Projects

A project is a billing-attribution group. Tag your instances and storage buckets with a project, and Carolina Cloud tracks exactly how much compute and storage each project has cost — live and cumulatively. Projects are how you answer “what is the glaxo-oncology study costing us?” or “how much of this month’s bill belongs to client-acme?”

Projects are organization-owned and admin-managed. They don’t change who can run what or who pays — they’re a reporting layer on top of your existing org billing. Use them to:

Split a shared org bill across teams, grants, studies, or clients.
Watch the live burn rate of one initiative without mentally subtracting everything else.
Keep a clean, per-project cost history that survives even after the work wraps up.

Where projects fit

Layer	What it does
Project	A label that compute and storage usage is attributed to.
Instance	Tag any instance with one project (or none). See Labelling instances.
Storage bucket	A project can have its own dedicated bucket. See Project storage.
Spend	Per-project live burn + cumulative totals. See Tracking project spend.

You don’t have to use projects. Instances and buckets that aren’t attributed to a project simply don’t show up in any project’s totals — billing works exactly as before.

Creating a project

From Admin → Projects, an admin clicks + New project, types a name, and hits Create. You can also spin one up inline while labelling an instance.

Naming rules

Project names are kebab-case: lowercase letters and single hyphens only.

Allowed	Not allowed
`pfizer`	`Pfizer` (uppercase)
`glaxo-oncology`	`glaxo_oncology` (underscore)
`client-acme`	`client-acme-2` (digits)
	`-acme` / `acme-` (leading/trailing hyphen)
	`glaxo--oncology` (double hyphen)

Names are rejected, not auto-corrected — naming a project is rare, so we’d rather you get it exactly right than guess at what you meant. A name must be unique among your org’s live projects.

How many you can have

Each organization can have up to 10 live projects by default. Archived projects don’t count against the limit. Need more? Email hello@carolinacloud.io to raise the cap.

Renaming a project

Need to fix a typo or reflect a renamed study or client? An admin can rename a project from its detail panel on the Admin → Projects page:

Select the project on the left.
Click Rename, type the new name (same kebab-case rules), and press Enter or click Save.

Renaming is safe for your cost history. Past spend is attributed by a stable internal ID, not by the name, so all historical totals stay intact — the project simply shows its new name everywhere going forward. The new name must be unique among your org’s live projects.

Archiving a project

Projects are archived, not deleted — a project with cost history must never silently vanish. When an admin archives a project (from its detail panel on the Projects page):

It’s hidden from instance and bucket pickers, so nobody attributes new usage to it.
Its name is freed for reuse — you can create a brand-new project with the same name.
Existing instances keep pointing at it, and all spend history is preserved. The archived project still shows its cumulative totals.

Archiving is idempotent and reversible in effect: the history is always there. There is no hard-delete for a project that has ever been used — this is deliberate, so your cost records stay intact for invoicing and audits.

Who can do what

Action	Admin	Member
View the Projects page and per-project spend	✅	✅ (read-only)
Create / rename / archive a project	✅	—
Attribute their own instance to a project	✅	✅
Create / delete a project storage bucket	✅	—

Next steps

Labelling instances — attribute compute to a project.
Project storage — give a project its own bucket.
Tracking project spend — read live burn and cumulative totals.