Cloud basics & GCP
What a cloud provider is, how GCP is organized (projects, regions, IAM, billing), and the mental model to navigate it.
GCP exposes ~200 services via REST APIs and the gcloud CLI, organized under a hierarchy: Organization → Folders → Projects → Resources. Each resource (a VM, a bucket, a DB) is scoped to exactly one project.
A project is the unit of billing, quotas, and IAM. Every API call references a project id; enable APIs per project before using them. A project has an alphanumeric project-id (immutable) and a project-number.
Regions are failure-isolated geographic areas (e.g. europe-west1). Each region contains multiple (europe-west1-b, -c, -d) for in-region HA. Multi-regional services replicate across regions automatically.
IAM binds principals (user, service account, Google group, domain) to roles (collection of permissions) on a resource. Roles are additive and inherited down the hierarchy. Prefer predefined roles over primitive ones (owner/editor/viewer are too broad); use custom roles only when justified.
Billing is per-project with export to BigQuery for analysis. Set budget alerts early — a misconfigured service (e.g. a public bucket scraped daily) can generate unexpected charges.
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.