Cloud Build — CI/CD pipelines

Cloud Build is the factory worker that builds your code for you. You describe the steps — build the container, run the tests, push the image, deploy — and Cloud Build executes them, in order, on every git push.

The steps live in a file called cloudbuild.yaml at the root of your repo. Each step is itself a container: a 'docker' step runs docker commands, a 'go' step runs Go compilation, a 'gcloud' step deploys.

It's like GitHub Actions, but native to GCP. Compared to rolling your own Jenkins: zero infrastructure to manage, billed per build-minute, directly plugged into other GCP services.

Typical flow: you git push → a Cloud Build trigger (configured to watch a branch) fires → the pipeline runs → logs stream to Cloud Logging → if green, your new version goes live on Cloud Run, usually in 2–5 minutes.

Free tier: 120 build-minutes per day, plenty for small projects. Beyond that, about $0.003 per build-minute — still cheap.