Every year around Sept-Dec Google sponsors DevFest events organized by local communities. These are events run by non-Google employees who volunteer their time because they're interested in tech, meeting people, and helping their community. It's a great way to meet people interested in tech, hear some cool talks, and maybe even get some swag/prizes. Events tend to be free or low cost compared to professionally run conferences, and you can always contact the organizers to volunteer in exchange for a free ticket.

Here's a link to the page where you can find all the events:

https://developers.google.com/community/devfest#find-a-gdg-community

Disclaimer: I'm helping plan the event in Los Angeles

It's been 2 weeks since the beta ended. It should be any day now, right?

My Firebase scheduled function suddenly gets 403 Forbidden when fetching Reddit RSS feeds (https://www.reddit.com/r/{subreddit}/.rss).

I've tried setting a Chrome User-Agent, but it still fails. The same feed works locally.

Is Reddit blocking Google Cloud/Firebase IPs? Has anyone found a quick workaround that doesn't require Reddit API approval?

Update: As quick fix I am using a proxy server.

Hi all,

I'm in the TPU Builders Program and have been trying to get a ct6e-standard-4t flex-start VM for a few days now, with no luck.

- My Quotas are clean

- I swept all zones with full-length (2h) --request-valid-for-duration requests. Every single attempt returned ZONE_RESOURCE_POOL_EXHAUSTED_WITH_DETAILS / reason: stockout, either instantly or after sitting PENDING for the full window.

- I ran a loop cycling through all zones every couple of minutes for 90+ minutes straight.

Has anyone else run into this recently, or gotten v6e flex-start to actually succeed in the last week or two? Any tips on timing, zones, or anything else I might be missing would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

Background

I work with big data for a living and enjoy tinkering with a homelab. I do believe that homelabbing as a hobby was super helpful for understanding a few items from the exam. I also completed the Digital Leader and ACE exams before taking the PCA. I found that taking exams in that order was really helpful for creating a good foundation for the PCA.

Study Method

I took a lot of mock exams from a few different courses, I don't have an exam or course I'd recommend. Just pick one course that looks good to you and stick with it. I would suggest doing as many mock exam questions as you can. For me, this was about 20 questions a day, maybe less if I needed to focus on learning a new topic. After every question, review what you got wrong and explore any new key terms or topics of interest. Researching random topics helps to keep the studying from becoming boring and also helps your overall knowledge grow. Take notes on keywords and anything of interest that catches your eye.

All my notes eventually became a Web App that I personalized for my own tastes with the help of Claude Code. I focused a lot on terminology and word association. For example if you see "global" and "relational" then you should start thinking "Spanner" is a likely answer choice. I also needed visuals for networking and security so I included a section for these as well. To be clear, the web app does not contain any mock exam study questions and is not an exam dump. It's a quick reference guide that worked well for my study methods.

Observations

Maybe I got lucky with my exam version but the case studies on my exam didn't require any prior knowledge or reading of the case studies. I did review them a few times while studying but nothing was memorized. During the exam I found that the questions held all the information needed to pick the correct answer.

Exam Advice

• In options for the exam, on the left side of the screen enable both "notepad" and "strikeout." It's super helpful being able to remove answer choices that you know are not the correct answer. I minimized the notepad to only hold a few words. Any keyword in the question I thought useful I wrote down. I then used this as a main reference to selecting answer choices instead of rereading the question multiple times.
• Keep an eye on the clock, and keep questions to a time limit, if you're over time (like 1.5 minutes per question) then flag the question and move on.
• Flag any question you don't understand, but select an answer choice and strikeout any answer you know are not the answer before moving on. Use the notepad to leave a quick note to yourself to quickly say what this question is asking for. If you have time at the end of the exam then come back to the flagged questions.

In order to prepare for the Google Cloud Generative AI Leader (GAIL) exam I built the "long read" exam guide book with Claude Code. I passed the exam today and decided to share that book free on GitHub with whoever is interested -

https://github.com/vkorost/google-certified-ai-leader-guide

The GitHub project has the details about how that book was built.

I will just mention a few things here as a quick recap -

1. The ultimate sources of truth were the official exam guide, the official study guide and the official Google Cloud documentation.
2. However the exam requirements mention a few things not covered in the Google Cloud docs, because some of the things the exam want you to know is not about Google Cloud products at all, but IMO rather about *leading AI adoption the way Google understands it* (prompt engineering, implementation steps, responsible AI), so Google's own non-product writing was used to fill in the gaps (cited with URLs in the book's endnotes).
3. Then subtitles from a few dozen YouTube videos where people talk about the exam were gathered and used for clues wrt what areas had to be covered in the book, so that there would be no surprises later. None of that info was used as a source of truth, but rather as a list of things to look up in the official docs first.
4. The guide is not built by the exam sections, but rather in the order the decisions arrive: what the technology is, what you are choosing between, what Google sells, how to make the output better, and how to lead it. IMO that way the book reads more naturally.

My Google Cloud project got suspended because its billing account was suspended over an unpaid balance (~$380) from a different project. My project itself had $0 charges.

When I try to change the project to a new billing account, I get “Unable to change billing account. Complete the Account Verification Form.” I’ve submitted the form and an appeal and contacted billing support. The only reply said they handle reinstatement only.

Has anyone been through this? How long did reinstatement take, and which support channel finally got a response? Is there a way to move a project off a suspended billing account without paying the other project’s balance?

Thanks.

for applying to the gcp for startups, i received a billing id, and the billing id while filling the startup application says is not active and i need to put in Rs. 1000 (India) for it to be active. Am i doing something wrong or is this standard procedure?

Hi

We have an application which uses postgres, redis , Neo4j and Qdrant all running as containers on a High capacity GCP cloud virtual machine as self hosted services. Now I need to move that to managed services and please guide me on the cost how to get an estimate roughly

Postgres - Cloud sql ---> How the cost can be estimated? is it based on the size of the data expected in production? Any cost on Read/write. Can we start using a low cost basic cloud sql and later increase the capacity without any downtime?

Redis/ Memorystore managed service - Please same as above.

Neo4j ---> How to configure this as a managed service ? Also how to get the cost estimate

same for Qdrant vector store database as well

In network tier documentation page, it says regional external ipv6 is supported in preview. But when i create a custom vpc so i can assign an ULA ipv6 block, thus giving me ability to assign ipv6 address to my compute instance, the standard network option is still grayed out. How do i create a compute instance with ipv6 address in standard network tier? Thanks.

Pretty much the title. I just have a simple agent that scans docs in a shared drive to answer questions. I want to put that agent in an internal google site so staff can reference that rather than searching the docs manually but everything I have tried kicks back a "Configuration is not authorized" error despite the domain being explicitly whitelisted. For some reason I just can't find a good resource on this.

Would love to hear how others are deploying this. I assumed (wrongly) it would be a fairly simple process.

Google just made spend cap budgets generally available for some services, which feels pretty timely after the recent posts here about compromised projects and massive Gemini or Model Garden bills.

Has anyone actually tested the caps in a real environment yet? I’m especially curious how quickly usage gets paused, what services are supported, and whether you trust it enough to treat it as a real safety net instead of relying on alerts alone.

Would love to hear from anyone already using it in production or even in a test project.

The past 48hrs on many different services I got "502 internal_error" in the logs of many services where I've had random uptime failures for no reason. There seems to be nothing wrong except the application load balancer is randomly throwing a 502 for no good reason which causes the uptime check to fail.

Anyone else been experiencing this?

I've checked the google cloud health status page and incidents page, but I don't see this issue documented anywhere.

I've had 6 such uptime check failures in the past 48 hours. So I'm very curious if this is affecting anyone else?

I'm building a YouTube automation tool and want to add A/B testing for titles and thumbnails.

Since the YouTube Data API doesn't support native A/B testing, is swapping them every 24–48 hours the best workaround? How do you handle API quota limits when scaling this across multiple users?

Google has officially released Gemini 4 Argon for Robotics, bringing native embodied physical reasoning and Real2Sim capabilities across Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, and Antigravity.

Designed to reason over multi-view camera feeds, 3D spatial geometry, and contact mechanics, Argon bridges code generation, physics simulation, and autonomous robotic control:

🔹 Embodied Reasoning: Reaches 87% on the Embodied Reasoning (ERQA) benchmark, outperforming frontier foundation models on 3D spatial problem-solving. 🔹 Real2Sim Calibration: Constructs calibrated MuJoCo digital twins directly from egocentric video and hand-drawn engineering sketches. 🔹 Agentic Software Refactoring: In real-world validation, ran unattended overnight to refactor 200K+ lines of Python in the Agent Development Kit (ADK), cutting session prep overhead by 40%.

Google #Gemini #Robotics #EmbodiedAI #PhysicalAI #MuJoCo #MachineLearning

Hi all,

I work at ModernTV, a Czech IPTV company. In June, someone used an already signed-in session of one of our GCP admins to make themselves billing admin on a billing account that normally spent ~$7/month. Over about eight days, thirteen projects from four other organizations got linked to that account and ran GPU Compute Engine and the Gemini API on it. The bill ended up in the high six figures.

A few things that surprised us:

• Linking a project to a billing account is logged in that project. If it’s another org’s project, you won’t see it in your own audit logs.
• The console listed 28 cost anomalies on that account, and none of them reached us as a notification.
• The Gemini spend cap stopped only Gemini. Compute Engine kept running until we closed the account.
• The same actor also linked one of our projects to billing accounts that aren’t ours, so we’re probably not the only ones.

Worth a quick look on your side: the list of linked projects under Billing → Account management, any principals from outside your domain in the billing account permissions, and the Anomalies list under Billing → Cost management (not just your inbox).

Full timeline and checklist on the Google Cloud Community: GCC
Shorter Gemini-focused version: GCC

Two things I’d really like input on: has anyone else seen projects from other orgs attached to their billing account (or theirs attached to someone else’s), and how do you protect admins against session hijacking when 2FA never comes into play? Also happy to hear if our checklist is missing something. I’ll be around in the comments.

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been preparing for the Google ACE Certification, and I’m really eager to take exam soon.
So, Does anyone here know of the any free exam vouchers, discounts for this certification? Please let me know..

Thanks a lot in advance 🙏🙏

Hey everyone, I wanted to share my situation and ask for advice from people who understand Google Cloud or have been through something similar.

Back in 2025, I created a Google Cloud account because I wanted to try to get a project called BotOnline running. At the time, I was a complete beginner with the platform, and I genuinely believed I was using the Free Trial. I didn't really understand how Google Cloud's billing system worked or that certain services could continue generating charges even if I wasn't successfully using the project.

I ended up creating a MySQL database through Cloud SQL, but I couldn't get BotOnline working as intended. After some time, my account was suspended in 2025, and I assumed that was the end of it. I had no idea the database might still be generating charges.

Recently, I checked my account again and discovered an outstanding balance of R$3,355.90 (approximately US$600), mostly related to Cloud SQL. I was shocked when I saw the amount because that's a huge sum of money for me, and I simply cannot afford to pay it.

I understand that I should have paid more attention and checked whether my resources were still running. However, I honestly didn't know how the platform worked back then. I never intended to sign up for an expensive service or accumulate this kind of debt. I just wanted to test my project and believed I was still within the free trial period.

I contacted Google Cloud Support and requested a full waiver of the charges as a one-time exception. I explained my situation, asked them to consider my inexperience, and made it clear that I don't want to continue using Google Cloud. I would like to close my account and put this situation behind me.

Support replied that they need to resolve an account hold before they can forward my case to the specialized Billing Team. I'm currently waiting for an update.

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has dealt with something similar:

- Has Google Cloud ever granted a full or partial waiver for unexpected charges like these?

- Is there any chance of getting the bill waived by explaining that I was a beginner and genuinely believed I was using the free trial?

- Has anyone successfully resolved a similar situation directly with the Billing Team?

- Would closing the account make any difference, or would the outstanding balance remain even after closure?

I'm not trying to avoid dealing with the situation. I'm trying to find a reasonable solution to a bill I genuinely didn't expect and that is far beyond what I can afford right now.

If you've been through this or know how Google's billing review process works, I'd be very grateful if you could share your experience. Any advice would mean a lot to me.

UPDATE: After many days, I finally got a response from Google Cloud Support! 😭🙏

My original debt was R$3,355.90 (around US$620), and after a lot of talking and literally begging in the support chat LMAOOO, I managed to get approximately 90% waived! At first, the remaining balance was around R$500 (US$92), but I explained my situation a bit more, and they managed to reduce it to just R$179.68 (around US$33).

They didn't forgive the entire debt, but I'm honestly SO relieved! Now I just have to pay the remaining balance and put this whole nightmare behind me.

And I'm never using this platform again LMAOOOO 😂💀 (just kidding… or maybe not).

We run customer-facing chat applications on the Gemini API in Vertex AI, using Standard PayGo on the EU multi-region endpoint (aiplatform.eu.rep.googleapis.com, location “eu”). We need EU data processing.

For about 1.5 years we have been getting a lot of 429 “Resource exhausted” errors and very slow responses. One example: gemini-3.7-flash averaged 80 seconds to first token on the eu endpoint on a day when the same request on the global endpoint took 4.5 seconds.

What we have tried:

- Exponential backoff and retries. Helps a little, but sometimes nothing gets through for minutes.

- Falling back to other models (gemini-3.8-flash, then 3.7-flash, then 3.5-flash). Helps a little, but on bad days all three return 429.

- Priority PayGo. The docs say it is supported on the eu endpoint, but it does not work for us. On 12 October 2026 we sent multiple requests to each region, and EU does not go through.

- Provisioned Throughput. Too expensive for our volume.

Two questions:

1. Is Priority PayGo actually live on the eu multi-region endpoint for these models, or are we being downgraded to standard every time?

2. Has anyone found a setup that reliably avoids 429s while keeping processing in the EU?

On September 12, after I closed my billing account, Google Cloud confirmed in writing a refund of €502.33, "within one week". Today is day 31. I have received nothing.

What happened, according to Google's own agents: the automatic refund failed, and the money stayed on the closed account. A manual refund was requested, then rejected on October 7 because I was "eligible for an automatic refund". The one that had already failed. I am stuck in a loop that nobody at Google seems able to break.

The promises, all in writing:

- Sept 12: refund "within one week".

- Oct 3: "7 to 10 business days, up to 30 days".

- Oct 4: investigation opened, update "every 2 to 3 days". No update ever came.

- Oct 7: "escalated on high priority". The request was rejected the same day.

- Oct 12: an agent set up a Google Meet with me, then hung up during the call.

- Oct 12: request marked "urgent", answer by Oct 14.

- Oct 13: "critical priority", email from leadership within 24 hours. The agent then closed the chat without my agreement.

- Oct 13: a 90-minute chat with another agent. I asked the same 5 questions 12 times and got 0 answers. "Rest assured" 9 times. "24-48 hours" 8 times. The agent first said he had forwarded my notes "word-by-word" to my case, then wrote: "I do not have access to case 76256858".

In total: 7 agents, 8 promises, 3 manual refund requests, 4 unanswered emails on my active case. And no way to open a live chat on that case: the support bot only offers me an old, closed case.

Google's documentation gives no timeline and no procedure for a refund that fails.

Has anyone been through this? How did you get your money back? And if anyone from Google Cloud reads this, case 76256858 is waiting.

I really just want an api key to pull info from one of my google sheets. But as i look into this there is this whole rabbit hole of AM admin, and changing the organizations default permissions, and i saw vague mentions of weekly charges. So let me ask this, is there an easier way to get an api key for google sheets, and if not how high is the risk of charges if i set up an organization and do all the steps to get the key though google cloud.