GCP · Curriculum

General infrastructure

From the resource hierarchy to Terraform pipelines. The foundational layer of Google Cloud, the way an architect actually thinks about it.

2 of 20 lessons published · 6 phases · ~15 min per lesson
Phase 1

Blueprint & bouncers

  1. 1.1
    The GCP resource hierarchy
    Organizations, folders, and projects — how GCP forces you to organize work before you build it.
    →
  2. 1.2
    IAM — identity & access management
    The bouncer at the door — who, what, and where for every access decision in GCP.
    →
  3. 1.3
    Organization policies
    Org-wide guardrails that prevent even an Owner from doing dumb things — the technical foundation of regulatory compliance.
    Planned
Phase 2

Roads & traffic cops

  1. 2.1
    VPCs & subnets
    Drawing the borders of your private cloud city and dividing it into neighborhoods.
    Planned
  2. 2.2
    Firewalls & Cloud NAT
    Toll booths and one-way mirrors — what gets in, and how private servers reach the internet.
    Planned
  3. 2.3
    Cloud load balancing
    Distributing traffic globally — the difference between an L4 and L7 load balancer, and when to pick which.
    Planned
  4. 2.4
    Private Google Access & PSC
    How private workloads talk to BigQuery, Cloud SQL, and Pub/Sub without ever touching the public internet.
    Planned
Phase 3

The workhorses

  1. 3.1
    Compute Engine VMs
    Renting a customized house — when raw VMs are still the right answer in a serverless world.
    Planned
  2. 3.2
    GKE — Google Kubernetes Engine
    The apartment complex with the automated landlord — Standard vs Autopilot, and when GKE earns its complexity.
    Planned
  3. 3.3
    Cloud Run
    The ghost kitchen — request-driven containers that scale to zero and back to a thousand on demand.
    Planned
  4. 3.4
    Choosing your compute
    A decision framework for VM vs GKE vs Cloud Run vs Functions, with cost and operational trade-offs.
    Planned
Phase 4

Vaults & filing cabinets

  1. 4.1
    Cloud Storage & persistent disks
    The warehouse and the backpack — object storage for unlimited capacity vs block storage for raw speed.
    Planned
  2. 4.2
    Cloud SQL & Spanner
    The accountant — relational databases for when consistency matters more than anything else.
    Planned
  3. 4.3
    Bigtable & Firestore
    The address book — NoSQL for massive scale and rapid reads when relational rigor would slow you down.
    Planned
  4. 4.4
    BigQuery
    The library research room — petabyte analytics in seconds, and the architectural pattern that defines GCP.
    Planned
Phase 5

Security cameras

  1. 5.1
    Cloud Logging & Monitoring
    The dashboard and the black box — knowing when things break and reading the evidence after.
    Planned
  2. 5.2
    Security Command Center
    A single pane of glass for every misconfiguration, vulnerability, and threat across the org.
    Planned
  3. 5.3
    Cloud KMS & Secret Manager
    Where keys, tokens, and customer-managed encryption keys actually live — and the audit story for each.
    Planned
Phase 6

The magic wand

  1. 6.1
    Terraform fundamentals
    Why professionals never click buttons — declarative infrastructure as the architect's superpower.
    Planned
  2. 6.2
    IaC pipelines & policy-as-code
    The pipeline that turns Terraform from a script into governance — plan review, OPA / Sentinel, and Governance-as-Code.
    Planned