GCP essentials

Get a small product running on the core of Google Cloud — safely and cheaply — with the gcloud CLI as the source of truth. The console is fine for reading; the CLI is what you commit, review, and reproduce. Bias toward secure-by-default and near-zero bill, not "every GCP service".

Four primitives carry most products, plus the project/billing scaffold under them:

• IAM — who can do what. Get this wrong and nothing else matters.
• Cloud Run — serverless containers, scale to zero.
• Cloud Storage — object storage (buckets).
• Cloud SQL — managed Postgres/MySQL.