Create capacity-based project

If you currently run your workloads using on-demand pricing, you'll need to create a new project to run workloads with capacity-based pricing. We generally recommend a new project for each query source (e.g. Looker, dbt) you plan to enable the billing model optimization for.

To create a new project with a reservation follow the steps below:

1. Create a new project (e.g. looker-alvin-capacity) under the appropriate organization (usually it will be the one pre-selected for you):

   
2. Whilst in the project, select Capacity Management from the sidebar in the GCP console and hit the Create Reservation button.

   
3. Set the location to the region where the majority of the workloads run. Unless otherwise informed by Alvin, choose Standard as the edition and set the max reservation size to 800 slots as a starting point. This can be adjusted later based on usage patterns observed by Alvin. Leave baseline slots at 0, so no cost incurs when you are not running workloads. The cost estimates provided by GCP here is not indicative of the cost, so don't be alarmed. It's just an estimate of what you would pay if you were consuming a fixed amount of slots 24-7 over a 30 day period.

   
4. Go to the detail page of the reservation you created earlier.

1. Now click the "Assignments" tab.

1. Hit the "Create Assignment" button, opening the sidebar and ensure the "Job Type" is set to QUERY.

1. Hit the "Browse" button, opening the search and locate the project you created earlier, e.g. "alvin-looker-capacity".

1. Now, select the project and finalize by hitting the "Create" Button in the sidebar.

2. Once the above is done, you will need to ensure the new project has access to run your workloads:

   1. Service account: if the workloads for this query source are run by a single service account, you will need to give this service account BigQuery Job User access to the new project.

   2. Multiple users: If there are multiple BigQuery users executing queries from the query source, you will need to give all users the same access to this project as they do to the on-demand project that already runs the workloads. Most commonly this is handled via groups.

3. Finally, give the service account used in Alvin to generate the initial savings report (e.g. [email protected]) BigQuery Metadata Viewer and BigQuery Resource Viewer access to the new project (skip if you enabled org level access to this service account).

   

Then, simply share the project id (e.g. looker-alvin-capacity) with your Alvin representative via Slack or email.