Chapter One
Compute
Five services on the spectrum from full infrastructure control to fully managed execution. The right choice depends on your workload, your team's expertise, and how much operational overhead you are prepared to take on.
Compute Engine
Raw VMs. You pick OS, disk, network.
GKE
Managed Kubernetes. You manage pods, services, deployments.
Cloud Run
Containers, request-driven. Low ops — you still build the image.
App Engine
Managed PaaS. Deploy code; Google runs and scales it.
Cloud Functions
Event-driven functions. HTTP or events trigger your code.
More controlLess ops
You manage the OS, patches, scaling.Google manages everything except your code.
Core Terminology
A few terms appear throughout this guide. Defining them here keeps the service-level sections focused on what matters.
Region
A geographic location such as
us-central1 or europe-west3. Affects latency, data residency compliance, and pricing.Zone
An isolated data center within a region. Multi-zone deployments protect against single-facility failure.
Project
The fundamental container for Google Cloud resources, billing, and access control. The unit of IAM isolation.
Service Account
An identity for applications and workloads to call Google Cloud APIs — distinct from human user accounts.
IAM
Identity and Access Management. Determines which principals can perform which actions on which resources.
VPC
Virtual Private Cloud. The virtual network where resources live. In Google Cloud, a VPC is a global resource spanning all regions.
Services in This Chapter
Service 01
Compute Engine
Virtual machines with full OS control. The foundation of Google Cloud infrastructure, used for legacy migration, GPU workloads, and applications that cannot be containerized.
Service 02
Google Kubernetes Engine
Managed Kubernetes. The platform for running containerized workloads at scale, from the company that created Kubernetes.
Service 03
Cloud Run
Serverless containers. Scale from zero to thousands of instances. The practical default for new HTTP services on Google Cloud.
Service 04
Cloud Functions
Function-as-a-service. Deploy individual functions triggered by HTTP or cloud events. Smallest deployable unit on the platform.
Service 05
App Engine
Original Google Cloud PaaS, launched 2008. Upload code and configuration; App Engine handles runtime, scaling, and operations.