month is the CPU and memory of a workstation that never sleeps. Both use Google's public on-demand rates for its E2 machines in europe-west1 (Belgium). Another region and any discounts on the account change the final bill.
Add about US$14 a month for the disk at its starting 100 GB and the address, whatever the size. Those and the rest of Billed separately are not in the table.
What is billed when¶
| The workstation is | CPU | Memory | Disk, address and network |
|---|---|---|---|
| Running | Billed | Billed | Billed |
| Asleep | Not billed | Billed, so it wakes with everything as you left it | Billed |
| Stopped | Not billed | Not billed | Billed |
| Deleted | Not billed | Not billed | Not billed |
A workstation goes to sleep after a time with nobody using it: 30 minutes unless you choose otherwise. Opening it wakes it. A shorter sleep timer costs less, and you can change it at any time from ⋯ → Sleep timer.
Billed separately¶
These are not in the monthly figures above:
- The disk. It starts at 100 GB. When less than 10 GB is free, the workstation grows it by 50 GB at a time, up to 500 GB. A disk never shrinks, and it's billed until the workstation is deleted.
- The static address, held for as long as the workstation exists.
- Network traffic out of Google Cloud, such as downloads to your laptop.
- The organisation's proxy and load balancer, which every workstation in the organisation is reached through. They are shared by all of them, so they are billed once rather than per workstation.
See what you actually spend¶
- ⋯ → Monitor usage opens the workstation's monitoring in the Google Cloud console.
- Billing details, at the foot of the Workstations screen, lists each workstation's resource labels. Use them to group or filter its VM, disk and address in the build environment's Cloud Billing reports.