For all the cloud companies, "quota" is literally dollars. Bandwidth, memory, cpu, these are things they sell. So they are measured in money. The existing corporate budgetary process already manages dollars (indeed, that's its main function). If you want more of one of these things, you'll be displacing some customer who stood ready to pay for them (i.e. on the spot market), so you need to replace the revenue they were providing. Very straightforward.
What does google measure all these things in? Quotons? Where do quotons come from? When google becomes more profitable, does the Central Bank of Quoton print more quotons each month than they had previously? Does Google have a Chief Quoton Officer?
Totally curious about this. Google is the only company operating on this scale that doesn't sell raw bandwidth/cpu/ram as their product, nor do they buy these things from underlying cloud vendors (like e.g. Cloudflare does). This makes a lot of things simpler internally and probably avoids a lot of internal conflicts, but it does mean that they have to have a parallel internal accounting system for this stuff.
Is there an official exchange rate between the two accounting systems? Are different teams allowed to sell each other quotons, in exchange for budget dollars? Has the IRS ever audited Google's Quoton books?
Okay that last question was not serious. But the rest were.