GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
This guide provides a production-oriented GCP baseline for delivery teams.
Foundation setup
Define these platform controls first:
- organization and folder hierarchy,
- IAM model and service account boundaries,
- audit logging and security policy,
- billing account, budgets, and cost labels.
Core service map
Compute
- Compute Engine for VM workloads.
- GKE for container orchestration.
- Cloud Run / Cloud Functions for serverless services.
Storage and data
- Cloud Storage for object data.
- Cloud SQL for relational databases.
- Firestore/BigQuery for document and analytics workloads.
Networking and security
- VPC for network isolation.
- Cloud Load Balancing for traffic distribution.
- Cloud KMS for key lifecycle management.
Delivery and operations model
- Manage infrastructure with version-controlled IaC.
- Release with CI/CD and environment approvals.
- Instrument workloads with Cloud Monitoring and logging.
- Verify SLOs and incident response runbooks.
Security checklist
- Apply least-privilege IAM roles.
- Prefer workload identity over static keys.
- Restrict service exposure using network and identity controls.
- Enable audit logs for security-relevant actions.
Cost controls
- Use labels for ownership and chargeback.
- Set budgets and anomaly alerts.
- Right-size compute and storage classes by workload behavior.