Plain-English definitions of the core GCP terms for ACE study. Simplified for learning; Google Cloud documentation is authoritative.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Project | The basic container for GCP resources, billing and IAM. |
| Organisation | The top of the resource hierarchy for a company. |
| Folder | Groups projects for shared policy. |
| IAM | Identity and Access Management — who can do what. |
| Service account | A non-human identity used by workloads. |
| Compute Engine | Virtual machines on Google Cloud. |
| GKE | Google Kubernetes Engine — managed Kubernetes. |
| Cloud Run | Runs stateless containers serverlessly. |
| App Engine | Fully managed platform for apps. |
| Cloud Functions | Event-driven serverless functions. |
| Cloud Storage | Object storage with multiple classes. |
| Persistent Disk | Block storage for Compute Engine. |
| VPC | Virtual Private Cloud — your network in GCP. |
| Firewall rule | Controls traffic to and from resources. |
| Cloud Load Balancing | Distributes traffic across instances. |
| Cloud SQL | Managed relational databases. |
| BigQuery | Serverless data warehouse for analytics. |
| Cloud Operations | Monitoring, logging and alerting (formerly Stackdriver). |
| gcloud | The Google Cloud command-line tool. |
| Cloud Shell | A browser-based shell with gcloud preinstalled. |
| Region / zone | A geographic area / an isolated location within it. |