Question

A large enterprise has hundreds of developers who frequently request new GCP projects to prototype ideas. The finance and platform teams complain that these ad-hoc sandbox projects have no spending limits, are never cleaned up, and lack ownership visibility, driving unpredictable cost and sprawl. Leadership wants a repeatable business process that lets developers self-serve sandbox environments while keeping costs and lifecycle under control. What should the cloud architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Establish a self-service provisioning workflow that creates sandbox projects from a standardized template under a dedicated folder, applying budget alerts, spending caps via quotas, mandatory owner labels, and an automated expiry/teardown policy.

Answer

Grant all developers the Project Creator role at the organization level so they can create projects freely, and review the billing report at the end of each quarter.

Answer

Require developers to email the platform team, who manually create each project and manually track ownership and cost in a spreadsheet.

Answer

Consolidate all experimentation into a single shared project so that only one budget needs to be monitored and no lifecycle management is required.