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Comment by td521534f12 | Hacker News Reader

GCP is kind of odd in that some hardware is only available in certain zones, and some hardware is technically available in multiple zones but the capacity is not evenly spread. I've had to implement infrastructure code for GCP that interrogated hardware availability by region and zone to place VMs, trading off multi-AZ availability where it made sense.

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Other clouds are similarly odd (or even worse). I have experienced in Azure that if you provision a resource group with some basic SKU for a given service, the only way to later upgrade to the latest and greatest SKU is to tear down the whole resource group and re-provision everything from scratch. All attempts at scale-up in place will fail with cryptic errors. Seems like you are assigned in an old corner of the DC and can't get out of it.

Extra fun if there is a key vault involved, then you have to manually delete every key in it, otherwise you can't create new keys with the same names in the new vault.

I can't even get a managed redis instance in Azure EUS2 right now...

Yep their managed redis is somehow always out

Yes. The area on the Venn diagram where services, hardware and regulatory compliance intersect is surprisingly small.

I had a client that was contracting with a very large bank and there were only something like four zones globally that we could possibly deploy in to.

Google also is unlike AWS in that their zone abstraction is very virtual, and two zones might be in the same physical building. If you have requirements that your deployment zones be physically separated by some minimal distance then it can make things pretty challenging.

And afaik there is no way to get an exact physical location (DC, Hall, rack) for the hardware you are actually using. If there was you could at least verify if there wasn't some kind of hiddent dependency.

> infrastructure code for GCP that interrogated hardware availability

How do you to do that ?

There's a GCP API that lists the hardware advertised in each zone as a starting point. Then you have to actually attempt to provision hardware in each zone to try to get a sense of what capacity is available there. Combine the two and you can kind of map out a topology.

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