GCP Basics

GCP Basics: a free DevOps track with 10 modules and 51 lessons. Learn how Google Cloud is laid out (regions, zones, the global network), organise work in…

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Modules

1. 01 Foundations – Regions, Resource Hierarchy, gcloud and Billing

   Learn how Google Cloud is laid out (regions, zones, the global network), organise work in organizations, folders and projects, drive everything from the gcloud CLI, and keep spending under control with billing accounts, budgets and labels.

2. 02 IAM & Security – Roles, Service Accounts, Federation, Org Policy and Secrets

   Grant least privilege with IAM roles and allow policies, give workloads service accounts instead of keys, let GitHub Actions in with Workload Identity Federation, set guardrails with organization policies, and keep secrets and keys in Secret Manager and Cloud KMS.

3. 03 VPC Networking – Subnets, Firewall, Cloud NAT, Shared VPC and Cloud DNS

   Design a custom-mode global VPC with regional subnets, control traffic with stateful firewall rules, give private VMs outbound Internet through Cloud NAT, share one network across projects, reach Google APIs privately and resolve names with Cloud DNS.

4. 04 Load Balancing & Hybrid – Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud Armor, CDN, VPN and IAP

   Pick the right Cloud Load Balancing product, protect it with Cloud Armor, cache at the edge with Cloud CDN, connect on-premises networks with HA VPN or Interconnect, and give admins access without public IPs through Identity-Aware Proxy.

5. 05 Compute Engine – Machine Types, VMs, Disks and Managed Instance Groups

   Pick machine families and pricing models, create and connect to VMs safely, manage Persistent Disk, Hyperdisk, snapshots and images, and run fleets of identical VMs with instance templates, managed instance groups and autoscaling.

6. 06 Storage & Databases – Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and Choosing a Database

   Store objects in Cloud Storage with the right location, class and lifecycle rules, secure buckets with uniform access and signed URLs, run Cloud SQL with high availability and backups, choose between Firestore, Bigtable, Spanner, AlloyDB and Memorystore, and move file data with Filestore and Storage Transfer Service.

7. 07 Containers & Serverless – Cloud Run, Cloud Run Functions, GKE and Cloud Build

   Run containers on Cloud Run with revisions and traffic splitting, react to events with Cloud Run functions and Eventarc, operate GKE Autopilot and Standard clusters, build and store images with Cloud Build and Artifact Registry, and choose the right compute option for each workload.

8. 08 Operations – Cloud Monitoring, Alerting, Cloud Logging and Audit Logs

   Observe workloads with Cloud Monitoring metrics, dashboards, uptime checks and the Ops Agent, alert the right people, route and keep logs with the Log Router, answer “who did what” with Cloud Audit Logs, and debug latency and errors with Cloud Trace, Error Reporting and Profiler.

9. 09 Data on GCP – BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow and a First Pipeline

   Store and query data in BigQuery and keep its cost under control with partitioning and clustering, decouple services with Pub/Sub, process batch and streaming data with Dataflow and Dataproc, and build a simple pipeline from Cloud Storage to a Looker Studio dashboard.

10. 10 AI on GCP – Gemini, RAG, BigQuery ML and Agents

    Find your way around Google’s AI platform (Vertex AI, now part of Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform), call Gemini models securely with IAM and quotas in mind, ground answers in your own data with RAG and vector search, run ML and generative AI directly in BigQuery, and deploy agents with the right guardrails.