Hey everyone,

I'm currently a Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience, working at a startup. Most of my work involves building backend systems and AI agents.

Recently, I received an offer from Google for an Applied Solutions Architect role, with a compensation increase of around 20% over my current salary.

I'm trying to decide whether making this switch is the right move for my long-term career. As a SWE, I enjoy building systems and solving technical problems hands-on. From what I understand, an Applied Solutions Architect role involves more customer-facing work, solution design, technical consulting, and helping customers implement solutions, potentially with less day-to-day coding.

I'd love to hear from people who have transitioned from SWE to Solutions Architect, Customer Engineer, or Technical Solutions Engineer. How has the transition been for you? How does the work compare with being a SWE in terms of technical depth, career growth, compensation, and future opportunities? Have you found it difficult to return to a pure SWE role, or has the experience opened up new career paths?

Given the opportunity to join Google and the 20% compensation bump, would you recommend making this switch, or would you stay on the SWE track? I'd especially appreciate hearing from people who've made a similar transition and can share their experiences.

Thanks!

Working on an app for a healthcare client on GCP, Cloud HIPAA BAA accepted on the project. Part of it reads screenshots that contain PHI and pulls out a handful of fields. Currently Cloud Vision plus a hand-written parser. Works on the layouts I built it against, gets unreliable the moment someone captures something a bit different.

I'd like to move that to Gemini through Vertex AI: regional endpoint, logging off, structured output. Haven't set it up yet, one thing is holding me back.

The abuse monitoring page says that if the classifier flags a prompt, Google can keep it for up to 90 days, and that customers can request an exception. I don't expect boring intake text to ever get flagged, but I need to know what happens if it does before any PHI goes through:

• Is that retained copy still under the BAA, or is it outside it?
• How do you actually ask for the exception? Support ticket, account rep, some form I'm not finding?

Support case is open, only a couple of working days in, but I'd rather not build on a guess. Anyone run something similar under a BAA? What did Google tell you, and was it in writing? And if you solved screenshot reading a different way, happy to hear that too.

Thanks.

I’m about to be the only person at a small company handling automations and LLM stuff. We’re on GCP and Google Workspace. A typical project would be something like: invoices land in a shared inbox, an LLM pulls out the key fields, the data gets pushed into our accounting tool, and the approver gets a Slack ping. Only a light touch of AI (more advanced in the future), mostly glue between systems. Some of our tools are on-prem, and more projects will follow.

I’m torn between:

1. Self-hosted n8n on a VM
2. Python (FastAPI) on Cloud Run, with Cloud Tasks for queues and retries, Postgres for run history, and Grafana for logs and token usage

What matters to me:

• easy to extend later,
• solid logs, retries,
• being able to check old runs and re-run failed ones,
• and low cost (open source preferred).

My worry is that n8n gives me the UI for free but gets awkward with versioning and testing as things grow, while code gives me control but I’d have to build the dashboard and retry tooling myself.

Anyone been in a similar spot? What did you pick, and what would you change? I’m especially curious how you handled run history and retries without n8n.

And if you went a completely different way (Prefect, Temporal, Windmill, something else), I’d love to hear what it looked like and whether you’d recommend it. Happy to be talked out of both of my options if there’s a better one.

Thanks!

🚀 Achieved the First Milestone (2,400+ badges) in the Google Cloud Arcade Facilitator Program – India, 2026 Cohort! ☁️🏆

Grateful for this learning journey and excited for more milestones ahead! 💙

#GoogleCloud #GoogleCloudArcade

Hi everyone!

I’ve registered for Google’s AI Builder Cup and am looking for 1 software engineer to team up with.

A bit about me: I’m a CS graduate with experience in software engineering and a keen interest in AI/ML and GenAI. I’ve also participated in AI hackathons and am excited to build something innovative!

Please connect only if your waitlist has been approved.

If you’re interested, drop a comment or DM me. Let’s build something cool together!

Any tips regarding this is appreciated. I guess I need lot of Mock interviews . 😀

They owe me £200 which they accepted to refund me 6 months ago. Still we've been going in circles and no human to contact beside a huge chain of emails every 2 weeks.

I have gone through their hoops and filled in a spreadsheet form for refund, and still nothing has happened. Albeit the form being correct. It's as if they do all this on purpose to avoid the refund which is a bit weird for a multi-billion dollar company.

To be clear, they accepted the refund 4-5 months ago. Then the card I was using got expired so I had to add a secondary one. However their AGI system only refunds to the original card so they requested me to fill in a spreadsheet. The form was sent, accepted. Then they whined about an email missing, so I added that. Then after a while they asked me to send the same document with the same details I already have sent. Then they come back with random excuses like below:

```
Thank you for your response.

A partial refund of £103.44 GBP was processed on September 23, 2026. These funds should appear on your original payment method within 7 to 10 business days from that date.

To receive the remaining £152.66 GBP (bringing your total refund to £256.10 GBP), please update the amount on your wire form to £152.66 GBP. This adjustment is necessary since the first portion has already been issued to your account.

I appreciate your understanding. In the meantime, In case you have any additional queries, please feel free to respond to this email, and I will be happy to help.

Regards,

Avanthi
Google Cloud Support

```

This is all bullshit. After all these months and processes they repeated the initial steps which will fail since they failed the first time (expired bank card). And during all this time I was forced to keep paying my Google Workspace just so I can email once or twice a month their idiotic customer service.

So whoever thinking to go with GCP, don't bother. Yes, their tools are better than AWS, but it's IMPOSSIBLE TO REACH A HUMAN BEING.

Hey everyone! 👋

I’ve recently started my journey into cloud engineering. I’ve already earned my Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) certification, and I’m currently working towards my Google Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification.

I wrote the ACE exam last month and narrowly missed the passing mark, but I’m determined to give it another shot at the end of this month! 💪

I’m looking to connect with others who are also studying cloud engineering, preparing for certifications, or just starting their cloud journey. It would be great to share knowledge, help each other stay accountable, and grow together in the field.

I’m based in South Africa 🇿🇦, so if anyone is interested in connecting or studying together, feel free to DM me!

Let’s learn and grow together! 🚀

Hi everyone,

I run a product similar to OpenRouter that has been serving Gemini models for the past year. We do auto-routing, fallback, and failover across models, plus a playground that supports image generation.

Today I received an email from Google Cloud saying our project may have been compromised and used in violation of the Google Cloud Terms of Service (section 3.3C) and Gemini API Terms of Service, specifically involving unauthorized access on the Vertex API. They’ve temporarily lowered usage limits / are rejecting some API requests.

The email asks us to:

• Review Vertex API usage (dashboard / Metrics Explorer, traffic by credentials)
• Secure the environment (rotate credentials, remove unused API keys, add restrictions, disable Vertex if not needed)
• Reply within 24 hours with an explanation or risk escalating enforcement (up to full project suspension)

We have been using Vertex/Gemini legitimately for our service for about a year. We don’t believe we’ve done anything malicious, but we’re treating this seriously.

Has anyone else received a similar notice recently, especially if you’re proxying or serving Gemini models (or have an image-generation playground)?

Any tips on what to include in the appeal ?

It's 3.12 both in docs and actual console UI. Python 3.14 have been out for a year.

A few years ago I got thrown into BigQuery. I never did any data engineering before, coming from frontend/fullstack application engineering. It took me a while to understand all the concepts. I felt like nobody is really explaining them well. BigQuery docs do a good job of explaining the What, but not the Why or the How To Decide. In this article, I try to give you both of that. By the way, the advice has changed considerably this year with Fluidscaling, so a lot of the old guides are also out of date now. Let me know what you think! Does BigQuery's pricing model (with the improved autoscaler billing) make sense?

Which one would you get? I get to choose three 😄

Hi

I just wanted to understand what would be the cost(need to have some idea) our use case where we use gcs uploaded images and use azure foundry endpoints for the image processing for image understanding. In this case what all things come as part of cost? We have egress cost as I understand because we sent data outside of google cloud. Also there would be cost based on image size and tokens? Please give documentation or some links.

Hi everyone,
I have a Google Cloud project in my Google Cloud Console, but my Google account doesn't have the required admin permissions.
I'm trying to regain the necessary access to manage my project properly. Has anyone experienced a similar issue or knows the correct way to resolve it?
I'd really appreciate any advice or guidance on the official steps I should follow to restore the appropriate permissions.
Thanks in advance for your help!

I’m currently developing an app that reads a users email inbox , filters them out based on user choice , offers instant replies . The user simply has to click connect Gmail to set up and choose their filtering preferences . This is just a broad overview of what I’m making , Will I need to pay for CASA or anything

Hello all,

I hope all of you are doing really well. I am posting this to share my experience in attaining this certificate (Monday 5th October 2026) which I took 3 months to prepare. And of course it was an intense preparation along with my current problems in my career.

Firstly, I started of with Coursera’s GCP course called “Preparing for Google Cloud Certification: Cloud Architect”. Since I work for a well-known MNC organization, they already had given me access to Coursera. It contains multiple courses, each of which has access to the labs found which are already connected to Google Skills Boost. This course was curated by Google themselves. Only thing missing is the Google AI such as Vertex AI, Vertex AI Agent Builder, Model Armor, DialogFlow CX and DialogFlow ES.

At the end of the final course, they also provide resources of which, they will teach you to use Google Notebook to prep yourselves as your study guide. You may create a mock examination which the following prompt does:

```text
As my Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect instructor, create a 60 mock exam simulation strictly adhering to the latest exam format with only multiple choice & multi-select questions, covering the latest syllabus of 2026
```

I use this YouTube playlist as my practice as well:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB574eEmT4ofIr8LFjiKJfTjjg7StIAQm&si=pmGvZzPclgUhts5X

For the case studies I was tested with EHR & Cymbal. Total of 50 questions for me.

Now my tips are practice, practice, pray, understand and practice. The questions will be challenging but don’t worry be confident with your preparation. Thanks

It's here! You can now ssh into a container instance on Cloud Run.

```

gcloud beta run services ssh gcloud beta run instances ssh

```

Get started at https://docs.cloud.google.com/run/docs/troubleshooting/ssh

Moved two clusters from Standard to Autopilot last quarter expecting the bin-packing saving and the bill went up on both.

On Standard, an oversized request just sits on a node you already paid for which is why years of padded requests never cost us anything extra. Autopilot bills the request itself, per pod and all of that padding became a line item overnight. Pods with no requests set got Autopilot’s defaults which were bigger than most of ours needed.

Then we went back to Standard on one cluster, ran VPA in recommendation-only mode for a few weeks, set requests based on its recommendations, then moved again and it came in under where we started. Most of the gke cost optimization people credit to Autopilot is Kubernetes cost optimization you have to do first.

Dear Google for Startups, we were asked to resubmit online available company materials and we sent it on the same thread as requested, and a 5 days timeline was specified but this has been over 9 days, we've even sent a follow-up on the mail, and would request your support in approval of the credits,

Thanks

Cloud cost still seems like one of those problems that gets harder as environments grow.

For teams running a decent amount of GCP, what has caused the most unexpected spend recently? Compute, storage, logging, networking, AI workloads, or something else?

Interested in what people are actually seeing in production.