A few years ago, we realized that spending in our AWS product test environment had jumped significantly from one month to the next. We drilled down into the issue and traced it to some RDS database instances that had been spun up to test new product features. No one realized that these expensive instances were left running after the tests were complete, and subsequently racking up charges for several months.

For many years after the inception of Compute Engine on June 28, 2012 (GA December 2, 2013), N1 was the only Google Cloud machine type family offered.