service-selection

Compute Choices

• Compute Engine

  • Use when : full OS control, legacy apps, custom networking

  • Supports : stateful workloads

  • You manage : OS, patches, scaling

• GKE

  • Use when : containerized apps, portability, complex microservices

  • Supports : stateful + stateless

  • You manage : cluster + workloads

• Cloud Run

  • Use when : stateless containers, HTTP-driven workloads

  • Auto-scales to zero

  • No cluster management

• App Engine

  • Use when : rapid development, minimal ops

  • Opioninated runtime

• Cloud Functions

  • Use when : event-driven, small logic units

  • Short-lived execution

Load Balancing

• Global HTTP(S) LB

  • Multi-region, global users

• Regional LB

  • Single region traffic

• Internal LB

  • Private services

• TCP/UDP LB

  • Non-HTTP workloads

Storage

• Cloud Storage

  • Object storage

  • Static assets, backups, data lakes

• Persistent Disk

  • Block storage for VMs

• Filestore

  • Shared POSIX file system

• Cloud CDN

  • Cache static content globally

Databases

• Cloud SQL

• Spanner

  • Global, strongly consistent relational DB

  • Financial systems, global apps

• Bigtable

  • Wide-column, massive scale

  • Time-series, IoT

• Firestore

  • Serverless NoSQL

  • Mobile & web apps

• BigQuery

  • Analytics, OLAP

  • NOT transactional

IAM & Security

• Prefer :

  • Predefined roles > primitive roles

  • Least privilege

• Structure :

  • Organization -> Folder -> Project

• Encryption

  • Default encryption always on

  • CMEK via Cloud KMS when required