GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your organization keeps development workloads in a separate Google Cloud project that is attached to the same Cloud Billing account as production. Finance has issued two new controls for the dev project:

Send an email to the FinOps group when 75 % of the monthly USD 10 000 budget is consumed.
If actual spend reaches 100 %, immediately stop every Compute Engine VM in the dev project, but leave production untouched. As the lead cloud architect, which design best meets these requirements using Google-managed cost-management features while minimizing ongoing operational effort?

Enable detailed billing export to BigQuery, schedule a daily query that checks cumulative spend, then send an email via Cloud Scheduler at 75 % and invoke a Cloud Run service to stop VMs when spend exceeds 100 %.
Create a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy on the billing.googleapis.com/cost/forecast metric with 75 % and 100 % conditions. Use email notifications for 75 % and configure Deployment Manager to delete VM instances when the 100 % alert fires.
Create a Cloud Billing budget for the dev project with 75 % and 100 % thresholds. Configure email notifications for 75 % and publish 100 % events to a Pub/Sub topic. Deploy a Cloud Function subscribed to that topic that uses a service account with compute.instanceAdmin to stop all Compute Engine VMs in the dev project.
Apply an Organization Policy that caps the dev project's monthly spend at USD 10 000 and enable Policy Controller to shut down VMs when the cap is hit. Use a Cloud Monitoring alert on the billing metric to send the 75 % email.

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Answer Description

Cloud Billing Budgets natively supports multiple threshold rules, automatic emails to Billing users, and publication of budget events to Pub/Sub topics. Creating a budget scoped to the dev project with rules at 75 % and 100 % satisfies the notification requirement; the 75 % rule sends an email to the FinOps group. Publishing the 100 % event to Pub/Sub allows a small Cloud Function-using a least-privilege service account with roles/compute.instanceAdmin-to iterate through the dev project and stop all VMs, preserving production resources. This leverages built-in budget alerts and requires only one lightweight serverless component. The other options either rely on features that do not exist (spend caps in Org Policy, budget alerts in Cloud Monitoring), impose a larger custom pipeline (BigQuery exports and scheduled queries), or add unnecessary tooling, so they introduce more operational overhead without additional benefit.

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