APIs, quotas, and locations

Google Cloud services are enabled project by project with Service Usage, including private services created with Cloud Endpoints. The console covers most cases; for scripts you use the Google Cloud CLI and, for programmatic access, the Service Usage API client libraries.

gcloud services enable bigquery.googleapis.com pubsub.googleapis.com
gcloud services disable bigquery.googleapis.com
gcloud services operations describe operations/OPERATION_ID

• You can enable or disable several services in one command. Each operation returns an ID you can check with gcloud services operations describe.
• The Service Usage API itself is enabled by default. If you disable it in the project that makes the requests, calls to enable or disable services fail until you turn it back on from the console or gcloud.

The Cloud Quotas system monitors consumption, restricts it, and lets you request changes and automate adjustments. If you try to consume more than allowed, access is usually blocked and the task fails.

Free trial accounts may have lower quota values. When you enable billing on the project, most of them increase.

Quota types

Quota hierarchy level and location

Example from the Compute Engine docs: with a global quota of 50 target pools, creating 25 in one region and 25 in another uses up the project quota in every region. With a regional quota of 7 reserved IP addresses, you can reserve only 7 per region.

When you run out of quota

The task fails with a quota error and keeps failing until there is enough room. If you don't want to change the quota value:

Requesting a quota adjustment

• Roles: Quota Viewer (roles/servicemanagement.quotaViewer) to view and Quota Administrator (roles/servicemanagement.quotaAdmin) to request adjustments.
• Most increases are requested at the project level; few products support organization-level increases. Decreases can be requested at the project, folder, and organization levels.
• Most requests are evaluated by automated systems based on resource availability, how long you have used Google Cloud, and other factors. Some are escalated to human reviewers. You might be asked to pay in advance.
• You don't need a paid support contract to request an adjustment. If you can't do it from the console, ask Cloud Customer Care.
• Group requests by product and area (for example, networking in one and Compute Engine VMs in another): batching many in one request lengthens the review.
• The quota adjuster requests adjustments automatically as you approach the limit, if there is enough usage history to predict.
• To create more projects without an organization, use the Request Project Quota Increase form.

Quota alerts

The Cloud Quotas dashboard is integrated with Cloud Monitoring. From Quotas & System Limits, in a quota's menu, Create usage alert opens an alert policy template: you choose the notification channel (email, SMS, Pub/Sub…) and get notified when usage reaches a percentage of the maximum. This basic alert exists only for project-level quotas. In Metrics Explorer, the Consumer Quota resource shows quota usage metrics.

Regions and zones

• Zones in a region have high-bandwidth, low-latency connections to each other.
• For high availability, Google recommends deploying across multiple zones and multiple regions, and having a recovery plan in case you lose a whole region.
• AI zones are specialized zones with high-capacity GPUs and TPUs for training and inference. Their name adds ai, a number, and a letter: us-west4-ai2b shares the update rollout wave of us-west4-b.
• Communication within a region is generally cheaper and faster than across regions.
• Pick a region close to your users to reduce latency, and wherever your data residency requirements demand.

Zonal, regional, and multi-regional resources

Verifying availability by location

Not every product or piece of hardware is available everywhere. To check:

• The Cloud locations page and "Products available by location" show which services each region offers.
• For Compute Engine, gcloud compute machine-types list shows which zones offer each machine type.
• Confidential VM is only in certain machine series and zones; sole-tenancy, wherever machine series with sole-tenant node types exist.
• If you don't know which zone to pick, the console lets you choose Any and Google decides based on machine type and capacity. The bulk instance creation API and regional MIGs with a target distribution shape also pick zones automatically.

gcloud compute machine-types list --filter="name=c4d-standard-4"

Transparent maintenance

Google maintains its infrastructure without interrupting VMs: by default, most are set to live migrate, which moves them to another host in the same zone without shutting them down. The alternative is stop and reboot: the VM shuts down cleanly and restarts away from the event. Some machine series support only this second option. It is set in the VM's host maintenance policy, covered in domain D2.

Exam scenarios

Common exam traps