Google Cloud Platform Overview

Google Cloud Platform Overview

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google’s suite of cloud computing services. It runs on the same infrastructure Google uses for its own products — Search, Gmail, YouTube — and offers compute, storage, databases, AI/ML, and developer tooling.

Core Service Categories

Category	Services
Compute	Compute Engine, Cloud Run, GKE, App Engine, Cloud Functions
Storage	Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Filestore
Databases	Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Firestore, Bigtable, BigQuery
Networking	VPC, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS
AI / ML	Vertex AI, Vision API, Natural Language API, Translation API
DevOps	Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Deploy, Cloud Monitoring

Global Infrastructure

GCP organises its infrastructure into:

• Regions — Independent geographic areas (e.g., us-central1, europe-west2)
• Zones — Isolated data centers within a region (e.g., us-central1-a)
• Multi-region — Data replicated across multiple regions (e.g., US, EU)

Region: europe-west2 (London)
├── Zone: europe-west2-a
├── Zone: europe-west2-b
└── Zone: europe-west2-c

Deploy across zones for high availability; across regions for disaster recovery.

GCP vs AWS vs Azure

Feature	GCP	AWS	Azure
Compute	Compute Engine	EC2	Virtual Machines
Containers	GKE	EKS	AKS
Serverless	Cloud Run / Functions	Lambda / Fargate	Functions / Container Apps
Object Storage	Cloud Storage	S3	Blob Storage
Managed DB	Cloud SQL	RDS	Azure SQL
Data Warehouse	BigQuery	Redshift	Synapse Analytics
Kubernetes	GKE (Google invented K8s)	EKS	AKS

Resource Hierarchy

Organisation
└── Folder (optional grouping)
    └── Project
        └── Resources (VMs, buckets, databases...)

Every GCP resource lives inside a project. Projects provide billing isolation, access control, and API enablement boundaries.

Getting Started

# Install Google Cloud CLI
# https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/install

# Authenticate
gcloud auth login

# Set a project
gcloud config set project my-project-id

# List active config
gcloud config list

Key CLI Commands

# Projects
gcloud projects list
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

# Compute
gcloud compute instances list
gcloud compute instances create my-vm --zone=us-central1-a --machine-type=e2-micro

# IAM
gcloud projects get-iam-policy PROJECT_ID
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT_ID \
  --member=user:user@example.com \
  --role=roles/viewer

Free Tier Highlights

GCP’s Always Free tier includes:

• Compute Engine: 1 e2-micro instance per month (us-regions only)
• Cloud Storage: 5 GB standard storage
• BigQuery: 10 GB storage + 1 TB queries per month
• Cloud Functions: 2M invocations per month
• Firestore: 1 GB storage, 50K reads, 20K writes/day