r/googlecloud • • Aug 24 '26

AMA about hackathons at Google Cloud - Thu Aug 27, 4pm PT

9 Upvotes

hi r/googlecloud!

I'm Tilde Thurium from Google Cloud Developer Marketing. During my 13 years in engineering and developer relations, I have organized over 100 hackathons.

I"m hosting this AMA to answer all of your questions about hackathons in general, including:

  • ideation and scoping: how to pick an idea that stands out
  • rapid prototyping: getting an MVP deployed to Google Cloud as quickly as possible
  • how AI-assisted development is changing hackathons
  • presenting or recording a compelling demo

Active Spotlight: The All Things Agentic Hackathon (GEAR)

If you're looking for a challenge to put these strategies into practice right now, we’re currently running the All Things Agentic Hackathon!

Here are the key details if you’d like to ask specific questions about it during the AMA:

  • Submission Deadline: Open now through August 31, 2026.
  • Prizes: Over $170,000 in total prizes across tracks.
  • The Challenge: Build production-grade, autonomous AI agents leveraging Gemini 3.5, Google Cloud services, and modern agent frameworks (such as the Google Agent Development Kit, GenAI SDK, Antigravity SDK, or Genkit).
  • Challenge Tracks:
    1. The Taskmaster: Event-driven, autonomous agents for multi-step automated workflows.
    2. The Collaborative Partner: Stateful, multi-turn conversational agents with persistent context and memory.
    3. The Fortified Enterprise Fleet: Enterprise-ready multi-agent systems focusing on discovery, zero-trust security, and policy governance. (Plus an opt-in track for Startup Excellence*).*
  • Developer Resources:

Live Q&A Details

  • Drop your questions early: This thread is open now so anyone across different time zones can leave questions and upvote topics.
  • Live Answering Window: Thursday, August 27, 2026, from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM PDT.

Ask me anything about hackathon preparation, agent architectures, demo tips, or specific rules for the All Things Agentic Hackathon!

Thanks everyone! There's still time to sign up for the GEAR All Things Agentic Hackathon.

Sign up here.


r/googlecloud • • Sep 03 '22

So you got a huge GCP bill by accident, eh?

175 Upvotes

If you've gotten a huge GCP bill and don't know what to do about it, please take a look at this community guide before you make a post on this subreddit. It contains various bits of information that can help guide you in your journey on billing in public clouds, including GCP.

If this guide does not answer your questions, please feel free to create a new post and we'll do our best to help.

Thanks!


r/googlecloud • • 15h ago

AI/ML Vertex Gemini has zero capacity outside of the US

11 Upvotes

I'm in the UK and recently I've been working on a client project where UK or EU data residency is desirable. We need gemini to do some things for us, but when using either london, EU, or global endpoints, vertex gemini is constantly giving 429 out of capacity errors.

Looking at the metrics, I can see that our request rate is very small, roughly 0.5 RPS, max of about 2. But the 429 error rate is up to 80%.

At first I thought it was a glitch. Maybe related to London's outage the other day. But this has been happening for more than a week now and continues today. It changes throughout the day, as you'd expect, but still very very high error rates.

On a previous project we never had these issues. The only difference was that this client was US-based and we were using the us endpoint (not global). So this morning I switched to that and boom, ~0.5-1% error rate.

What I don't get is why the internet isn't complaining about this? It's ridiculous, they should just turn it off until they can handle some non-zero load.

Edit: updated us estimates to 1% region. Also, I forgot to mention GCP's dynamic quota nonsense. It's impossible to estimate what your RPS quota actually is. This alone has pushed me towards OpenAI/etc. Purely because their quota system is more transparent. Again, to me, this is crazy given how much experience GCP has in this space.


r/googlecloud • • 5h ago

GCP professional data engineer

0 Upvotes

I’m preparing for the GCP Professional Data Engineer certification and want to know how the current exam compares to the available dumps.

For anyone who took the exam recently:
Are the dumps still relevant to the actual exam?
What resources and practice exams did you use to prepare?
If you passed recently, what would you recommend focusing on?

Would appreciate answers from people who’ve taken it firsthand.


r/googlecloud • • 9h ago

CASA Tier 2 Renewal- You done one?

0 Upvotes

Super quick question. I'm just in the process of working on my re newal for ParentPush.com via TAC security. I've got a deadline of early Jan - but it's already taking quite some time... has anyone completed a renewal here, before? How long did it take you? What hurdles should I be on the look out for? My website is a simple parent notification service - for important school emails. So not wildly complex... Thanks again.


r/googlecloud • • 10h ago

AI/ML Latency above 5 mins on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform - DeepSeek V4.1-Flash?

1 Upvotes

I'm getting over 5 min response times on Cloud Vertex AI Model Garden Model as a Service DeepSeek V4.1-Flash. Just was curious if anyone else was getting this as well?


r/googlecloud • • 12h ago

Apache Iceberg TCO: The Real Cost of Lakehouse Table Maintenance

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1 Upvotes

r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

Can someone explain the outage please?

19 Upvotes

From someone who has been an AWS customer for a number of years I’m really confused how a power outage in a single zone of a 3x zone region can take out the entire region?

Don’t each of the DCs have independent power, connectivity, etc?

I’m confused as to how this could happen. Insights?


r/googlecloud • • 6h ago

BREAKING: Google Cloud outage disrupts Revolut and UK banking services. Your backup bank might need a backup.

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0 Upvotes

r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

Revolut outage today was a Google Cloud power failure in London — full timeline (began 2:08 AM ET)

15 Upvotes

This morning's Revolut outage was not a hack. Google Cloud had a "power event" in its London zone (europe-west2-b) starting 06:08 UTC / 07:08 BST, and Revolut's card payments, ATM withdrawals, transfers, currency exchange and stock trading went down with it.

Timeline (UTC):

  • 06:08 — power event begins in Google's London zone
  • ~07:00 — Downdetector passes 1,500 Revolut reports (StatusGator later counted 4,000+)
  • Morning — Revolut confirms the disruption and says all customer money and data are safe
  • Afternoon — Google restores full service availability

Also disrupted: HMCTS remote court hearings across England and Wales. Other UK names (Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail, NHS England) had user-report spikes too, but nobody has confirmed those were caused by Google Cloud — worth keeping separate.

If your card was declined this morning: don't keep retrying (declines can stack up pending holds), check the status page first, use a backup payment method, and watch your transactions for 2–3 days for duplicates.

I track outages and breaches and put the full timeline with sources together here:
https://techreview.si/google-cloud-outage-revolut-down-power-event/


r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

There goes London - Google Cloud says outage affecting banks and court video links caused by 'power event'

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30 Upvotes

r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

Incident details | Google Cloud Service Health (europe-west2)

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53 Upvotes

GCP europe-west2 is currently down and affecting a bunch of services, in case you're wondering why something is not working.

Incident affecting AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Data Fusion, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Run, Cloud Spanner, Google App Engine, Google BigQuery, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Looker (Google Cloud core), Managed Airflow, Managed Service for Apache Kafka, Memorystore for Redis, Memorystore for Redis Cluster, Memorystore for Valkey, Persistent Disk, Storage Transfer Service, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)


r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

Cloud Storage Is The Google Drive Android App Safe For Storing All Of Your Audio/Music Files?

0 Upvotes

I'm asking because I'm going to be getting The Motorola Razr Fold 2026 on Halloween🍭🍬🎃🤡👻And I want to make sure that all my Music Files/Songs🎵🎶🎤🎧are completely safe when I transfer everything from my Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 Device to The Motorola Razr Fold 2026 without any issues. Do you think that it would be a good idea to transfer all of my 1,907 WMA Songs/Audio Files to The Google Drive Android App before I transfer everything to the new Phone/Device? What has been everyone's experience with using The Google Drive Android App and Backing Up all of their Songs, Pictures, Documents, and all other important Files? If I could get some advice I would really appreciate it.


r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

Using built-in GCP metrics for automation (autoscaling, rollbacks) — what are your workarounds for metric latency?

1 Upvotes

Hey r/googlecloud,

I’m looking for real-world feedback on using Google Cloud built-in metrics (Compute Engine, Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Load Balancing) to drive automated systems.

Built-in metrics are great for dashboards and retrospectives. However, when you try to build tight automated loops—such as: * Automated rollbacks during faulty deployments (e.g., memory/CPU spikes), * Fast cluster autoscaling or traffic shifting, * Self-healing / automated remediation scripts,

the delay between an event happening and the metric being queryable (sampling window + aggregation overhead) can stretch to several minutes, making it difficult to protect tight SLOs.

I’m collecting feedback to share directly with the GCP observability and telemetry teams, and would love your input:

  1. What automated workflows are you driving (or trying to drive) using built-in GCP metrics?
  2. Which specific metrics are the most useful to you for automation?
  3. What is your workaround when built-in metrics are too slow? Do you switch to custom metrics (OpenTelemetry / Prometheus), scrape logs, query instance endpoints directly, or use third-party tooling?
  4. What are your latency expectations? How fresh does a metric need to be for you to trust it for automated decisions (e.g., sub-10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute)?

Appreciate any setup examples, architecture patterns, or specific metric pain points you can share!


r/googlecloud • • 1d ago

CloudSQL My free, open-source Postgres app for Mac now connects to Cloud SQL without the Auth Proxy

2 Upvotes

I've been building Rowkery, a keyboard-first Postgres and SQLite app for the Mac. It's free and open source (Apache-2.0).

What always annoyed me about Cloud SQL from a laptop was the proxy routine:

  1. Start cloud-sql-proxy in a terminal
  2. Pick a local port
  3. Keep that window open
  4. And remember which port belongs to which instance.

Version 0.2.0 Rowkery now handles that automatically! Under Postgres you pick Google Cloud SQL, choose the instance from a list grouped by project, and connect. It works the way the Auth Proxy does: it asks the Cloud SQL Admin API for the instance's address and a client certificate that lasts an hour, then opens TLS straight to the instance on port 3307. Nothing listens on a local port, and you don't have to add your IP to authorized networks.

For the Google side it reads your existing gcloud login (gcloud auth application-default login) without copying it, or you can give it a service account key, which it keeps in the macOS Keychain.

What it can't do yet:

  • Postgres instances only, no MySQL or SQL Server
  • Database login is user and password; IAM database authentication isn't supported yet
  • Private IP and PSC need you to be on the VPN, as with the proxy

It's an alpha and the build isn't signed yet, so macOS blocks it the first time. The site shows the one command that lets it open.

Do give it a try and see if it helps making your workflow more efficient!


r/googlecloud • • 2d ago

Passed GCP PCA and Professional DevOps Engineer, what should I do next? And how do you find GCP work?

13 Upvotes

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!


r/googlecloud • • 2d ago

Discovering MCP servers at runtime with Agent Registry and ADK: my approach and the pitfalls I hit

5 Upvotes

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?

r/googlecloud • • 2d ago

Query regarding committed use discount for compute engine

4 Upvotes

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


r/googlecloud • • 2d ago

PHP on Cloud Run: Cut Your Latency with PHP 8.5 and Persistent Sockets

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6 Upvotes

r/googlecloud • • 2d ago

Billing Help, not sure about authorization hold

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4 Upvotes

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?


r/googlecloud • • 3d ago

I want to know best resources for learning GCP

4 Upvotes

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


r/googlecloud • • 3d ago

Billing Preventing runaway AI agent costs on Google Cloud

0 Upvotes

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?


r/googlecloud • • 4d ago

Passed GCP PMLE Exam

16 Upvotes

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.


r/googlecloud • • 3d ago

AI/ML What RAG tool do you use?

2 Upvotes

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?


r/googlecloud • • 3d ago

I entered a wrong referral code.

0 Upvotes

Recently google is conducting a competition in google skills(google cloud). In that I entered wrong referral code instead of my college's . Sorry for my english. But I did every course and exercises in that gmail. Gdg campus organizer from my college is asking me to create new acc and start from scratch if I wanna participate. I am mainly participating because of merch..💔

This referral code helps tracking the progress. I completed it in a day. Only to realize I entered a wrong referral code