bongoDev

Google Cloud is not a menu of products to memorize. For a cloud engineer it is a programmable operating environment built from resource hierarchy, identities, APIs, networks, compute platforms, managed data services, observability and policy.

The cloud-engineering loop

Text

REQUIREMENT
   ↓
PROJECT + LOCATION + IDENTITY
   ↓
NETWORK + COMPUTE + DATA
   ↓
AUTOMATE / DEPLOY
   ↓
OBSERVE
   ↓
SECURE + SCALE + OPTIMIZE
   ↓
RECOVER + IMPROVE

For every workload, be able to answer:

Where does it live? Organization/folder/project, region or zone, VPC and subnet.
Who can access it? IAM principal, role, service account, network path and policy.
Where is state stored? Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Cloud SQL, Spanner, Firestore, Bigtable, Memorystore, etc.
How is it operated? Monitoring, Logging, Audit Logs, alerts, CI/CD, IaC, backup and incident response.

Shared responsibility changes with the service

Service model	Google manages more of	You still own
Compute Engine	facilities, hardware, hypervisor	guest OS, packages, application, firewall design, data
GKE	managed Kubernetes control plane and platform components	workload config, IAM/RBAC, policies, images, application reliability
Cloud SQL	database infrastructure, maintenance options, backups/HA features	schema, users, queries, access, capacity choices, application behavior
Cloud Run	infrastructure, scaling platform, HTTPS endpoint	container/code, identity, configuration, concurrency, dependencies
Cloud Storage	object-storage infrastructure	IAM, lifecycle, retention, encryption choices, object exposure

Popular service-selection map

Need	Common GCP service
virtual machines	Compute Engine
managed Kubernetes	GKE
serverless containers	Cloud Run
object storage	Cloud Storage
relational database	Cloud SQL / AlloyDB / Spanner
document database	Firestore
wide-column database	Bigtable
cache	Memorystore
container/package registry	Artifact Registry
messaging	Pub/Sub
event routing	Eventarc
data warehouse	BigQuery
metrics/alerts	Cloud Monitoring
logs	Cloud Logging
secrets	Secret Manager
keys	Cloud KMS
IaC execution	Terraform / Infrastructure Manager