Introduction to Google Cloud

Introduction to Google Cloud

Google Cloud grew from Google's internal infrastructure and early services such as App Engine into a public platform for compute, storage, networking, databases, analytics, security, and AI. Resources are controlled through the console, gcloud, client libraries, REST APIs, and infrastructure-as-code tools.

Core ideas

• The resource hierarchy normally flows from organization to folders, projects, and service resources.
• A project is an API, IAM, quota, metadata, and billing association boundary.
• Regions are independent geographic locations; zones are deployment areas within Regions.
• Policies can inherit down the hierarchy, making organization and folder design a governance decision.

Design and operating model

Establish an organization hierarchy, separate production and non-production projects, attach billing, restrict available Regions and services through policy, and centralize security and logging projects. Choose deployment locations from latency, residency, service availability, resilience, carbon, and cost requirements.

Example

gcloud auth list
gcloud config list
gcloud projects describe "$GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT"
gcloud compute regions list \
  --format='table(name,status,quotas.metric:label=QUOTA)'

Run examples in a disposable training project. Replace project IDs, Regions, identities, resource names, sizes, and policies with reviewed values, and verify current Google Cloud CLI and service requirements before production use.

Production guidance

• Use workforce federation and MFA for people, not shared user accounts or downloaded keys.
• Apply labels and billing ownership consistently across projects and resources.
• Deploy through Terraform or another reviewed declarative workflow rather than depending on console history.

The chapter quiz follows the lesson and checks both service vocabulary and architecture decisions.