Cloud basics & GCP
What a cloud provider is, how GCP is organized (projects, regions, IAM, billing), and the mental model to navigate it.
A cloud provider is a company that rents you computers, storage, and services over the internet — you don't buy hardware, you rent what you need and pay for what you use.
(Google Cloud Platform) is Google's version of that, competing with AWS (Amazon) and Azure (Microsoft). All three offer similar building blocks: servers, databases, object storage, networking, AI.
In GCP, everything lives inside a — think of a project like your own apartment: it has its own address, its own bill, its own keys (who can enter). You can have several projects side by side (one for staging, one for prod, one for experiments).
are physical locations (europe-west1 in Belgium, us-central1 in Iowa). You pick a region close to your users for low latency, or for data-residency rules (RGPD = stay in Europe).
(Identity and Access Management) controls who can do what. A developer gets keys to deploy; a read-only auditor gets keys to view logs. Principle of least privilege: give the smallest permission that works.
Grounded on https://cloud.google.com/docs/overview
Next up
Compute Engine — Virtual Machines
Rent raw virtual servers from Google. Maximum control, but you manage the OS, patches, scaling, and everything else.