Key Google Cloud Architect terms in plain English. Knowing what each service is for - and when to choose it over a similar one - is exactly what the exam tests.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Compute Engine | Google Cloud’s virtual machine service (infrastructure as a service) for running workloads on VMs. |
| Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) | A managed Kubernetes service for running containerised workloads with orchestration. |
| Cloud Run | A serverless service for running containers that scales automatically, including to zero. |
| Cloud Functions | An event-driven, serverless compute service for running small pieces of code in response to triggers. |
| App Engine | A managed platform-as-a-service for deploying applications without managing servers. |
| Cloud Storage | Object storage for unstructured data, organised into buckets with different storage classes. |
| Storage class | A Cloud Storage setting (standard, nearline, coldline, archive) trading storage cost against access frequency. |
| Cloud SQL | A managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. |
| Spanner | A globally distributed, strongly consistent relational database that scales horizontally. |
| Bigtable | A wide-column NoSQL database for large-scale analytical and operational workloads. |
| BigQuery | A serverless, highly scalable data warehouse for analytics using SQL. |
| Firestore | A flexible, scalable document (NoSQL) database for application data. |
| VPC | Virtual Private Cloud: Google Cloud’s software-defined network, which is global by design. |
| Cloud Load Balancing | A managed service that distributes traffic across instances, globally or regionally. |
| Cloud CDN | A content delivery network that caches content near users to reduce latency. |
| Cloud Interconnect | A service providing dedicated, private connectivity between on-premises networks and Google Cloud. |
| IAM | Identity and Access Management: controlling who can do what on which resources, designed for least privilege. |
| Service account | A special identity used by applications and VMs (rather than people) to authenticate to Google Cloud services. |
| Cloud KMS | Key Management Service for creating and managing cryptographic keys. |
| Resource hierarchy | The organisation, folders, projects and resources structure used to organise and govern Google Cloud. |
| Project | The basic Google Cloud organising unit that groups resources, billing and permissions. |
| Cloud Monitoring | A service for collecting metrics and building dashboards and alerts to observe systems. |
| Cloud Logging | A service for storing, searching and analysing log data across Google Cloud. |
| RTO | Recovery Time Objective: the maximum acceptable time to restore a system after an outage. |
| RPO | Recovery Point Objective: the maximum acceptable data loss, expressed as the age of the last recoverable data. |