Google Cloud Platform

This overview is designed to help you understand the overall landscape of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Here, you'll take a brief look at some of the commonly used features and get pointers to documentation that can help you go deeper. Knowing what's available and how the parts work together can help you make decisions about how to proceed. You'll also get pointers to some tutorials that you can use to try out GCP in various scenarios.

GCP resources

GCP consists of a set of physical assets, such as computers and hard disk drives, and virtual resources, such as virtual machines (VMs), that are contained in Google's data centers around the globe. Each data center location is in a global region. Regions include Central US, Western Europe, and East Asia. Each region is a collection of zones, which are isolated from each other within the region. Each zone is identified by a name that combines a letter identifier with the name of the region. For example, zone a in the East Asia region is named asia-east1-a.
This distribution of resources provides several benefits, including redundancy in case of failure and reduced latency by locating resources closer to clients. This distribution also introduces some rules about how resources can be used together.

Accessing resources through services

In cloud computing, what you might be used to thinking of as software and hardware products, become services. These services provide access to the underlying resources. The list of available GCP services is long, and it keeps growing. When you develop your website or application on GCP, you mix and match these services into combinations that provide the infrastructure you need, and then add your code to enable the scenarios you want to build.

Global, regional, and zonal resources

Some resources can be accessed by any other resource, across regions and zones. These global resources include preconfigured disk images, disk snapshots, and networks. Some resources can be accessed only by resources that are located in the same region. These regional resources include static external IP addresses. Other resources can be accessed only by resources that are located in the same zone. These zonal resources include VM instances, their types, and disks.
The following diagram shows the relationship between global scope, regions and zones, and some of their resources:
A diagram of global scope in GCP, illustrating the use of regions and zones to partition resources.

A diagram of global scope in GCP, illustrating the use of regions and zones to partition resources.

The scope of an operation varies depending on what kind of resources you're working with. For example, creating a network is a global operation because a network is a global resource, while reserving an IP address is a regional operation because the address is a regional resource.
As you start to optimize your GCP applications, it's important to understand how these regions and zones interact. For example, even if you could, you wouldn't want to attach a disk in one region to a computer in a different region because the latency you'd introduce would make for very poor performance. Thankfully, GCP won't let you do that; disks can only be attached to computers in the same zone.
Depending on the level of self-management required for the computing and hosting service you choose, you might or might not need to think about how and where resources are allocated.
For more information about the geographical distribution of GCP, see Geography and Regions.

Projects

Any GCP resources that you allocate and use must belong to a project. You can think of a project as the organizing entity for what you're building. A project is made up of the settings, permissions, and other metadata that describe your applications. Resources within a single project can work together easily, for example by communicating through an internal network, subject to the regions-and-zones rules. The resources that each project contains remain separate across project boundaries; you can only interconnect them through an external network connection.
Each GCP project has:

A project name, which you provide.
A project ID, which you can provide or GCP can provide for you.
A project number, which GCP provides.

As you work with GCP, you'll use these identifiers in certain command lines and API calls. The following screenshot shows a project name, its ID, and number:

A screenshot of the GCP Console displaying project ID and name.

In this example:

Example Project is the project name.
example-id is the project ID.
123456789012 is the project number.

Ways to interact with the services

GCP gives you three basic ways to interact with the services and resources.