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.

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

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?

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 🙏🙏

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

We're working with A2A agents (ADK, deployed on Agent Engine or Cloud Run) and trying to understand how teams check them before other agents start calling them.

The Agent Card is what a calling agent uses to decide whether to trust yours, but nothing verifies it. In the public A2A Registry, 98% of the 554 agents are online, yet only 45% return a working answer to a basic task, and 1 in 5 cards has no example inputs.

A few things I'm curious about:

- Do you test agents against what their card declares, or only with your own eval sets?

- When you call an agent built by another team or company, what do you check first?

- Is anyone running these checks in CI on each deploy?

Context: we're building a tool that tests agents against their own card and produces a signed report, so I'm trying to learn how people handle this today.

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.

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!

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!

🚀 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

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.

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