GCP's max instance count is helpful to a certain extent, but this doesn't completely protect you unless from DDOS attacks. If you have 3 nodes that can all handle 1000 requests per second, and those requests are doing something expensive the max instance limit doesn't help you.

Although I guess if you have 3 nodes that can only handle 100 requests each the damage of a DDOS would be much more limited.

True, it doesn’t protect you from DDOS. But how is it different from having 3 regular hosts?

Yeah GCP is the friendliest cloud provider for sure.

Still a big, complex platform with tons of features and things to spend money on, but much more friendly than some others (looking at you, AWS)

And a billing limit. plus you get a generous amount in the free tier