For Teachers and Admins
Vocareum applies platform-level restrictions to GCP Cloud Labs to prevent unexpected charges and protect the shared billing environment. These restrictions are applied automatically and cannot be overridden by learners.
Blocked GCP Services
The following GCP services are fully blocked in lab environments. Learners cannot enable or use these services in their lab projects. These are enterprise-grade or high-cost services that are not needed for typical lab work.
Service | Reason |
Cloud TPU ( | Tensor Processing Units — extremely high cost per hour |
Cloud Spanner ( | Enterprise distributed database — expensive at scale |
AlloyDB ( | Managed PostgreSQL — high base cost |
VMware Engine ( | Dedicated bare-metal VMware hosts |
Bare Metal Solution ( | Dedicated physical servers |
Certificate Authority Service ( | Per-certificate costs that can accumulate |
CCAI Platform ( | Enterprise contact center telephony |
Chronicle SIEM ( | Enterprise security analytics |
BeyondCorp Enterprise ( | Enterprise zero trust networking |
NetApp Volumes ( | High-performance managed NFS storage |
Backup and DR ( | Enterprise backup and disaster recovery |
Migration Center ( | Enterprise migration planning tool |
If your course requires access to one of these services, please contact Vocareum support to discuss options.
Restricted Operations on Allowed Services
Some GCP services remain available for lab use (e.g., Compute Engine, BigQuery, Vertex AI Search) but certain high-cost operations within those services are blocked. Learners can use the services normally but cannot create long-term financial commitments or reservations.
Operation | Service | Why it's blocked |
Committed-use discounts | Compute Engine | Creates 1- or 3-year billing commitments at the account level |
Capacity reservations | Compute Engine | Reserves specific VM capacity that incurs ongoing charges |
Capacity commitments | BigQuery | Creates slot commitments billed at the account level |
Configurable pricing | Vertex AI Search | Enables subscription-based pricing at the account level |
These restrictions do not affect normal usage of these services. For example, learners can still create and manage VM instances, run BigQuery queries, and use Vertex AI Search with default pricing.
Other Restrictions
Each learner receives their own GCP Project under a managed folder. All resources must be created within that project.
Per-project spend budgets are configured by the instructor in the Part Settings. When the budget is exceeded, the lab environment may be restricted.
Instructors can further restrict learner permissions using GCP Custom Roles (see Configuring GCP Custom Roles).
Organization policies can be applied to enforce additional constraints such as region restrictions (see Creating a GCP Lab — Managing Organization Policies).
Need an Exception?
If your course curriculum requires access to a blocked service or restricted operation, please reach out to Vocareum support. We can evaluate exceptions on a per-organization basis.