Book Image

The Ultimate Guide to Building a Google Cloud Foundation

By : Patrick Haggerty
Book Image

The Ultimate Guide to Building a Google Cloud Foundation

By: Patrick Haggerty

Overview of this book

From data ingestion and storage, through data processing and data analytics, to application hosting and even machine learning, whatever your IT infrastructural need, there's a good chance that Google Cloud has a service that can help. But instant, self-serve access to a virtually limitless pool of IT resources has its drawbacks. More and more organizations are running into cost overruns, security problems, and simple "why is this not working?" headaches. This book has been written by one of Google’s top trainers as a tutorial on how to create your infrastructural foundation in Google Cloud the right way. By following Google’s ten-step checklist and Google’s security blueprint, you will learn how to set up your initial identity provider and create an organization. Further on, you will configure your users and groups, enable administrative access, and set up billing. Next, you will create a resource hierarchy, configure and control access, and enable a cloud network. Later chapters will guide you through configuring monitoring and logging, adding additional security measures, and enabling a support plan with Google. By the end of this book, you will have an understanding of what it takes to leverage Terraform for properly building a Google Cloud foundational layer that engenders security, flexibility, and extensibility from the ground up.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

How Google Cloud is a lot like a power company

Most of you probably don’t generate your own power. Why? It’s an economy-of-scale thing. Your core business probably isn’t power generation, so you likely don’t know much about it and wouldn’t do that good a job generating it if you tried. Besides, you and your business simply don’t need enough power to make generating it yourself cost-effective. What do you do instead? You connect to a power grid, like this:

Figure 1.1 – The utility model

As you can see, the power company specializes in generating power at scale, and you plug in and use a little slice of that power however you need. Do you worry about how the power is generated? Not overly, but you do want the power to be there whenever and however you need.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) works just like a power company, only for IT services. Instead of building your IT infrastructure from scratch, you tap into...