Essential Terms and Definitions

The following table provides an overview of the key terms and entities commonly encountered in the CloudVerse platform.

Term	Description
Organization	The Organization resource in Google Cloud is the root node of the resource hierarchy, serving as the hierarchical ancestor for folders and projects. It allows IAM access control policies to apply across all resources within the organization. While not mandatory, having an Organization resource enables the use of certain Resource Manager features. It is typically associated with a Google Workspace or Cloud Identity account and is automatically provisioned when a user with such an account creates a Google Cloud project. For more information, see the GCP | Organizations and GCP | Creating Organization.
Project	Project is a container for all your cloud resources and services, like virtual machines and storage. Each project has a unique ID and is linked to billing, allowing you to manage costs and resource usage. Projects also help in setting permissions and controlling access through Identity and Access Management (IAM). An account you add to CloudVerse corresponds to a project.
Billing Account	GCP Billing Account tracks and manages the costs for using Google Cloud services. It links to one or more projects and handles payments through methods like credit cards or bank accounts. It provides detailed invoices, cost reports, and budget alerts to help manage and control spending.
Billing Data Exporting	Cloud Billing export to BigQuery enables you to export detailed Google Cloud billing data (such as usage, cost estimates, and pricing data) automatically throughout the day to a BigQuery dataset that you specify. This is a must-have step so CloudVerse can collect your billing data. For more information, see the GCP | Export data bigquery.
Bigquery Dataset	Bigquery Dataset is a dataset in BigQuery where your detailed billing data is stored. It organizes and holds the exported billing information, such as usage and cost data, allowing you to analyze and query it effectively. Before you enable your Cloud Billing data to export to BigQuery, you must create at least one BigQuery dataset to manage your exported data.
Project Hosting Bigquery Dataset	Project Hosting BigQuery Dataset is the project that contains the dataset where the billing data is exported to. For more information, see the GCP | Projects
Service Account	Service Account is a special type of account used in GCP to enable applications, virtual machines, or other services to authenticate and perform actions on resources securely. It acts as an identity for the application, allowing it to interact with Google Cloud resources with the permissions granted to that service account. This helps in managing access control and ensuring security for automated processes in the cloud environment.
Role	Role is a set of permissions that define what actions an account or service can perform on GCP resources. Roles are used to manage access control by granting users or service accounts specific capabilities, such as viewing, editing, or managing resources. There are predefined roles with common permissions and custom roles that can be tailored to specific needs.
APIs	Google Cloud APIs are programmatic interfaces to Google Cloud Platform services. They are a key part of Google Cloud Platform, allowing you to easily add the power of everything from computing to networking to storage to machine-learning-based data analysis to your applications. CloudVerse need some APIs to be enabled so that we can use them from the backend side. For more informations, see the GCP | Enabling and Disabling Services