Hi! I would like to ask a question, in best case answered (and solved) by GCP support. I am a supervisor in high school and I recommended students to use GCP for their projects. One group of students had a project in GCP; easily: 1 VM for API server (micro instance), 1 bucket for files, 1 MySQL database. Students were asked to not touch anything else (and they did not). However once we get a warning email from GCP that our instance is possibly used for high resources draining actions (??!). When we look at VMs in Compute engine, there was a new instance named as “gke-prod-cluster-…”. We immediately removed this one and asked support for re-activate our project from stopped state and to answer “where is this instance came from??”. They just activated a project again and did not answer any question. Students had another duties and they stopped also their API VM (to not drain money). BUT starting March one student (the one who own billing account) received an invoice for more than 100 EUR. We check VMs in Compute engine and there were, again, 2 “gke-prod-…” instances running AND AUTOMATICALLY CREATED in 22 of February! They were running and nobody asked for them, and they were draining money from STUDENTS! Now we immediately stopped whole project in GCP and trying to solve this mystery. Students (<18 years old) definitely not have over 100 EUR for unexpected issue from GCP side. They expected to pay up to 5 EUR for storage and static IPs, they even always start and stop their API VM when not needed. We even never activated GKE service! Please help me to solve this mystery, I feel really guilty for recommending GCP to students for their project, and they definitely never use GCP again, after this experience.
I am also including screenshots proofs:
