GCP Services Guide
Core Services by Category
| Category | Service | AWS Equivalent | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute | Compute Engine (GCE) | EC2 | IaaS VMs, custom machine types |
| Containers | Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) | EKS | Managed Kubernetes, Autopilot mode |
| Serverless | Cloud Run | ECS Fargate / Lambda | Containerized apps, HTTP-driven scale to zero |
| Serverless | Cloud Functions | Lambda | Event-driven functions |
| Storage | Cloud Storage (GCS) | S3 | Object storage, data lake, static hosting |
| Database | Cloud SQL | RDS | Managed MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL Server |
| Database | Cloud Spanner | Aurora / DynamoDB | Globally distributed, strongly consistent RDBMS |
| Database | Firestore | DynamoDB | NoSQL document DB, mobile/web apps |
| Analytics | BigQuery | Redshift / Athena | Serverless data warehouse, petabyte-scale |
| Messaging | Pub/Sub | SNS + SQS | Async messaging, event streaming |
| Networking | Cloud Load Balancing | ALB/NLB | Global anycast HTTP(S)/TCP/UDP LB |
| Security | Secret Manager | Secrets Manager | Store API keys, passwords, certificates |
gcloud CLI Essentials
# Auth & config
gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project my-project-id
gcloud config set compute/region us-central1
# Cloud Run: deploy container
gcloud run deploy my-service \
--image gcr.io/my-project/my-app:latest \
--region us-central1 \
--platform managed \
--allow-unauthenticated \
--memory 512Mi --cpu 1
# GKE: create cluster & connect
gcloud container clusters create my-cluster \
--region us-central1 --num-nodes 3
gcloud container clusters get-credentials my-cluster --region us-central1
# Cloud Storage
gsutil cp localfile.txt gs://my-bucket/
gsutil ls gs://my-bucket/
gsutil rm gs://my-bucket/file.txt
gsutil iam ch allUsers:objectViewer gs://my-public-bucket
# Cloud SQL: connect via Cloud SQL Proxy
cloud-sql-proxy my-project:us-central1:my-instance &
psql "host=127.0.0.1 user=postgres dbname=mydb"
# BigQuery
bq query --use_legacy_sql=false \
'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `my-project.dataset.table`'
bq load --source_format=CSV dataset.table gs://bucket/file.csv schema.json