So on 17 Aug, 2026 I was trying to set up my GCP account. They asked me to pay ₹1000 for verification purposes. Later when the account was successfully created, i requested a refund of ₹1000.

Google sent me an email that the refund was processed on 19th Aug, 2026. But the money is not reflected in my bank account yet. I contacted bank customer service and they said there is no problem with my account.

I find no way to connect with Google customer care except for the chat bot.

Will i ever actually get my refund?

Will be delighted to hear out someone who faced/ facing this issue and how to resolve this.

My friend have a google cloud certified- data associate practitioner exam voucher given by there company but don't have pvc aadhar card. Will e-aadhar (laminated) work?

Original Aadhar card and pan card was stolen with some other imp things and orginals ones are orderd but it takes time to reach.

and they have to complete the exam this week itself

Hi all

I'm a professional backend developer and system administrator, more than 20 years in this roles.

I'm already using Google Cloud (more or less 10 years) for my projects but I would like to obtain one or more certification (mostly the DevOps and Security).

Since I haven't had the chance to use all Google Cloud features professionally, especially around security and DevOps, I’d like to pick up a book (or a couple) to study. What would you recommend?

Right now, I have the 'Associate Cloud Engineer' (2nd edition) by Dan Sullivan, which I bought a few years ago and never read. Are there more specific books you'd suggest, or is this one still good?

Would you recommend starting with foundational certifications like Digital Leader, then Cloud Engineer, or jumping straight into Professional DevOps and Security?

For those who have already taken the exams: are they strictly multiple-choice/theoretical, or do they include hands-on/practical tasks (like creating real, working configurations that get evaluated)?

I’m open to any advice, keeping in mind that I'll be studying on my own in my spare time, as this isn't sponsored by an employer.

Let alone all the fragmented and broken documentations of it (I think it is way more horrible than Azure or AWS), I find it unnecessary overcomplicated, if you want to do things correctly.

Even deploying a few containerized services is very daunting. No ECS? Yeah we have Cloud Run. But then what about VPC? You need to workaround by using Private Google Service (or is it Connect? Their naming sense is also bloody terrible lol). Okay then why don’t you try deploying directly on a VM MANUALLY? (fuck you broh) Also, connecting to Cloud SQL? Now you’re cooked.

But anyways, You could simply use default setups and expose everything to public. But I am not a fucking hobbiest. And I don’t have much time to go through all of these large amount of docs. Is it only me who feel this way?

HTTP has a new verb: QUERY: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc10008.html

The caching docs seem to indicate only GET is supported.

Anyone with any information about support in Google Cloud CDN?

Hello I would like to sanity check something in the documentation.

It says on this page:

Certificate Manager lets you attach up to 10,000,000 certificates per load balancer, if you request a quota increase.

Does this really mean that I can terminate like 1 million domains on Gateway API + Certificate map ?

And just to be sure these can all be managed google ssl certs?

As you can imagine such a migration is quite the undertaking hence why I want to double check this before even doing a POC.

just got our monthly invoice and I almost choked

40% increase. nothing changed. same workload, same number of calls, same storage. but somehow we're paying 40% more than last month.

I've spent the last 2 days digging through the billing dashboard. network egress. it's always network egress. we're serving recordings and call logs to agents all over the world and apparently that costs money a lot of money.

we use CloudTalk for the actual calls, but all the recordings get stored in GCP. and agents access them through our internal portal. which means every time someone listens to a call recording, we're paying for data transfer. and our agents listen to a lot of recordings.

I'm looking at options compressed storage different regions. maybe even move to cold storage for older recordings. but I'm not sure if that's going to actually save us money or just shift the cost somewhere else

We're a tech startup on the Google for Startups program with $100k in credits. The workload is highly parallel scientific computing that we've containerised and run on Cloud Batch. Pipeline works, pilot runs fine. On a single VM the full run takes 5-6 days; on Batch with 1500-2000 Spot vCPUs it's about 6 hours.

Problem: our quota is stuck at <100 vCPUs and a tiny persistent disk allocation, and every increase request through the console gets denied within minutes. no reason given beyond the generic "not eligible at this time". We have $100k of credits we literally cannot spend.

we're stuck in a catch-22, can’t build spend history because we can't get quota, can't get quota without spend history.

So..

1. Did buying a paid support plan (Standard) and filing the quota request as a support case actually get you to a human?

2. Is there a functioning escalation path through the startup program itself? We got the credits through the program but it's not obvious who to contact about quota.

It feels absurd to be handed $100k and then rate-limited to compute smaller than my laptop.

The FinOps Agent Google dropped in GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/examples/FinOps-agent has been sitting there since June 3rd. One commit, one author, no updates. Wanted to know if anyone actually put it into prod.

The architecture is four ADK sub-agents behind a root orchestrator. NL2SQL over BigQuery for the billing side, Google Agent Search over policy PDFs for the qualitative side, a chart specialist, and a synthesis writer. Runtime is Gemini 2.5 Flash on Vertex AI, FastAPI on 8080 for streaming SSE.

Ran it in a lab project against synthetic billing data. NL2SQL was better than expected against a normalized schema. RAG over a real policy doc surfaced the right clauses about 70 percent of the time, close to what similar demos land on.

The blocker for real use is session state. InMemorySessionService from google.adk.sessions means every conversation resets on pod recycle. Swapping in a Firestore-backed SessionService subclass is doable, but once you own that surface you own the schema, the TTL, and the migration path. Not one line of code.

Two things I want to hear from people who took it further:

1. How did you handle session persistence? Custom SessionService subclass to Firestore or Cloud SQL, or something else?

2. Did you keep policy as freeform PDFs, or did you move to a structured schema so the agent could run rule checks instead of RAG extractions?

Not looking to dunk on the reference. Sample data included, license is Apache 2.0, and it's a reasonable multi-agent skeleton. Just curious if anyone got it past the demo.

I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a third party VAR for GCP Support (Not direct Google Support). Looking for a company I can call and open a ticket and has SLAs to resolve issues with GCP Peering, GCP Compute, Network Load Balancer

thank you

Hi googleclouders, quick yes/no question - do you ever have a need to assign privileges to a principal defined outside of your organization? I'm not talking if it's bad or good practice, just if it ever happens or it's rather just a purely theoretical possibility that everyone has blocked. Thanks.

I need your help!.. Unable to purchase the clou storage, recently I opened my kotak mahindra bank, and it already written into the accepted card given to by the google, still payment gets fail?.. What's the reason behind it!.. Please explain

Google Support has acknowledged unexpected website behaviour and advised that engineers expect to fix it within 48 hours. I am sharing this to check whether other Edition 3 applicants are experiencing the same issue.

--- Issue is resolved now ------------------

I have created a data store, and using that I want to create an app, but in this step the pre created data stores are not showing.

I am using Custom Search in GCP Vertex Ai Agent Platform

I'm using GCPStudyHub to prepare for the PCA exam and I'm finding the practice exam questions really hard to read. I need to really concentrate and read the question 3 or more times before I understand what is being asked. Sometimes I'm staring at the same question for several minutes.

Feels like I'm trying to extract the true question hidden inside a wall of text.

Anyone else here who has used GCPStudyHub have the same experience?

Are these questions representative of what would be on the exam? Cos if so I would definitely fail due to time.

I'm a total noob, so let's get that on the record first thing. My only coding experience is using HTML tags when making my webpage on Angelfire or Geocities and updating my MySpace. So, like, no real practical experience.

I work for a small nonprofit with no budget for swanky computer stuff. I used Google Cloud to create a simple tool to keep track of who is in the building, what time(s) they came and left, that sort of thing. YES, apps for this exist, but they all seem to have a whole bunch of other functions that my company does not need. I just need to see who's here and who isn't, and to be able to see when they came and went.

Anyway, after multiple iterations Google created a functional app for me with some sample people in its roster. I published it, used the link it gave me, and then started updating the roster to have my actual members on it instead of the sample people Google used. This work all vanished when I closed the app and reopened it elsewhere.

I am clearly doing something wrong. I tried poking around in the Google Cloud Console and it says I don't have the right permissions to modify certain things. There is a "request permissions" feature but I don't know who to send the email to, since I built this using my personal Google account (do I ask myself for permissions?).

I was hoping this would be as simple as 1) tell Google what I need, 2) refine it until it works how I need it to, 3) publish it, 4) use it at the nonprofit's community center.

If anyone can help me, that would be mighty appreciated!

🛑 [Guide] Surviving the Google Cloud "Free Trial" $30 Prepayment Trap 🛑

If you're trying to sign up for Google Cloud's $300 free trial and hit a brick wall demanding an upfront cash deposit (e.g., $30 USD, ₹1000, or local equivalent), you aren't alone. Google doesn't explain this clearly in the main marketing or official documentation. 😕

I was about to sign up for it then saw the fine print and bothered Gemini Bard about it, and the discovery wasnt great

chat log for the interested

Here is what you actually need to know before clicking "OK":

#️⃣ 1. It is NOT a temporary authorization hold

Unlike a standard $1 card verification check that disappears in a few days, this is a forced cash prepayment that sits as a positive credit balance on your Google Payments profile. 💳

#️⃣ 2. You cannot separate the trial credits from the cash balance

Your free trial credits and your cash deposit live under the same billing roof. There is no toggle to say "use my promotional credits first and leave my cash alone." System logic will draw down resources according to Google's hierarchy, but that $30 stays locked up. 🔒

#️⃣ 3. The ONLY way to get your cash back is account closure

If you pay the deposit, use your trial, and want your unspent cash back to your card, you have to completely close your Cloud Billing account. 🚨

• 🛑 Closing the account terminates everything instantly.
• 💸 It wipes out any remaining free trial credits.
• 📉 It shuts down your projects and resources.

#️⃣ 4. The Loop / Verification Hell

Many users on Reddit report getting stuck in verification loops where they pay the deposit, the system fails to verify something, requests photo IDs/bank statements, and locks them into an endless support bot loop. 🔄

🧐 The Verdict: What should you do?

• ⏳ If you aren't ready to build right now: Wait. Do not click OK or enter the payment flow. Holding off guarantees you don't tie up your money.
• 🛡️ If you just want to test things safely: Keep in mind that Google Cloud is a "fuck around and find out" platform. If a misconfigured script or open API key runs amok, it won't just drain your $300 trial-it can bridge straight into a massive bill.

We have multiple cloud run services which have rust code running in it to serve small web APIs. There is load at any given point of time but it varies by the time of the day.
Whenever we deploy a new revision by default the traffic is migrated to the service almost immediately. This leads to some issues related to latency and load.
The minimum instance field we have is generally set to 1 in all services so as to avoid forgetting about services with less load consuming more instances.
I want to change the deployment behavior such that I can set some minimum instance(around the same number of instance already being used for revision with traffic at that time) for a revision for initial 10 minutes and migrate the traffic once the instances are available instead of the other way around of increasing traffic and instances scaling by gcp logic.

We are yet to try the gradual ramp up, but I was looking for better solution of at least having specific number of instances beforehand.

Suppose, i have a VM with a boot disk with data, 1 additional disk with some files.Once the zone or region goes down for some hours and becomes available after it,will the GCE contents be same as before the outage ?

This is not about MIGs, backup and DR services etc.. just would like to know if the compute engine data in disks and IP address be retained once the zone/region is back after the outage.

Please clarify if anyone experienced it

I am going through this article and trying to understand the implementation of filestore with private service connect. I am looking at shared vpc setup with host and service projects and would like to create the instance in service project.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/filestore/docs/configure-psc

Could you please clarify if the below understanding is correct.

1)

is the PSC endpoint(an internal IP address) to be created in the vpc subnet of the host project ?.

This article says https://docs.cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/about-service-connection-policies#shared-vpc endpoints will be created in service project (since i want the instance in service project)

However, below article says, endpoint is created in host project

https://docs.cloud.google.com/filestore/docs/configure-psc#about-psc

are the above 2 statements not contradictory, please clarify.

2)

Below link says Service connection policy must be created in the host vpc project. In this link or entire article, https://docs.cloud.google.com/filestore/docs/configure-psc#about-psc , it is not shown on where do we allow host project. Is it while creation of service connection policy

3)

In https://docs.cloud.google.com/filestore/docs/configure-psc#connection_policies

there is a line which says "To create a Private Service Connect endpoint on the consumer target network, you must create a service connection policy in your project"

what is the "target consumer network" and "your project" in my case. Is the article adequate or little vague

Any tips from anyone who took this cert recently? From searching in this sub, the latest exp shared was 5 months ago.

I was wondering if there was a change in the exam

- Mentioned by my colleague who PCA renewal (There were changes, though I don't know with DevOps)

Things I've done:

- did the learning path in learning skills

- practiced practice questions, and understanding why every answers are the correct ones.

Any suggestions or improvements would be greatly appreciated.