Worth noting that AWS Bedrock makes it easy to have zero retention with premier claude models. Not quite local, but it feels local-adjacent for security while getting affordable access to top-performing models... GCP appears to be a bit harder to set this up.

IMO Google Vertex is not any harder than AWS. AWS biggest pain is figuring out IAM roles for some of the services (batching and S3 Vectors -- I actually cut out Knowledge Bases in the book because it was too complicated and expensive). Have not personally had as big an issue figuring out Vertex.

I do have a follow up post planned on some reliability issues with the APIs I uncovered with compiling the book so much -- I would not use Google Maps grounding in production!