Google Cloud: Services & Architecture
By Sergey Okinchuk
PAMArtifact Registry

Chapter Nine

Developer Tools & CI/CD

Three services that together form the native CI/CD pipeline on Google Cloud — store artifacts, build them, deliver them through environments to production.

3 services

These three services chain in a single line. Cloud Build compiles your code into an artifact. Artifact Registry stores that artifact. Cloud Deploy promotes the artifact through environments — dev to staging to production — with approval gates, canaries, and rollbacks. Together they replace a stack that used to require Jenkins on a VM, a separate artifact repository, and hand-rolled promotion scripts.

The chapter's central decision is not which of the three to use — you use all three, or you opt out of the GCP-native CI/CD path entirely. The real choice is GCP-native (Cloud Build plus Artifact Registry plus Cloud Deploy) versus external CI (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI) pushing to Artifact Registry and triggering Cloud Deploy. Both work; the tradeoff is integration depth versus portability.

The Native CI/CD Pipeline
SourceCommit & push to your repo
→
Cloud BuildBuild, test, containerize
→
Artifact RegistryStore the versioned image
→
Cloud DeployPromote dev → staging → prod
A push triggers a build, the image lands in the registry, and Cloud Deploy rolls it through environments — with an approval gate before prod.

Services in This Chapter

Service 44
Artifact Registry
Modern artifact storage. Docker images, Maven, npm, PyPI, Go, Apt, Yum, generic. Standard, Remote, and Virtual repositories. Replaces Container Registry, which was shut down in March 2025.
RegistryArtifacts
Service 45
Cloud Build
Managed CI service. Trigger from Git, run pipelines defined in YAML with each step as a container, optional private pools for VPC builds, built-in SLSA provenance.
CIBuild
Service 46
Cloud Deploy
Managed continuous delivery. Promote artifacts across stages with approval gates, canary rollouts, automatic rollback on health check failure. Targets GKE, Cloud Run, GKE Enterprise.
CDDelivery