Your Handy Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cheat Sheet

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a big, sprawling platform, and finding your way around can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you’re just wading in for the first time. Sure, putting “Cloud” in front of anything makes it seem cooler, but putting “Cloud” in front of everything can make it all a little confusing.

Whether you’re new to GCP or just need a quick refresher, we’ve put together this handy “GCPeat sheet” to help you keep some of the main platform services straight:

Google Compute Engine: Google’s global infrastructure at your fingertips.

GCE is Google’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, which lets you run workloads on Google’s physical hardware, and gain access to the same global infrastructure Google uses to run its core services.

 Google Kubernetes Engine: Automated, scalable deployment with containers.

Kubernetes Engine is Google’s production-ready environment for running Kubernetes clusters and deploying containerized applications — and other workloads — at scale.

Google App Engine: Run anything, anywhere on the Web.

Just like it sounds, GAE is Google’s platform for web app development and hosting. Use Flex Mode to run containers and take advantage of GAE’s automatic scaling to handle any increase in demand.

Google Cloud Functions: Built for microservices, applicable everywhere.

Typically used with microservices, GCF offers massively scalable solutions for event response. It’s a “serverless” solution that runs either node.js or Python and generates HTTP endpoints for each “function” triggered by an event – for example, powering down supporting infrastructure that’s not in use.

Ready to go deeper?

Take the next step in learning GCP with our Introduction to Google Cloud Platform course. This free, two-hour course covers GCP’s design, structure, and plethora of services – and it’s a great foundation for pursuing your Associate Cloud Engineer certification.

Google Cloud Storage: The “glue” holding together GCP services.

GCS is one of the most important services on the entire Google Cloud. It often acts as the “glue” for services built with other toolkits, like GCE and GAE, providing infinitely scalable, fully-managed, versioned, and highly-durable object storage.

Cloud Spanner: SQL databases on steroids. Lots of steroids.

This GCP database service can be used just like a regular SQL database. But Cloud Spanner’s breakthrough horizontal scalability and consistency means you won’t be sacrificing ACID guarantees with even huge relational databases.

BigQuery: Get answers faster than fast.

BQ provides a massively scalable, serverless column-store data warehouse for analytics using SQL,without the need for upfront provisioning. What that means: database queries can scan terabytes of data in seconds and petabytes in minutes.

Virtual Private Cloud: Privacy within the public square.

Google’s VPC allows you to create a private cloud network within the GCP public cloud network, which opens the door to doing a lot of interesting things that couldn’t reasonably be done with privately built infrastructure.

Apigee API Platform: API management from start to finish.

Apigee is a full-featured, enterprise-scale API management platform that helps businesses design, secure, and scale their APIs across GCP, multi-, and hybrid cloud environments.

This list is obviously just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Google Cloud Platform services. If you want a more comprehensive rundown, take a look at the Google Cloud Developer's Cheat Sheet compiled by Google's Developer Relations Team. It not only lists every Google Cloud product, but pulls off the amazing feat of describing each of them in four words or less! If you're pretty well versed in GCP, it's an invaluable resource, and if you're just finding your way around, it makes for a great look down the rabbit hole. 

Ready to go deeper?

Take the next step in learning GCP with our Introduction to Google Cloud Platform course. This free, two-hour course covers GCP’s design, structure, and plethora of services – and it’s a great foundation for pursuing your Associate Cloud Engineer certification.