A lab session gives each participant one real Google Cloud project and one real deployment, built from the Lab sessions view of Managed Environments on the Solutions page in a single action. No participant needs a Google Cloud billing account. Lab sessions are early access.
Every trainer who teaches cloud recognises all four.
A learner who has already used the real console sees the seams. A learner who has not is taught something that does not exist outside the classroom.
One learner deletes a network or exhausts an address range, and the exercise stops for the other twenty-nine. You debug your own lab rather than teach.
Card details, a billing account per person, and a bill that runs long after the course ends. In several markets the learner cannot complete that step at all, and never starts.
A day of setup before every cohort, and scripts that drifted since the last one. The infrastructure is real, but you author it again for each delivery.
There is also cleanup, after everyone has gone home: finding what was left running, in whose account, and turning it off before it becomes an invoice.
One session per cohort, run from the Lab sessions view of Managed Environments.
Name it, paste the participant emails, and set each participant's credit allowance, how long each environment runs (up to 24 hours) and the region. An address the dialog cannot read stops the whole session, so nothing is charged for a list that was only partly understood.
How many participants a session holds is set by an administrator, who also grants the Trainer role; it cannot be requested from inside RAD. Participants without a RAD account are emailed an invitation to sign up, and are not provisioned until they have; the session counts them as waiting to sign up.
Pick a module or a solution from the catalogue of 350+ deployment options covering 180+ applications and platform modules, and fill in its first page of settings. The region comes from the session. Module, project and shared-services fees are currently waived for lab sessions; build time is still charged. RAD shows the cost per participant and in total before anything starts.
Each participant gets their own Google Cloud project and their own deployment inside it. Not a shared project with thirty namespaces: thirty projects. Environments build a few at a time, so a large cohort takes longer to finish.
RAD-managed projects are created in one of four Google Cloud folders: sandbox, development, production and lab. Each has its own org-policy set. No deploy form offers lab: only a lab session reaches it.
A built environment waits as Ready until you start its clock, or starts on its own if the session is set to When ready. Each participant gets the full duration from their own start, and you can extend time or add credits while it runs.
When time or credits run out, billing is switched off, the participant's access is removed and the lab project is deleted. Nothing is left running to hunt for later.
When a participant's clock starts, they get access to their project in the Google Cloud console: what was deployed, its logs, its storage buckets and its Cloud SQL database, built by ordinary Terraform. A banner on every RAD page shows them their time and credits left, with a link to open the project in the Google Cloud console. They cannot read secrets, change configuration, scale or create resources, and they cannot deploy anything themselves in a lab.
Org policies applied to the folder the lab projects are created in.
One region in each of eight geographies, the cheapest available in that geography per the Cloud Billing Catalog API. africa-south1 is the only Google Cloud region on the African continent.
A deployment into a participant's own project keeps every region Google offers.
Chosen per session when you create it, and fixed from then on.
The whole cohort's allowance, participants × credits per participant, is reserved from your purchased credits when you create the session. Free credits cannot be used. Adding participants or credits later is paid the same way.
The default for a new session. Each participant pays the credits per participant from their own purchased credits, and nothing of theirs is built until they have paid. Their payment becomes yours only when their clock starts; if they never get access, it is returned to them.
Whatever participants did not use returns to your top-up credits, which do not expire, when the session settles. Settlement waits for Google's billing data, usually up to a day after the last environment is switched off. Overrun beyond an allowance is charged to you, up to the ceiling you set.
10 credits is $1. Before anything is built, RAD shows the cost per participant and in total. Build time is metered at 6 credits an hour, and the average build takes about 19 minutes.
A participant buys their place from the lab banner at the top of every RAD page. RAD takes payment through Stripe and Flutterwave; Flutterwave supports card, bank transfer, USSD and mobile money. RAD never handles card details.
When a participant cannot pay on RAD, because their bank will not work with the payment provider or they have cash rather than a card, they can pay you directly and you buy their place with one click, from your own purchased credits. The place then works like any other, and if it is never used the credits come back to you. RAD does not take, hold or check the payment made to you; you can keep a note of it against the place.
A lab project belongs to one participant in one session. It never counts as one of their own RAD-managed projects, so a participant keeps their own sandbox project alongside your course.
An administrator grants the Trainer role. What it reaches is the lab sessions you run, and nothing else.
Participants are emailed before their time ends, by default at 15 and 5 minutes, and once more when their lab has ended. End now closes the whole session at any time, and a session nobody provisions ends itself after 14 days.
Administrators can manage every trainer's sessions; credits they add still come from the trainer, who is told who acted. Finance can end a session to stop its spending but cannot change it.
The catalogue carries 60+ pre-composed solutions, and a lab session can build a solution into every environment in the same way as a single module.
A solution holds between two and eight applications, provisioned up to four at a time into one project. A member that consumes another member's Terraform outputs waits for that deployment to finish; the rest start as soon as the solution is confirmed.
Where a producer-and-consumer pair is wired, a solution writes the producer's Terraform outputs into the consumer's configuration when it finishes. Connections in other solutions are made by hand. This wiring is a beta capability; verify it in a pilot.
Teardown runs the dependency graph backwards, so the shared project is destroyed after the things living inside it rather than before them. For a cohort that is the difference between a clean end of term and a set of half-deleted estates left to chase.
A capstone solution is charged as one reservation across all its members, with a bundle discount of 15% for 3–4 modules, 20% for 5–6 and 25% for 7 or more. Paid, like any lab environment, from the session's allowance.
Page counts from docs.radmodules.dev.
Each one ends in something running rather than in a diagram. They map onto the same catalogue your cohort deploys from, so the lab a participant reads and the form they fill in are the same subject, step for step, throughout.
One for each of the 340+ application options, plus 175+ shared application-layer guides those options build on. They list the variables the deploy form asks about and what each one does, which makes them useful as pre-reading.
Aligned to seven Google Cloud certification tracks: ACE, PCA, PCD, PCDE, PCNE, PDE and PSE. Each guide defines deployment profiles built from the foundation modules and maps the exam domains onto them for teaching.
The brochure is the version to send a head of faculty or a budget holder: what the lab tier restricts, and how a course is costed per seat. There is also a programme write-up, From Certified to Capable, for the curriculum itself.
RAD is in beta, and lab sessions are the newest part of it.
The trainer role, lab sessions and the lab tier are built and running. They have not yet been through a role-based security review, and one scoping bug has already been found and fixed.
If your curriculum needs another cloud provider, RAD is the wrong tool. Everything in the catalogue is a Terraform module targeting Google Cloud.
Under the exact email you enrolled. Places are paid from purchased credits, yours or theirs: the free signup credits cannot fund a lab place.
Training providers, university lecturers, bootcamp operators and corporate L&D teams who will run one real cohort with us. In exchange you get direct access to the people building it, and your feedback lands in the product.