Start building on Google Cloud Platfom(GCP) with $300 free and Cheatsheet to help you get started.

5 min readSep 3, 2020

In my previous story, I explained why cloud is important for any business and which cloud one should according to service requirements.

Now, Let’s take a look at the Google’s very own Cloud Platform.

GCP

Google Cloud Platform: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that run on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, file storage, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning. In April 2008, Google announced app Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers, which was the first cloud computing service of the company. This service became available from November 2011 for the general users. After the announcement of App Engine, Google later added multiple cloud services into the platform.

Registration requires a debit card with recurring payment or a credit card or bank account details. Once registered, a new user will receive a $300 promotional credits. You can use them to explore multiple services provided by Google Cloud.

Let’s take a look at the few terms that we need to know!

Project in GCP

A project organizes all your Google Cloud resources. A project consists of a set of users; a set of APIs; and billing, authentication, and monitoring settings for those APIs. So, for example, all of your Cloud Storage buckets and objects, along with user permissions for accessing them, reside in a project. You can have one project, or you can create multiple projects and use them to organize your Google Cloud resources, including your Cloud Storage data, into logical groups.

Virtual Private Cloud

A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network is a virtual version of a physical network, implemented inside of Google’s production network, using Andromeda. A VPC network provides the instances, GKE App Engine. HTTP for internal, Load Balancing, VPC, etc. Projects can contain multiple VPC networks. Unless you create an organizational policy that prohibits it, new projects start with a default network (an auto mode VPC network) that has one subnetwork (subnet) in each region. A VPC helps to

Provide flexibility to scale and control how workloads connect regionally and globally
Access VPCs without needing to replicate connectivity or administrative policies in each region
Bring your own IP addresses to Google’s network infrastructure across all regions.

VPC Network Peering

Google Cloud VPC Network Peering allows internal IP address connectivity across two Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks regardless of whether they belong to the same project or the same organization.

VPC Network Peering enables you to connect VPC networks so that workloads in different VPC networks can communicate internally. Traffic stays within Google’s network and doesn’t traverse the public internet.

Kubernetes(K8s)

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) provides a managed environment for deploying, managing, and scaling your containerized applications using Google infrastructure. The GKE environment consists of multiple machines (specifically, Compute Engine instances) grouped together to form a Cluster.

Load Balancer

A load balancer distributes user traffic across multiple instances of your applications. By spreading the load, load balancing reduces the risk that your applications experience performance issues.

Google App Engine

App Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications at scale. You can choose from several popular languages, libraries, and frameworks to develop your apps, then let App Engine take care of provisioning servers and scaling your app instances based on demand.

Identity and Access Management

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers Identity and Access Management (IAM), which lets you grant granular access to specific GCP resources and prevents unwanted access to other resources. IAM lets you adopt the security principle of least privilege, so you grant only the necessary access to your resources.

CLOUD SDK- gcloud

The gcloud CLI manages authentication, local configuration, developer workflow, interactions with Google Cloud APIs. With the gcloud command-line tool, it’s easy to perform many common cloud tasks, like creating a Compute Engine VM instance, managing a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster, and deploying an App Engine application, either from the command line or in scripts and other automations.