[lbatx]

I guess you're not familiar with how cloud services work. There's (generally) plenty of excess capacity.

[londons_explore]

Within Google, there is plenty of wasted capacity, but getting capacity for a service to scale up is a fiendishly difficult task. They even employ hundreds of people whose main role is to try to allocate all the various types of resources to teams. "Oh - you want 1700 GB of bigtable in Reliability zone 3 in Atlanta? I'm afraid your department doesn't own any there - you can trade with the ads department who aren't using theirs, if you give them 2Tbits of network bandwidth between Peru and Brazil? That trade will only be till the end of the quarter though, because then they need it back."

[bena]

It's the (generally) that's the issue here, now isn't it?

[vorpalhex]

I didn't see any notifications that GCP was out of capacity. Did I miss one?

[londons_explore]

Gcp capacity and capacity for Google services is fairly isolated. They never coexist on the same racks

[lbatx]

Doubtful. I put that in since absolute statements are always dangerous. I'd say at any given time, there's an excess of 20-50%. There's virtually no chance they were lacking capacity.