What Is Google Cloud Platform? Google's Public Cloud
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google public cloud: compute, storage, networking, databases, and data and AI services rented on demand, similar in scope to AWS and Azure.
GCP is one of the three major public clouds. It is known for strong data, analytics, and Kubernetes offerings (Kubernetes itself came out of Google). Teams use GCP for the same reasons they use any cloud: elastic scale, managed services, and paying only for usage. It is a common deployment target for CI/CD.
Core GCP services
- Compute Engine - virtual machines.
- Cloud Run and Cloud Functions - serverless compute.
- GKE - managed Kubernetes.
- Cloud Storage and BigQuery - object storage and analytics.
Projects and resource hierarchy
GCP organizes everything into projects, grouped under folders and an organization. A project is the billing and permission boundary; resources, APIs, and IAM bindings all live within a project, which keeps environments cleanly separated.
Identity and access
GCP uses IAM with members (users, groups, service accounts) granted roles on resources. Automated workloads authenticate as service accounts. For CI from outside GCP, Workload Identity Federation lets external tokens map to a service account without keys.
Regions and zones
Like other clouds, GCP runs in many regions, each with multiple zones for redundancy. You choose a region for latency, cost, and data-residency reasons, and most resources are regional or zonal.
Role in CI/CD
A pipeline builds an image, pushes it to Artifact Registry, and deploys to Cloud Run or GKE. Authentication from GitHub Actions uses Workload Identity Federation so no service-account key is stored. Cloud Build can also run the build entirely inside GCP if you prefer.
Key takeaways
- GCP is Google public cloud with strong data, Kubernetes, and serverless offerings.
- Everything lives in a project, the billing and permission boundary.
- Pipelines deploy via Artifact Registry and Cloud Run or GKE, authenticating with federation.