[sandorscribbles]

if you need to bump a quota above the predetermined range of what googlers think is "normal" usage (which is far too low to run anything at scale)you have to talk to a human to negotiate the quota bump. why? because googlers in their infinite engineering wisdom use "gcp quotas" not as a cost optimization guardrail for customers benefit, but to inform google on when and how much metal they need to buy for their datacenter region you are running in.

[verst]

I have to defend the Googlers here (I work at a different hyperscaler). Teams / services need to optimize their COGS. That means optimizing infrastructure cost. A lot of pay as you go service may not have any base cost to customers but they require some infrastructure to be provisioned. Without quotas you can have a lot of provisioned infrastructure which does not produce any revenue to even collectively break even. Just yesterday this a decision we evaluated again in my team. As a team we cannot afford an unlimited quota - both because of what that would do to our bottom line and because we can't necessarily obtain all the quotas we need ourselves to provision enough capacity for our dependencies. It's a difficult trade off requiring manual intervention.

[sandorscribbles]

i may have not emphasized enough how important quotas are for customers. quotas are very important guardrails for orgs that ensure that newly hired engineer who wants to "test drive the cloud" by running a BigQuery tutorial they found on github, gets stopped before they burn $10k in an afternoon. however, quotas on gcp are there for the benefits of google and not geared towards the customers. first there is an ever expanding tree of potential quotas complicating production rollouts of infra and second they are all set insanely low so even the smallest POC gets blocked. requesting a small increase routes the quota through software and auto-approval, requesting a quota that allows for a production workload? 3 weeks + help from your account rep, if google has blessed you the privilege of being allowed to talk with a human googler. no account rep you say, well your production workload can just wait around for google support to potentially acknowledge your existence.