The Promise vs. The Reality
Google Cloud Platform sells itself on managed services: BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Cloud Run. Less operational burden, more focus on product. That pitch holds until the first real production incident, when teams discover GCP shifts responsibility rather than eliminates it.
The issue isn't reliability, it's visibility. GCP's abstractions mask what's actually happening until something degrades. Latency climbs gradually. Quotas hit without warning. Retry logic hides real failures. The system stays up but behaves unpredictably, and because nothing technically "failed," investigations drag on.
Where Managed Stops
Cloud SQL is managed until you need to promote a read replica. That's manual. Cloud Run auto-scales until cold starts hit production traffic during a spike. That's your problem to architect around. Disaster recovery testing? Also on you, with limited tooling to simulate realistic failure scenarios.
The shared responsibility model is clear in Google's docs: they secure infrastructure, you handle configuration, backups, and compliance. What's less clear is how much operational expertise "managed" services still demand. IAM complexity across projects, Security Command Center gaps with third-party tools, and backup verification all require in-house capability.
Recent discussions highlight this gap. GCP's "shared fate" positioning offers tools like VPC Service Controls and a Risk Protection Program with Munich Re, but customer execution still determines outcomes. ISO 27017 and 27018 certifications prove Google's infrastructure security, not your implementation.
The Cost of Abstraction
Escaling is trivial in GCP. Limiting that growth intelligently isn't. Teams routinely discover runaway costs from over-logging, excessive metrics, or services that communicate more than intended. The financial feedback loop lags technical decisions by weeks, creating false confidence early and budget panic later.
On-premise infrastructure imposes physical limits. GCP's limits are financial, and they arrive after the damage is done.
What Actually Works
GCP accelerates development when teams assume responsibility shifted, not disappeared. That means:
- Explicit disaster recovery runbooks, not trust in "managed" labels
- Regular failover testing, because Cloud SQL won't do it for you
- Cost monitoring as a first-class operational concern
- Cold start mitigation strategies built into Cloud Run deployments from day one
The platform is solid. The risk is treating it like an operational safety net rather than a different set of trade-offs.
The Real Dependency
Over time, GCP-specific behaviors infiltrate architecture decisions. APIs, service quirks, ecosystem integrations. This isn't lock-in from vendor malice, it's lock-in from accumulated convenience. When strategic shifts happen, teams realize they've optimized for Google's operational model, not portability.
GCP works best for organizations that understand managed services mean managed infrastructure, not managed outcomes. The responsibility didn't vanish. It just moved to places the console doesn't make obvious.