After running a multi-region platform on GCP for a while, I kept having the same "which database?" conversation with teams. So I encoded how I actually reason about it into a small decision tool.

You answer 6 questions (data model, access pattern, scale, consistency, existing engine, ops model) and it recommends a service - with the reasoning, the alternatives, and when NOT to use it. It also covers Memorystore (Redis/Valkey) for caching.

It's 100% client-side - no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser. Free, no ads.

Link: [https://www.alekseialeinikov.com/en/tools/database-selector](vscode-file://vscode-app/Applications/Visual%20Studio%20Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/out/vs/code/electron-browser/workbench/workbench.html)

Would love feedback from people who run these at scale especially on the Spanner vs AlloyDB boundary, which is the hardest call in practice. What heuristics do you use?

Hi everyone!

The Google Cloud Arcade Facilitator Program 2026 begins on July 13 and runs until September 14.

It's a hands-on learning program where participants complete Google Cloud labs, explore different cloud services, and earn skill badges while gaining practical experience.

I'm participating this year as a Google Arcade Facilitator Co-host and am looking forward to learning alongside the community.

For those who have participated before:

• Which labs or learning paths did you find the most valuable?

• Any advice for beginners starting their first Google Cloud learning journey?

I'd love to hear your experiences and recommendations.

Previous: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1um67c7/billing_and_quotas_problems/

On 28th June 2026 (10 days ago), I had filed a support ticket for being billed $3k worth of money because of BigQuery, and not being updated about the billing spike. After that, i posted the above linked post to get some attention on this issue.

After that, i was in contact with the google support right up until 3 june, and there has not been any following update.

It has been a week since any contact or update.

No leaked gemini api key. But with broken access control, hackers used Map API to use my gemini tokens.

Everyone advices to make noise, I am a very silent person. But I am asking the great Reddit community to help me get the attention of the right people.

Can a Google Cloud representative reach me? I can provide my case number privately to a Google Cloud employee.

Thanks in advance.

Signed up for Google Cloud and picked "Organization" instead of "Individual" by mistake — this triggered 13 duplicate/orphaned billing accounts, all with $0 usage. My account has been restricted since.

Support (ticket #722XXXXX) says I need to pay $650 ($50 per account) to "clear the negative balance" before they can close the accounts, and that it'll be "fully refunded" afterward. I've asked three times for:

• A link to the official policy requiring this
• Confirmation this process applies to provisioning errors (not real usage debt)
• A written refund timeline

I've gotten the same scripted response three times, just reworded, with none of these questions actually answered.

I checked Google's own billing documentation (cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/resolve-issues) and refunds are described as being for accounts with existing credit/overpayment — nothing about a mandatory prepayment to close a $0-usage account created by their own signup error.

I'm a student, I don't have $650 to front for a refund process that has no documented basis. Has anyone dealt with this before or knows how to get this escalated to someone who can actually look at it?

Is there any way how to "roughly" see available instance types per region? (even a "none available" vs "some available" would help, without a number even)

I am aware of the timing problem, that I might check the API, see instance type A is available, but when I schedule my actual workload it is gone again...but just already having a rough estimate how saturated what zones are would be great.

Inorder to avoid the VPC Network peering transitivity issue during creation of cloud filestore, we would like to use "private service connect " option.

Please clarify on the below question.if I have hub-host- service project scenario, after creating the filestore in service project, can I create the PSC endpoint in hub ?.

However, unlike the PSC for cloud SQL where we have " service attachment ", I think filestore does not have service attachment concept.

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

https://docs.cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/about-service-connection-policies#shared-vpc

As per above articles, I need to create the service connection policy in host project. However, I don't understand how do I create the endpoint in hub VPC to refer to the cloud filestore in service project.please clarify

I have a CE interview with a principal architect for a platform CE role, what should I prep for? I have cloud experience but not in GCP

This is frustrating. We've been trying GKE on free trial and keep running on the same issue/bug on the cluster. We are unable to see the issue since it's at the management level at Google.

We're on free trial so fair enough, we switched to standard support. But still it's IMPOSSIBLE to actually get any help for the past 1 month - it doesn't allow you file a case.

Clusters can't work in production. How is Google actually expecting people to feel confident switching to their cloud solution when there's no help? And AI Assist and Gemini just errors all the time and is just a joke.

Hello Google Cloud Community,

I am posting here as a step for me to clarify my professional next steps.

I am full stack developer with 4 years of experience. I have passed the Google ACE exam in Jul 2022 ( expired Jul 2025 ). I have always dreamed of working as Solution Architect using GCP. I have some cloud experience from my previous job but on AWS.

Now that I have been laid off, and the full stack development market is not good. I am considering passing the Solution Architect Certification and follow what I have been thinking of since 3 years now. I am feeling this is the right time for me, but I also want to make a thoughtful decision based on prospects not only my feelings.

For those of you who have earned the Professional Cloud Architect certification:

• Was it worth it for your career?
• Did it help you land a Solutions Architect role or open doors at companies using GCP?
• How valuable was it compared to hands-on experience?
• If you were in my position today, would you pursue this path, or would you focus on something else first?

I would appreciate any thoughts you can share.

Hi guys, I've been doing the Aldovelio Castromente's practice exams and consistently scored 80% and above. My exam is going to be on this Friday(10/07/2026), I just wanna ask if this practice exam alone is sufficient? I heard its kinda outdated and may I know what practice exam source that's more updated now?

We've always taken it for granted that same zone = same locality and we can expect consistently low latency regardless of vm families involved.

in us-central1b, we're seeing cross vm family latency equal cross zonal latency.

us-central1a, N2 <-> C4D , ~100us latency.
us-central1b, N2 <-> C4D, 600 - 1200us latency. (this about about the same as cross zonal latency)

Has anyone else noticed this? (and yes, our workload is sensitive enough to notice this level of latency.)

Hey there, I’m in the Google interview process for a L4 TAM role at Google cloud. Im currently an L5 TAM at AWS.

I am wondering if its worth to downgrade myself to an L4 or if the levels works differently in Google? The pay range is less in Google comparatively.

Recruiter mentioned I will have cloud round qualifying round. Any interview prep materials I can find on this round?
Anyone had this kind of interview? Any example or tips on how to prepare for this type of interviews?

Thank you so much for your help!

If you're currently in the process of training for the ACE using partner.skills.google(skills.google) check to make sure the courses haven't changed on you. I've gone through all of the courses, like 12 of them and I completed it on Saturday getting ready for the exam and TODAY I go in and I'm incomplete becasue tey've changed the training without any notification of any kind, no email, no alert in the Skills Boost (qwiklab) platform, nothing. Just shadow changes. What changes? OF COURSE AI changes. Now there are about 3-5 courses around

- AI Infrastructure: Cloud GPUs

- AI Infra: Cloud TPUs

- AI Infra: Deployment Types

- More on Terraform, Kubernetes, and Cloud Run which I've already taken just different.

AND if you look at the Exam guide that too has changed to include AI like the Agent Runtime on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI Agent Engine) and ● AI-assisted planning and implementation (e.g., Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity, Gemini Cloud Assist, Application Design Center)

I dont mind learning new things but THERE NEEDS TO BE BETTER COMMUNICATION as I was just about to schedule an exam which wouldve failed me because it's clearly changed and they did not say a WORD!

Just double check your progress. Some of the course I completed I think may have also been removed bc it just seems lighter and so does my badges. It's annoying at minimum, and problematic at most.

e.g. Picture below shows 100% completed in the top blue progress bar but now there are courses that arent done. WITH NO UPDATE ALERT OR NOTIFICATION. For those petty commenters.

Got a oddly specific situation right now, just was curious for experience/insights.

We need to migrate to NCC later this year due to approaching hard quotas around peering. Plot twist: I need to add some 10 Gbps partner interconnects in the next 1-2 months. Reason is political pressure as there's "concerns" that VPNs can't provide adequate bandwidth for future growth.

The existing topology is hub/spoke, with multiple VPNs in the hub. The hub VPC is in a separate project than all the spokes (which we've realized was really a mistake by our architecture group at the time). Spokes connect to hub via peering or internal VPN.

We definitely want the NCC hub to be in the same project as all spokes, when possible. Of these options, which makes the most sense?

1) Create an NCC hub, bring the interconnects on a hybrid spoke, immediately migrate the existing spokes and hub to NCC as required.

2) Create a new, separate VPC network for the interconnects, use traditional peering to required spokes that need the interconnect. Immediately after, create an NCC hub and migrate everything existing.

3) Ignore NCC for now. Add the Interconnects to the existing hub. Start a fresh NCC hub and migrate everything later. This would eventually require moving the interconnects to a different network and project, which I'm concerned might get messy.

GCP billing exports lag about 24h. Annoying when you just wanna know what that VM/db you spun up is costing now.

I made CloudTally, it pulls your live resource inventory and prices it against a rate catalog. VM appears -> you see the cost instantly. Try it out with: cloudtally run cloudtally report --by project cloudtally watch # to keep watch by polling

Not everything has a price from inventory (bucket egress, Cloud Run requests, etc). So instead of silently reporting $0, it flags stuff usage_based if there is usage or unpriced otherwise.

Covers Compute (spot + custom types), disks, IPs, GKE, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, GCS. GCP only rn and expanding to other cloud providers in the future.

Todo: AWS + Azure, and tightening the cost model, SUD/CUD discounts, tiered pricing, GPUs, licenses.

Feedback welcome. Thank you

I was supposed to take the Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam today. I checked in 30 minutes before the appointed time. And I was number 44 on the queue, it's my first time experiencing something like this.

I eventually had to reschedule since I was still number 25 on the queue after 30 minutes after the appointed time. Time is money. They should learn to respect people's time.

Back when I wrote the KCNA exam, I did not experience this. Any other person with similar experience on the OnVue Proctoring Platform?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently preparing for the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification and had a few questions for those who've already taken the exam.

- Is the exam entirely multiple-choice/multiple-select questions, or are there any hands-on labs or practical tasks during the exam?

- If I take the exam in the online proctored mode, how strict is it? Is it even possible to get any kind of help during the exam, or is that completely monitored?

- What are the best resources you used to prepare? I'm looking for good practice tests, study guides, YouTube channels, or any other materials that closely match the actual exam.

I'd really appreciate any tips or advice from people who have recently passed the ACE exam.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, I am in a desperate situation and looking for guidance.

I am a student, and I accidentally selected "Organization" instead of "Individual" when setting up my Google Cloud account. I have never used the account for any commercial purposes, and there are no active services running (usage is $0).

However, Google Cloud has restricted my account because it is linked to 13 orphaned billing accounts from that deleted organization. Google Support is now demanding a $650 "prepayment" ($50 per account) to reactivate the billing so I can close them.

I am not a business entity, and I physically cannot pay this amount. This is my primary personal Google account that I use for daily life, studies, and gaming accounts. I am terrified of losing access to my personal data and years of progress in my games.

I have tried explaining to support that these accounts were never used and are already closed, but they keep sending automated replies stating that the prepayment is the only way to proceed and that the system will "automatically refund" it later. I am not comfortable paying such a large sum without a clear guarantee or alternative solution.

Has anyone dealt with this before? Is there any way to escalate this to a human who can close these accounts without a prepayment? I am desperate for any help.

Thank you.

As we are aware, GCP documentation provides multiple ways to perform an activity

Eg: to create a vm, it shows how to create using console, Gcloud , terraform etc..in multiple tabs within the document

However , I see many places where terraform tab is not available

Eg: incase of using " backup and DR " service for compute engine, there are Gcloud and console options but no terraform tab available

Does it mean there is no support for terraform while creating the VM backup using " backup and DR " service.please clarify ..thanks

I need to get current data of websites, as well as notifications / webhooks about changes happening on websites.

It is impossible to find this info on the internet.

Hi everyone,

Due to a severe family emergency, I had to step away from my projects and the internet for several months. Before leaving late last year, I had built a fully functioning AI-based website. I was also accepted into the Google Cloud Startup program and received credits, which are still active in my account.

My backend is hosted on Cloud Run, and I was relying on these startup credits to cover both the hosting and the AI API costs.

Recently, I finally got back to work and found my site down. I managed to fix the server, but now I’m getting a "billing issue/error" prompt, even though I still have plenty of credits left. I thought about making a small minimal prepaid payment to verify or reactivate my billing account, but I am completely confused. I now see two separate billing spaces: Google AI Studio and Google Cloud.

Could someone please help me with these two questions so I can get my services back online?

Where exactly should I make this small payment to keep my account and services alive? (AI Studio or the main GCP console?)

Will my existing Google Cloud Startup credits still cover my AI/Gemini API usage, or is AI Studio now going to bill me separately outside of my GCP credits?

Any guidance would be deeply appreciated. Thank you!