The Hidden Costs of 'Free' Cloud: Google Cloud's Soft Delete and Access Scopes Traps

Google Cloud's free tier appears cost-effective until architectural misconfigurations and legacy system defaults silently drain your quota. This tutorial reveals two critical pitfalls: Soft Delete's hidden retention consuming storage allowance, and legacy Access Scopes overriding IAM permissions. Understanding these traps is essential for engineers building genuinely zero-cost cloud infrastructure without surprise billing alerts.