r/googlecloud

Reposting as I used wrong profile before but as per title. Our company got 100k credits last year then had a tough period and forgot about it and now only have 2-3 months to spend. What would you build with it?

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.

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.

Google Cloud suspended my project but after suspension my gemini api usage remained. I was not able to disable gemini api at that time. Also my firebase database was connected with cloud and now including authentication, nothing works on my app.

I stored gemini api key on firebase to be on the safe side, cursor directed me to do so. And now, within a day after creating my gemini api key, it became exposed. I don't trust gemini anymore, will use sth else later on.

My question is how can I get my account back? How long its gonna take to receive response to my appeal?

Any success applying credits for these models?

They are available in agent studio but can't get em to run via json key

Posting again because I’m trying to reach someone from Google Cloud who can help escalate my billing/security review.

My normal Google Cloud usage was monthly $250 . On May 12 my Gemini usage spiked to about $35K+ in 3 hours. This was not normal usage.

Support has been silent since May 22 and now receiving Google Collections email.

This incident happened before Google’s June 19 changes around unrestricted Gemini API keys. Truffle research also discussed how older public Google API keys become usable against Gemini after the API was enabled.

My ask:

Can a Google Cloud representative please help route this to the right billing/security escalation team? I can provide my case number privately to a Google Cloud employee or mod.

I’m asking Google Cloud to review server-side logs for the May 12 incident window, including source IPs, user agents, request volume, model/token usage, and whether the pattern matches known API key abuse.

Has anyone here successfully gotten a Google Cloud billing/security escalation for Gemini API key abuse?

In this case, Google sent the alert that they were suspending his account because of what looked like hijacking...then charged him anyway, and won't back down.

https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/07/03/dev-says-google-warned-him-about-account-hijack-then-charged-him-11000-anyway/5266234

I'm solo-shipping a real D2C stack on GCP — not a landing page:

• Cloud Run API (Node 22 / Express 4)
• Cloud SQL + Prisma
• Upstash Redis (BullMQ, rate limits, cart)
• Firebase Hosting (storefront + admin ERP)
• Razorpay/Shiprocket webhooks, Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Build

No team. No Docker locally (WSL2). Goal: ship without breaking checkout.

What actually works with Cursor:

1. .cursorrules — pinned versions (Express 4, Prisma 5), paise not floats, API response shape, never migrate prod locally
2. Updates.txt — one bullet per prod incident so the next session doesn't start from zero
3. One task per session — "fix expense migration" not "improve admin"

Cursor is fast when context is structured. Dangerous when you say "just fix prod."

Aside — the deploy that almost broke prod:

We moved off Memorystore + VPC connector to Upstash (rediss://). Deleted the connector. Deployed. New revision: connect ETIMEDOUT. Health red. Checkout dead.

Not an app bug. Two footguns:

1. prisma-migrate job still referenced the deleted VPC connector
2. Manual deploy pulled redis-url:latest (placeholder) instead of redis-url:4 (real Upstash URL)

In Cursor: pasted Cloud Run logs, pointed at cloudbuild.yaml + startup order. Traced BullMQ importing at module load before Redis was ready. Fix: workers boot after ensureRedisReady, pin redis-url:4 in Cloud Build, --clear-vpc-connector on the migrate job.

Smaller one: Prisma P2022 — API shipped before migration ran. Expense.status missing → 500 on "Add Expense." Re-ran migrate job; added rule: migration before traffic shift.

Honest limits: zero automated tests; Cursor will wire the wrong webhook field if you don't document it (channel_order_id = display ID, not UUID). You still read every diff.

For infra glue — Cloud Build flags, migration order, "why is prod 500" — it's the first tool where solo feels survivable.

Full transparency: I'm bootstrapping this — no funding, no team — and Cursor Pro is a real line item. They have a referral program; if you're already planning to try it, my link gives us both a bit of credit: https://cursor.com/referral?code=MIBRU4HJHP1W

I'd share this post either way. The .cursorrules + session log setup matter more than any link. Happy to answer questions on GCP solo ops or how I structure rules files.

Anyone else solo on GCP + Cursor? What's in your rules file vs your head?

I want to reframe the usual "restrict your API keys" advice, because I think it points at the wrong problem.

I've been on the receiving end of Google Cloud's billing pipeline. A Gemini API key I created in Google AI Studio - never deployed, never checked into a repo, never left Google's own systems - got abused over a couple of hours and racked up roughly $80k on an account that was usually just 1400INR on spends. The first I heard of it wasn't an alert, a hold, or a flag. It was ~$80k quietly materializing in the transactions table after the fact in my credit card e-mandate queue. It was the credit card company which was more honest with me 🥲

Here's what I find remarkable: the billing system is wired tightly enough into Google's financial backend to instantly issue mandates and process charges the moment they cross a threshold - but the customer-facing side of that same system shows you nothing until the money is already gone. That asymmetry isn't an accident of scale; it's an engineering decision. Real-time when it's time to charge you, eventually-consistent when it's time to warn you. I'll call that "dark" and leave it there.

So my actual ask isn't "improve API keys." It's two things:

1. Make the customer-facing billing APIs reactive and real-time. If the mandate system can act in seconds, the anomaly/notification system can too. Budgets today are advisory and lagging - by the time a budget alert fires, you can already be five figures deep. Give us spend signals on the same clock as the charges.

2. Give API keys hard, user-defined cutoffs - price, volume, and time - that actually stop traffic. Not alerts. Cutoffs. Right now the user is kept in the dark on most of the config that governs a key. Consider the Firebase angle: you spin up a "Firebase project," but the whole thing is a facade over an underlying GCP project. A non-DevOps founder or a hobbyist has no idea their key is effectively an open secret that can reach any Google service - until they're billed one morning for a service they never knowingly enabled. Nobody hands you that disclaimer up front.

I know unrestricted keys are being phased out after everything that's happened, and that's good. But restriction-by-default is damage control. The real fix is a billing surface that's honest with the customer in real time and lets them set a ceiling that the platform will actually enforce.

I'm posting this as a serious request for improvement, not a jab because I got burned. The engineering talent to do this clearly exists - it's already pointed at collections. Point some of it at the customer.

(For context: Google eventually waived ~75% of the charge, but is holding the remaining ~25% + GST as "valid usage" and won't share the access logs. So even the dispute process runs on the same one-sided visibility.)

haha so my entire lifetime with Google Cloud was always one-sided 💔

Hi, I made a new Google cloud account and have the free $300 credit. I made a couple projects to try and play around with it, and it's been eating away at the free credits.

I'm very new to this so didn't know you had to disable things. I've disabled billing for all projects, cancelled the billing account itself, shut down all the projects, but the money is still going down.

What's going on? What can I do?

Anyone tested this during their free trial time if Anthropic model usage are deducted from the credits or not? Startup credit def. don't cover as per I understand, unless you're on scale tier.

Thanks in advance!

Hello guys,

I've been looking into cloud certifications but I find myself stuck at this point where I don't know in what direction to proceed because I want to go towards a job that suits me but I don't know the cloud job market so well. I have a weakness in troubleshooting and client support and I would like a job that has lower levels of such. What would you recommend?

I’m in a pretty bad Google Cloud situation and looking for advice from people who have dealt with billing or API key abuse cases.

My normal Google Cloud bill is usually around $200/month. This month my project got hit with an unexpected Gemini / Generative Language API bill of around $55k USD. The billing report shows the spike was almost entirely Gemini API usage, not normal Firebase or app traffic.

I pulled Cloud Monitoring data and it shows about 2.2 million Gemini API requests during the incident window. The traffic was tied to one API key UID. That key maps back to a Firebase generated public iOS client key used in my mobile app config, not a Gemini key that I intentionally created or used.

I found out from a Google billing anomaly email. At the time I received the alert, the visible bill was around $2k. Within about 2 hours, I disabled the Generative Language API, restricted the key, deleted it, and later verified that Gemini usage stopped.

The problem is that the bill kept ramping up after that because of billing/reporting delays, and eventually landed around $55k.

Google declined the request to adjust the charges, saying the usage was considered valid because it came through my project/API key.

Update: Google Cloud has assigned an escalation manager, and they said their investigation indicates a billing adjustment is required. The adjustment request is now waiting for internal approval, with another update expected by July 7.

I have 13 years of experience in Drupal, PHP, and TypeScript development. I'm planning to transition into a cloud-focused role and am considering the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification.

I have around 3 months of hands-on exposure to GCP through work, so I understand the basics but don't have extensive cloud experience.

With the current job market, is the Associate Cloud Engineer certification still worth pursuing, or would it be a better investment to focus on AI (LLMs, AI agents, etc.) instead?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has made a similar career transition or is involved in hiring.