How do I turn off the faucet????!!!

[Brian Bonner]

I followed this tutorial:  https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/quickstart

I really wanted to attempt to deploy a docker-compose configuration to GCP to see how it would work, but I scaled it back, since it seemed like it was a very manual process.

So, I went through the tutorial on 11/10/2017.   I revisited it yesterday for a UX call w/ Google and to my surprise it said I owed $13.06.   Today it was $16.

I was panicking .   How do I turn off this faucet???

I was looking everywhere.   I looked at the billing details -- which didn't match the dashboard.   It showed app-engine flex core and app-engine flex memory. 

So I went to the app-engine dashboard and it showed zilch under the instance overview.

So I went to instances, I saw two instances there, but it wouldn't let me delete them.  

I was going to disable the project, but the text on the settings page said that charges would continue to be incurred. 

How do I stop this thing???

So after the price went up again, I went back to the tutorial and found cleanup.   Basically it said I have to delete the project.

Is this really the only way to stop billing?   Delete the project?   There's no way to stop the container?   Or something else?   I didn't want to do it because of this warning in the tutorial:

Warning: Deleting a project has the following consequences:

• If you used an existing project, you'll also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• You can't reuse the project ID of a deleted project. If you created a custom project ID that you plan to use in the future, you should delete the resources inside the project instead. This ensures that URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, remain available.

As you can see, I tried to delete resources to no avail.   It was so frustrating.   

I see on the charges page (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#flexible-environment-instances) that most of the charges are related to the vCPU.  How do I turn them off when I'm not using them?

Can't google provide a better way of showing where the billing expenses are coming from?   Is there a command line way to spit out a detail invoices?

Jordan's post here:  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/google-appengine/flex$20charges|sort:date/google-appengine/uaiyicw6rhg/ole26VFlBwAJ   seems to indicate that specifying autoscaling vs. manual: 1 will save money, but this document:  https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible/nodejs/configuring-your-app-with-app-yaml  seems to indicate that the minimum # of instances is 1 no matter what:   So how would this save money?   It seems so contradictory.

min_num_instances

Must be 1 or greater, default is 2 to reduce latency. When a service is deployed, it is given the minimum number of instances and scales according to traffic.

I thought the tutorial for app engine would end up being free based upon this:  https://cloud.google.com/free/  It says app-engine is free.

So why was I charged in the first place?

Thank you,

Brian

[Yannick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello Brian,

First things first, you are running App Engine Flexible instances. To stop them from running you should go to the Versions page, select the version that currently has instances running and click the STOP button. This will shutdown running instances for that version of your service. You also have the option of disabling your application so that it cannot accrue any charges.

Regarding the free tier of App Engine, please note that it as well as the ability to scale down to zero instances are only available on the App Engine Standard environment while you are using the App Engine Flexible environment. You can view a comparison of these environments here.

I hope this helped.