Now that you can log in, you’ll want to make sure that you have access to a Billing Account and Billing Project. This will allow you to charge storage and analysis costs through a Google account linked to Terra. A Terra Billing Project is Terra's way of connecting a workspace where you accrue costs for things, back to a Google Billing account where you pay for it. You must have a Google Billing Account established before creating a Terra Billing Project. Outlined here are the steps necessary to set this up, as well as instructions on how to add or be added to an existing account/billing project.
Detailed instructions for setting up your billing can be found by following the links below. If you are a BioData Catalyst Fellow, your procedure for billing set up is a bit different, but you may find some of the information below still relevant (sharing a billing project with another user, for example). Step 1: Get Cloud credits for BioData Catalyst Step 2: Wait for approval & review the Billing overview for BioData Catalyst users Step 3: Credits approved. Now create a new Terra billing project Step 4 (optional): Sharing Billing Projects among colleagues
Logging in to Terra for the first time is a quick and straight-forward process. The process is easiest if you already have an email address hosted by Google. If you want to use an email address that is not hosted by Google, we have instructions for that as well. Article: How to register for a Terra account Article: Setting up a Google account with a non-Google email We also recommend our article on navigating in Terra to get familiar with basic menus and options in Terra, as well as this video introduction to Terra.
Read on in the next two subsections for primers on how to set up billing and how to manage costs.
We have a number of articles on tracking and minimizing the costs of operating on Terra. There are multiple ways of estimating how much your analyses are costing you, including built-in tools and external resources. The articles below contain instructions and advice on managing your cloud resources in a variety of ways: Article: Understanding and controlling cloud costs Article: Best practices for managing shared team costs Article: How much did a workflow cost? Article: How to disable billing on a Terra project