The real issue is that Bigtable's used to be in one big shared cell which could handle temporary 190% increases in resources.

Now, to increase isolation between services, everyone is off in a partition, and each individual partition is much smaller and therefore can't withstand resource spikes without falling over.

And I bet the "emergency loan" functionality for various resources still isn't automated and still has arcane requirements to meet and a delay before it kicks in. Yay - a 15 minute delay. Thats exactly what I need when my entire service is down! /s