Choosing a managed database
Cloud SQL is the safe, well-lit default — every other product requires a specific, named reason Cloud SQL can't satisfy, not general enthusiasm for a more advanced-sounding name.
Speaker notes
- Walk the decision tree left to right: relational data fitting in one region defaults to Cloud SQL; needing more raw performance than Cloud SQL delivers points to AlloyDB; needing global distribution AND strong consistency simultaneously points to Spanner; semi-structured document data points to Firestore; massive-scale wide-column lookups or time-series points to Bigtable; large-scale historical analytics points to BigQuery.
- State the warning directly: do not choose Spanner or AlloyDB because they sound more impressive or more cloud-native — both carry real added cost and complexity, and Spanner in particular uses a non-standard SQL dialect by default and a genuinely different consistency model than most engineers have direct experience with.
- This decision tree is the single most exam-relevant and interview-relevant artifact in this chapter — memorize the branches, not just the product names.
Deck map
01
GCP foundations in one line
02
How the ACE exam maps to this course
03
GCP's geography and the project as the unit of isolation
04
Organization, folders, and projects
05
Org policies and how inheritance works
06
Labels, network tags, and resource manager tags
07
Billing accounts, budgets, and cost control
08
gcloud CLI, Cloud Shell, and client libraries
09
Terraform on GCP and the end of Deployment Manager
10
Gemini CLI, Cloud Assist, and Application Design Center
11
Principals, roles, bindings, and policies
12
Primitive, predefined, custom roles, and IAM conditions
13
Service accounts, keys, and impersonation
14
Workload Identity Federation
15
Break-glass access and IAM auditing
16
Choosing a machine family: E2, N4, C4
17
Disks, OS Login, and VM Manager
18
Spot VMs and managed instance groups
19
Autoscaling policies, health checks, GPUs and TPUs
20
GKE Autopilot vs Standard vs the 2026 hybrid option
21
Node pools and pod autoscaling
22
Cloud Run revisions, traffic splitting, and functions
23
Choosing between GKE, Cloud Run, and Compute Engine
24
Cloud Storage classes and lifecycle management
25
Choosing a managed database
26
The managed database lineup
27
Connection pooling, read replicas, and Pub/Sub
28
Backup, regional failover, and CMEK
29
VPC networks, subnets, and Shared VPC
30
Firewall rules, tags, and Cloud NAT
31
Load balancers, Cloud DNS, and Cloud CDN
32
VPN, Interconnect, and private access
33
How a request actually reaches shipment-api
34
Cloud Monitoring: metrics, dashboards, alerts
35
Cloud Logging: router, buckets, and audit logs
36
Trace, Profiler, Error Reporting, and Managed Prometheus
37
How the five Cloud Operations products fit together
38
Readiness checklist