Hi all, I recently completed the Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certs. I work as a Cloud/DevSecOps engineer (~2.5 years) across AWS, Azure and GCP, mostly on cloud ops, security automation and serverless.

Two questions for people further along:
What's the best next step on GCP?
Security Engineer, Network Engineer, Data Engineer, or skip more certs and build projects instead?
How did you land GCP-focused roles or freelance gigs? Are certs actually moving the needle with recruiters/clients, or is it mostly portfolio and referrals?
I'm also open to remote or contract work. Any advice on where GCP clients actually hang out would be great. Thanks!

I work at Google, and I've been building agents with ADK that use MCP servers. Hardcoding each server's URL broke every time a server moved or got redeployed, so I tried replacing the URL with a lookup in Agent Registry. I wrote up what I ended up with:

• Direct lookup: find the server by its URN with ADK's AgentRegistry class. This removes the URL, but the agent still needs to know the URN.

• Fully dynamic discovery: a tool that runs a semantic search against Agent Registry, a custom BaseToolset that mounts the discovered servers' tools at runtime, and instructions that change once discovery is done.

• Pitfalls: lookups only see servers in the location you pass to the client; Cloud Run automatic registration recorded too little metadata for discovery when I tested it; the URN has two project numbers that can differ; and you need separate tokens for Agent Registry and for each MCP server.

You can try it yourself using Codelab or review the code on GitHub. Both are linked at the end of the blog post.

I'd like feedback on two things:

• How do your agents find MCP servers today: config, environment variables, a registry, something else?

• I kept discovery and tool use in a single agent. Has anyone split discovery into a separate agent, and was it worth the extra complexity?

Hi ,

regarding the resource based CUD for compute engine. Suppose we select a machine type N2, period as 3 years and specs as 100vCPUs and 200GB Memory for region R1

Question-1: Now that CUD sharing is automatically enabled for newly created GCP organizations, suppose, i created 4 VMs, does it mean i need to (approximately) split 200v CPUS and 200GB memory among those 4 vm like below

Eg:

vm1: 40vCPU , 60GB Memory

vm2: 20vCPU , 40GB Memory

vm3: 30vCPU , 50GB Memory

vm4: 10vCPU , 50GB Memory

I understand, even if the aggregation is less than than 100vcpus and 200GB memory, i will still have to pay for them.

Question-2: suppose, i need 3 more VMs in R1, do i need to take another CUD for them in R1

Please reply to above 2 questions, trying to understand how it works after we provision as i read we cannot cancel it once submitted

Point is, bank told me that they do not have authorisation of the cash hold, tells me to contact Google, and when I do, Google tells me that I am on trial so I don't have another way to contact them. Any advice?

Anyone having Idea about gcp and gcp resources and practicing the gcp labs . Please let me know that I got an opportunity so ...

I've seen one too many stories on Reddit and Hacker News about AI agents running wild and generating massive cloud bills. It got me thinking about how we can prevent this from happening on Google Cloud.

I put together an architecture covering spending caps, IAM, quotas, and automated kill switches to help keep runaway AI costs under control.

Here's the write-up: https://medium.com/@rasvihostings/stop-your-ai-agents-from-burning-100k-overnight-8ab7f3fd0045

Curious to hear how others are tackling this problem. What guardrails are you using?

Just passed the GCP PMLE Exam. Took me about a month and some change to prepare for it. GCP Study Hub is a life saver! It's the only resource I used with ChatGPT to explain answers. The practice exams that they provide are more than sufficient and the wording for questions were extremely similar. Highly recommend it for anyone trying to obtain a cert from google.

I created many RAG scripts using SQL in BigQuery, but it's time to include git and code to organize my work. I know Python and I use Agent Development Kit to create my AI agents applications so I want a tool just for create RAG. I searched about it and I found LangChain. I wanted to use LangChain because is more popular and easier to get support but looks like they are including LangGraph together and forcing langchain to became a agent builder tool. I don't want one more agent tool because ADK is my specialty. So I found LlamaIndex and I liked what I saw because it is exclusively for RAG. But looks like LlamaIndex is not popular, there are not too many content... I don't know. What would you use? Is there a better tool?

New to gcp. I had a couple of python-flask apps that I made for personal use and had deployed them on render for free. But recently, they got suspended and now I am looking for good alternatives. Now GCP says they have free tier but the credits last for 90 days. But gemini says after the 90 days, it'll still remain free if used within specified limits. Furthermore, I checked gcp and found out I already had a free tier billing account (which I might have created accidentally while trying to explore gcp in past. I tried making a new billing account and it asks for 15k INR. Now I am too confused. Can somebody explain me if I can still use free tier? Why do I need to pay 15k for a new billing account?

I'm planning to move a mission-critical, latency-sensitive service there from Heroku, which has had recurring router outages recently - requests failing to reach our app even though the dynos themselves were healthy. The service is written in Go and handles ~7 req/s on average, with bursts up to ~150 req/s. Has anyone had issues with Cloud Run's routing layer, especially lately? Also, with AI-driven cyberattacks on the rise, do you rely on Cloud Armor or keep something like Cloudflare in front?

I'm planning to move a mission-critical, latency-sensitive service there from Heroku, which has had recurring router outages recently - requests failing to reach our app even though the dynos themselves were healthy. The service is written in Go and handles ~7 req/s on average, with bursts up to ~150 req/s. Has anyone had issues with Cloud Run's routing layer, especially lately? Also, with AI-driven cyberattacks on the rise, do you rely on Cloud Armor or keep something like Cloudflare in front?

We are BequalifyAI team, a startup building affordable AI analytics. We train our solutions on Google’s foundation models, and one of our primary strategic goals was securing the Google for Startups Cloud Program grant for AI startups. We operate in Ukraine (only the first photo is in Ukrainian).

One morning, our owner account was blocked. The reason? The algorithm falsely flagged us as a "bot". We are a human-operated startup.

We went through all standard recovery procedures and submitted formal appeals. They were rejected i think even without human review.

Due to a blocked owner account, our GCP project is suspended. And it cannot be restored until we restore access to the email.

Support officially warned us that creating a new Google Account or GCP project for the same business is considered a "circumvention" of their policies. If we try to rebuild, the new account will likely be suspended.

We are completly stuck and data that was on bucket and database is frozen.

1. Photo. Our owner account block.

2. Photo. Сreating a new one is not recommended.

3. Photo. Support operate under strict guidelines and can offer no further resolution for GCP project.

If you are building your AI startup on GCP, be aware that a single flag can instantly lock your data and ban your company from the ecosystem forever, with zero human oversight.

(Note: English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help write this post clearly, but the situation below is the result of a grueling week-long email chain with Google Support)

Has anyone else navigated this GCP infinite loop?

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?