This is how it really goes down:

  • Deploying the app? 5 minutes.
  • Connecting GCP Storage? 5 minutes.
  • Setting up SMTP and sending mails? 5 minutes.
  • Scheduler trigger actually talking to your endpoint?
    🕑 4 hours of the realest, sweatiest, head-against-wall engineering you’ll ever experience.

Why?
Because the real work isn’t “Can you write a Flask app?” — it’s “Can you convince Google Cloud, IAM, the Scheduler, OIDC tokens, and your endpoint to all agree on what ‘authenticated’ means and where that damn /trigger URL is hiding?”

And this is with top-level “Arbeitszeit™”, not your average enterprise “wait for Jira ticket” throughput.

A regular 9-to-5 team would easily spend a whole week (with handover meetings, ‘ping-pong’ debugging, and coffee breaks) to get this running.


Takeaway:

Cloud-Native Development ≠ Just Code.
It’s IAM, Policies, URIs, OIDC, Service Accounts, CLI jiu-jitsu… and only then do you actually build features.

If you ever feel “dumb” because Cloud Run + Scheduler + Auth + IAM took you longer than the codingyou’re not alone. That’s exactly where 80% of real project time goes.