GCP regional quota error

Suppose you are faced with the error:

Error: error creating NodePool: googleapi: Error 403: Insufficient regional quota to satisfy request: resource "SSD_TOTAL_GB": request requires '700.0' and is short '200.0'. project has a quota of '500.0' with '500.0' available.

The reason is that GCP has a standard limit for SSDs within a region. You can try to increase it, but keep in mind that some quotas can’t be increased within the trial 300$ account or can be increased only after upgrading to a paid account and even making a support request.

The thing is that there are a number of disk types: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks.

The most interesting ones for us are pd-ssd and pd-standard.

GCP set pd-standard disk type by default some time ago. And if you have some scripts or Terraform configurations for your cluster, they created machines with pd-standard disk type back then.

At some point in time, GCP switched to the pd-ssd disk type by default, and your scripts started working the other way, and you unexpectedly faced a quota limit.

Thus, the solution is to specify the disk type explicitly in your Terraform code. GKE example:

resource "google_container_node_pool" "node_pool" {
    // ...
    node_config {
        machine_type = …
        disk_type = "pd-standard"
    }
}