> Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones.

Big +1 to this. For what I thought was a modest sized project it feels like an np-hard problem coordinating with gcloud account reps to figure out what regions have both enough hyperdisk capacity and compute capacity. A far cry from being able to just "download more ram" with ease.

The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers.

(All that said... still way easier than if I needed to procure our own hardware and colocate it. The project is complete. Just delayed more than I expected.)