Google Cloud Digital Leader — knowledge map
The 124 core concepts of Google Cloud Digital Leader and how they connect. Click a node in the map above to explore related terms and prerequisites; the list below indexes every concept with its definition and links to its prerequisites and related concepts.
Concepts (124)
Managed services (management boundary)
A categorization by how much AWS operates for you. The more fully managed (AWS handles patching/scaling/availability), the lower your operational burden but less control; unmanaged (e.g., EC2) is flexible but self-operated. It frames “where your responsibility ends” in the shared responsibility model.
Prerequisites: Shared responsibility model
Cloud Storage
Object storage for unstructured data such as images, video, and backups.
Serverless (FaaS)
No server management; code runs only on events and bills only for execution (e.g., AWS Lambda).
Cloud Run
A service that runs containers serverless, scaling to zero when idle and billing only for usage.
Encryption
Transforming data with a key so only authorized parties can decrypt; symmetric/asymmetric, at rest/in transit.
Related: Encryption in transit、Encryption at rest
Compute Engine
Google Cloud IaaS providing virtual machines (VMs) with selectable CPU/memory and OS-level control; ideal as a lift-and-shift target.
Prerequisites: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)、Migration strategy (lift-and-shift/improve-and-move/refactor)
CIA triad
The three pillars of information security: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability.
Encryption keys (GMEK / CMEK / CSEK)
GMEK = Google-managed default keys; CMEK = customer-managed keys via Cloud KMS (control rotation/disabling); CSEK = customer-supplied keys. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit by default.
Prerequisites: Encryption、Encryption at rest、Encryption in transit
Related: Cloud KMS
BigQuery
Google Cloud serverless data warehouse for fast SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data.
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)
Spanner
A distributed relational database combining global strong consistency and high availability, ideal for global core systems.
Prerequisites: CIA triad、High availability (HA)、Strong consistency
Vertex AI
A unified AI platform to build, train, deploy, and operate ML models end to end, including using foundation models.
Prerequisites: Machine learning (ML)
Encryption at rest
Encrypting data while it sits on disk or object storage. Most managed cloud storage (block/file/object/DB) offers built-in encryption integrated with the platform's key management (e.g., a KMS). A baseline defense protecting the data itself against theft or unauthorized access.
Prerequisites: Cloud Storage
Related: Encryption
Service account
A special identity for workloads (VMs/apps) rather than humans; prefer short-lived tokens via metadata or Workload Identity Federation over downloaded keys.
Cloud VPN
A service connecting on-premises or other networks to Google Cloud over an encrypted tunnel.
Prerequisites: Encryption
App Engine
A fully managed web app platform (PaaS) to publish apps without managing servers, letting you focus on development.
Prerequisites: Managed services (management boundary)、PaaS (Platform as a Service)
BigQuery ML
A capability to create ML models and run predictions with only SQL on data in BigQuery, without moving the data.
Prerequisites: BigQuery、Machine learning (ML)
Gemini
Google Cloud core generative AI model for text generation, summarization, code assistance, and image understanding, embedded across services and Workspace.
Prerequisites: Generative AI
Encryption in transit
Encrypting data while it moves across the network, typically protected with TLS. Only by pairing it with encryption at rest do you cover a piece of data's whole lifecycle (stored and moving)—satisfying both is a baseline security requirement.
Prerequisites: Encryption at rest
Related: Encryption
Machine learning (ML)
A technique that learns patterns from data to predict on new data; the foundation of AI.
Cloud Interconnect
A dedicated-connection service (Dedicated/Partner) linking on-premises to Google Cloud with high bandwidth, low latency, and an SLA; choose vs the simpler encrypted-tunnel Cloud VPN by requirements.
Prerequisites: Cloud VPN、Encryption
Three observability pillars (metrics, logs, traces)
Metrics (Cloud Monitoring, numeric trends), logs (Cloud Logging, events), and traces (Cloud Trace, request paths); correlate logs and traces by trace ID to pinpoint causes.
Related: Cloud Trace、Cloud Logging、Cloud Monitoring
Scalability
Adjusting capacity to demand; scale up = vertical (bigger machine), scale out = horizontal (more machines).
Error budget
The allowable amount of failure (1 − SLO) derived from an SLO. Teams ship aggressive changes while budget remains and prioritize stabilization once it's exhausted—a shared language for release decisions. Blameless postmortems examine what consumed the budget and feed lessons back into prevention.
Related: SLI (service level indicator)
Eventarc
A service that routes events from diverse sources (Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage changes) uniformly to Cloud Run/Cloud Functions.
Prerequisites: Cloud Functions、Cloud Run、Cloud Storage、Pub/Sub
Cloud Functions
A serverless functions service for event-driven small tasks, such as running when a file is uploaded.
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)
Cloud Logging
A Google Cloud Observability capability for collecting, searching, and retaining logs, used for investigation and audit.
Related: Three observability pillars (metrics, logs, traces)
Cloud Monitoring
A Google Cloud Observability capability for metrics monitoring, dashboards, and alerts.
Related: Three observability pillars (metrics, logs, traces)
Pub/Sub
A messaging service that ingests events in real time and distributes them to multiple services; used for streaming ingestion.
Site reliability engineering (SRE)
A Google-pioneered practice that runs operations with a software mindset and manages reliability via measurable targets such as SLOs and error budgets.
Prerequisites: Error budget
Consumption-based pricing
Paying for what you actually use rather than reserved capacity; no up-front investment and less waste.
API Gateway (Google Cloud)
A fully managed API gateway in front of serverless backends (Cloud Run/Functions/App Engine); defined with OpenAPI to handle auth, keys, and monitoring.
Prerequisites: App Engine、Cloud Run、Managed services (management boundary)、Serverless (FaaS)
Cloud Deploy
A managed continuous-delivery (CD) service for GKE, Cloud Run, and Anthos. It templates a delivery pipeline (e.g., dev → staging → prod) and provides deployment strategies like canary or blue-green, approval gates, and rollback as built-in features.
Prerequisites: Cloud Run、GKE Enterprise (Anthos)、Deployment strategies (canary/blue-green/rollback)
Related: Cloud Build
SLI (service level indicator)
A measured metric used in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to quantify reliability—success rate, latency, availability, etc., tied directly to user experience. It's continuously measured and compared against an SLO target to judge whether reliability goals are met.
Prerequisites: Site reliability engineering (SRE)、CIA triad
Vertex AI AutoML
A Vertex AI capability that auto-builds high-quality custom ML models from tabular, text, image, or video data with minimal code. It runs neural architecture search and hyperparameter tuning under the hood to produce a model balancing accuracy against training cost. For quick SQL-only analysis, BigQuery ML can be the simpler choice.
Prerequisites: BigQuery、BigQuery ML、Vertex AI
Related: Tabular Workflows
Billing account and budgets
The unit that pays costs; link projects to it (one account, many projects). Budgets and alerts only notify at thresholds and do not auto-stop spending.
Ops Agent
An agent installed on Compute Engine or on-prem VMs that collects detailed system metrics (CPU/memory/disk, etc.) and logs into Cloud Monitoring / Cloud Logging. It unifies the legacy separate Monitoring agent and Logging agent—use this for new deployments.
Prerequisites: Cloud Logging、Cloud Monitoring、Compute Engine
Cloud Storage classes
Classes by access frequency: Standard (frequent)/Nearline (~monthly)/Coldline (~quarterly)/Archive (long-term rare). Less access = cheaper storage but pricier retrieval.
Prerequisites: Cloud Storage
Cloud KMS
A managed key-management service to create and manage encryption keys and control rotation/disabling; the basis of CMEK.
Prerequisites: Encryption
Related: Encryption keys (GMEK / CMEK / CSEK)
Workflows
Serverless orchestration for lightweight cross-service step chaining (simple workflows); heavy dependencies use Cloud Composer.
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)
CapEx (capital expenditure)
Spending to buy and own equipment or facilities up front—like building an on-prem data center—requiring a large initial outlay that is depreciated as an asset over years. It was the center of the traditional pre-cloud IT investment model.
BeyondCorp
Google implementation of zero trust that grants access based on verifying user and device rather than network location.
Prerequisites: Zero Trust
Cloud SQL
A managed relational database compatible with MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQL Server, for typical business apps.
Firestore
A scalable document NoSQL database for mobile and web app data.
GKE Enterprise (Anthos)
A platform to operate and manage containers consistently across on-premises and multiple clouds, enabling hybrid and multicloud.
Resource hierarchy
The Google Cloud hierarchy of Organization → Folder → Project → resources; the project is the basic billing/permission unit and policies inherit down the hierarchy.
Spot VM
A Compute Engine VM offered at a deep discount in exchange for possible preemption; used for cost optimization of interruption-tolerant batch work.
Prerequisites: Compute Engine
Eventual consistency
A consistency model where a read right after a write may return a stale value, but all replicas eventually converge over time. It's often the default behavior of distributed data stores that prioritize availability and low latency, and using it for reads that don't need strong consistency buys throughput.
Prerequisites: CIA triad、High availability (HA)
Related: Strong consistency
Cloud Build
A serverless CI service that automates fetching source, building, testing, and containerizing images. Build steps are defined in cloudbuild.yaml and can be triggered by pushes to GitHub/Cloud Source Repositories; artifacts are typically stored in Artifact Registry.
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)
Related: Cloud Deploy、Artifact Registry
High availability (HA)
Designing so a service keeps running despite failures (redundancy, availability zones, etc.).
Prerequisites: CIA triad
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Renting infrastructure such as VMs; you manage the OS and above—the most control (e.g., Azure Virtual Machines).
OpEx (operational expenditure)
Spending paid continuously as you consume it. Cloud pay-as-you-go billing follows this model, minimizing upfront investment and letting cost flex with demand. The CapEx-to-OpEx shift is commonly cited as a core financial benefit of moving to the cloud.
Prerequisites: CapEx (capital expenditure)、Consumption-based pricing
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
Renting a platform to run apps; the provider manages OS/runtime and you focus on app and data (e.g., App Service).
Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM)
Encrypts Google Cloud data using keys held in an external (own/third-party) key-management backend, raising key sovereignty beyond CMEK (customer-managed via Cloud KMS).
Prerequisites: Cloud KMS、Encryption keys (GMEK / CMEK / CSEK)、Encryption
VPC Service Controls
A mechanism that prevents data exfiltration to managed services (e.g., BigQuery, Cloud Storage) via a service perimeter; a layer of control separate from IAM grants.
Prerequisites: BigQuery、Cloud Storage、Managed services (management boundary)
Cloud CLI emulators
Local mocks (Firestore, Pub/Sub, Spanner, etc.) provided by the Google Cloud CLI to speed local development/unit testing without connecting to the cloud (not a production substitute).
Google Cloud Armor
Edge/backend security policies applied in front of an external Application LB; provides WAF (SQLi/XSS/RFI), advanced DDoS protection with ML-based Adaptive Protection, rate limiting, bot management, and Threat Intelligence.
Prerequisites: Machine learning (ML)
Cloud CDN
A CDN enabled on an external Application LB backend that caches content at Google's edge; origins include MIG/Cloud Storage/Cloud Run/internet NEG. Drop stale content via cache invalidation on updates.
Prerequisites: Cloud Run、Cloud Storage
Cloud Router
A router that exchanges routes dynamically over BGP with on-prem/other networks; configure ASN, route priority/MED, and authentication, and control advertised/learned ranges with custom-advertised/learned routes.
Prerequisites: Route priority
Network endpoint group (NEG)
A load balancer backend unit that groups container-native (GKE), serverless (e.g., Cloud Run), or internet endpoints; chosen vs managed instance groups (MIGs) by need.
Prerequisites: Managed instance group (MIG) and instance template、Cloud Run、Serverless (FaaS)
SLO (service level objective)
The target value an organization sets for an SLI (e.g., 99.9% availability). Usually set more conservatively than the contractual SLA (service level agreement), and the risk of falling short is tracked via how much of the error budget has been consumed.
Prerequisites: CIA triad、Error budget
Related: SLI (service level indicator)
Tabular Workflows
A feature that decomposes the tabular AutoML pipeline into components on Vertex AI Pipelines, letting you customize and reuse individual stages such as feature engineering or architecture search. Where plain AutoML is more black-box, Tabular Workflows targets advanced use cases needing fine control or scale over specific stages.
Prerequisites: Workflows、Vertex AI
Related: Vertex AI AutoML
Cloud DNS
A Google Cloud service that manages internal/external name resolution (domain → IP).
Cloud NAT
A service that lets VMs without external IPs make outbound calls to the internet.
Managed instance group (MIG) and instance template
A Compute Engine group that creates identical VMs from an instance template (a VM blueprint), with autoscaling and self-healing.
Prerequisites: Compute Engine
Storage Transfer Service
A managed service to transfer large or continuous data into Cloud Storage; for small data, the gcloud/bq CLI is simpler.
Prerequisites: Cloud Storage、Managed services (management boundary)
Elasticity
Automatically scaling capacity with load (autoscaling); scalability made automatic.
Prerequisites: Scalability
Cloud Billing
Links a billing account to projects to track costs, set budget alerts, and export billing data to BigQuery.
Prerequisites: Billing account and budgets、BigQuery
Deployment Manager
Google Cloud's native Infrastructure as Code service (YAML/Jinja/Python templates). It is deprecated and reaches end of support on 2026-03-31; migrate to the Terraform-based Infrastructure Manager or another IaC tool.
Prerequisites: Infrastructure as Code (IaC)、Infrastructure Manager
Filestore
A fully managed NFS file storage that mounts as a shared file system from Compute Engine VMs or GKE, providing low-latency shared storage.
Prerequisites: Compute Engine、Managed services (management boundary)
VPC firewall rules
Stateful rules that allow/deny traffic in/out of a VPC, evaluated by direction, priority, target (tags/service accounts), and source; hierarchical firewall policies exist at the org level.
Prerequisites: Service account、Cloud NGFW and hierarchical firewall
HA VPN
Google's recommended IPSec VPN, providing a 99.99% availability SLA via two redundant tunnels (each with its own external IP). Used to connect to on-prem, other clouds, or other VPCs, and assumes dynamic routing via BGP. The default choice for new deployments.
Prerequisites: CIA triad
Gemini Cloud Assist
An AI assistant inside the Google Cloud console that analyzes logs, metrics, traces, and resource configuration to offer natural-language troubleshooting and architecture suggestions. Aimed at cutting the time operators spend investigating root causes across the console.
Prerequisites: Gemini
Related: Gemini Code Assist
Gemini Code Assist
An AI pair-programming feature that assists with code completion, generation, explanation, and review inside an IDE. It has a free individual tier and an Enterprise tier that can ground completions in a private codebase and add enterprise administration. Used as an extension for VS Code and JetBrains-family IDEs.
Prerequisites: Gemini
Related: Gemini Cloud Assist
Generative AI
AI that creates new content (text, images, code) from learned data; distinct from classification/regression.
Horizontal scaling (scale out)
Scaling by adding more instances to spread the load. It assumes a stateless design plus a load balancer and auto scaling, and since one instance failing doesn't take down the whole system, it also improves fault tolerance. Considered the default direction in cloud-native design.
Prerequisites: Scalability
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Defining infrastructure declaratively as code (templates) so it is reproducible and version-controlled—preventing manual drift and enabling review, automation, and consistent multi-environment builds. On AWS, CloudFormation and CDK are the main tools.
Deployment strategies (canary/blue-green/rollback)
Canary = release to a subset first; blue/green = instant switch between old/new environments; rollback = revert quickly on issues. Risk-limiting release techniques.
Private Google Access
A setting that lets VMs without external IPs reach Google APIs (e.g., Cloud Storage) privately; distinct in purpose from general egress via Cloud NAT.
Prerequisites: Cloud NAT、Cloud Storage
Cloud Run revisions and traffic splitting
Each deploy creates an immutable revision; traffic splitting controls the percentage sent to each revision, enabling canary release and rollback.
Prerequisites: Cloud Run、Deployment strategies (canary/blue-green/rollback)
Cloud SQL Auth Proxy
A proxy for secure Cloud SQL connections using IAM auth and encryption without exposing a public IP; the recommended way for apps to connect to the DB.
Prerequisites: Cloud SQL、Encryption
Cloud NGFW and hierarchical firewall
A next-generation firewall controlling in-VPC traffic; offers hierarchical policies inherited by org/folder, an effective policy evaluated by priority, and Enterprise-tier L7 inspection (IPS). Implement micro-segmentation with tags/service accounts.
Prerequisites: Service account
Cross-Cloud Interconnect
A service that links another public cloud to Google Cloud over a dedicated physical link without the internet; use it for multicloud connectivity when you need more bandwidth/lower latency than Cloud VPN.
Prerequisites: Cloud VPN、Cloud Interconnect
VLAN attachment
The logical link between a Cloud Interconnect and a VPC (Cloud Router); after creating the physical Interconnect, a VLAN attachment carries traffic to the actual VPC.
Prerequisites: Cloud Interconnect、Cloud Router
Strong consistency
A consistency model guaranteeing that a read after a completed write always returns the latest value. It typically costs more latency or throughput than eventual consistency, but is chosen where stale reads are unacceptable, such as inventory counts or balances. Consistency models are picked per use case based on this trade-off.
Related: Eventual consistency
Vertical scaling (scale up)
Scaling by upgrading a single instance's specs (CPU, memory, etc.). It requires little application change and is simple, but is capped by instance-type limits, tends to be a single point of failure, and often requires downtime to apply. The counterpart choice to horizontal scaling.
Prerequisites: Horizontal scaling (scale out)、Scalability
Zero Trust
The principle of "never trust, always verify"; verify identity, device, and context on every access, even inside.
Config Connector
An Infrastructure as Code tool that manages Google Cloud resources declaratively the Kubernetes way.
Prerequisites: Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
GKE Autopilot
A GKE cluster mode where Google fully manages node provisioning, scaling, upgrades, and hardening. Billing is per-Pod, and you lose node-pool tuning and SSH access in exchange for minimal operational overhead.
Prerequisites: Managed services (management boundary)
Organization Policy
A mechanism that inherits and enforces constraints down the resource hierarchy for consistent org-wide rules (e.g., disallow creation outside certain regions); distinct from IAM grants.
Prerequisites: Resource hierarchy
VPC Network Peering
Directly connecting two VPC networks so they can communicate with each other.
Prerequisites: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Transfer Appliance
An offline transfer service that ships large data on a physical device for ingestion into Cloud Storage; suits volumes where network transfer is impractical.
Prerequisites: Cloud Storage
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP)
A managed, Prometheus-compatible metrics ingestion/storage service. You query container-environment metrics (EKS/ECS, etc.) with PromQL while AWS handles scale and retention—commonly paired with Managed Grafana for visualization.
Prerequisites: Managed services (management boundary)
Containerization
Packaging an app and its dependencies into one image that runs the same anywhere. Lighter and faster to start than VMs, with higher density and portability. On AWS, run via ECR (registry) + ECS/EKS (orchestration) + Fargate (serverless).
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)
Economies of scale
The idea that AWS aggregates many customers’ demand to lower unit costs, passing savings back as price cuts. Alongside pay-as-you-go, no upfront investment, and easy global reach, it’s a core cloud value proposition.
Prerequisites: Consumption-based pricing
Model Garden
A Vertex AI catalog to browse and choose among diverse foundation models (Google, open, third-party).
Prerequisites: Vertex AI
Classic VPN
A legacy, single-tunnel IPSec VPN gateway with no SLA guarantee. It comes in route-based (dynamic) and policy-based (static traffic-selector) variants, with the latter kept mainly for compatibility with specific peer network devices. Google deprecates it in favor of HA VPN for new builds.
Prerequisites: HA VPN
Cloud Code
An extension built into IDEs like VS Code and IntelliJ. It helps author Kubernetes manifests and Dockerfiles, deploy to GKE/Cloud Run directly from your local machine, and live-debug on a remote cluster—all from within the editor.
Prerequisites: Cloud Run
Cloud Endpoints
An API management service that manages OpenAPI/gRPC APIs via the Extensible Service Proxy, adding auth, monitoring, and quotas.
Prerequisites: gRPC
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Google Cloud's software-defined network. A global resource that holds regional subnets in one network; routes, firewalls, and peering control traffic.
Workload Identity Federation (GCP)
A mechanism that trusts an external identity provider outside Google Cloud—AWS, Azure, on-prem, or CI/CD like GitHub Actions—and exchanges its issued tokens for temporary Google Cloud credentials. Used for external system integrations where you want to avoid downloading and distributing service-account keys.
Prerequisites: Service account
Dataplane V2
GKE's eBPF-based networking data plane. It enforces Kubernetes NetworkPolicy (Pod-to-Pod L3/L4 traffic control) efficiently at the kernel level and also provides visibility via flow logs. It has become the default for new clusters on recent GKE versions and runs with less overhead than the older iptables-based implementation.
IP masquerade (GKE)
A mechanism that source-NATs a GKE Pod's outbound (egress) traffic to the node's IP. By default, non-masqueraded (untranslated) destinations are RFC 1918 private ranges and link-local addresses; the ip-masq-agent configuration lets you add or change the target CIDRs. Whether this agent is auto-deployed as a DaemonSet, and its default configuration, depends on the GKE version and cluster setup (e.g., Autopilot vs. Standard, whether Dataplane V2 is in use).
Prerequisites: Dataplane V2
Cloud Trace
A distributed-tracing service that follows request paths (spans) across services to find latency bottlenecks; a different observability axis from metrics (Monitoring) or logs (Logging).
Related: Three observability pillars (metrics, logs, traces)
Infrastructure Manager
A Google Cloud service that runs Terraform as managed IaC, making infrastructure reproducible and reviewable/auditable via CI/CD and PRs.
Migration strategy (lift-and-shift/improve-and-move/refactor)
Lift-and-shift = move as-is (fastest, least change); improve-and-move = slight optimization; refactor = rebuild cloud-native (most effort, biggest payoff). Choose by requirements.
Application Default Credentials (ADC)
The standard way an app resolves credentials to authenticate to Google Cloud; combine with service accounts or Workload Identity Federation to avoid hardcoded keys.
Prerequisites: Service account
Artifact Registry
A registry to store and manage container images and language packages; the destination for artifacts built by Cloud Build.
Related: Cloud Build
Connection pool
Reuses database connections to avoid connection setup cost and exhaustion; especially important for serverless/high-concurrency apps.
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)
gRPC
A low-latency, typed (Protocol Buffers) RPC framework over HTTP/2, suited to internal service-to-service calls; choose REST for public web.
Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP)
Protects access to apps/resources based on user identity; exposes apps securely without a VPN, enabling zero-trust-style access control.
Prerequisites: Zero Trust
Memorystore
A fully managed in-memory cache compatible with Redis/Memcached; caches frequent reads to reduce latency. Not a durable store.
Prerequisites: Managed services (management boundary)
Secret Manager
A managed service to securely store, retrieve, and rotate secrets (API keys, passwords, certificates); avoid embedding them in code.
Prerequisites: Managed services (management boundary)
Signed URL
A URL granting time-limited, scoped access to a Cloud Storage object without making it public; different from making a whole bucket public.
Prerequisites: Cloud Storage
Artifact Analysis
Scanning that detects known vulnerabilities in container images/packages. Distinct from Binary Authorization (deploy-only-if-signed); combine detection with enforcement.
Prerequisites: Binary Authorization
Private Service Connect
A way to reach specific managed/published services over private IPs without traversing the internet; use it to avoid exposing public IPs.
Prerequisites: Managed services (management boundary)
Synthetic monitors
Actively and periodically probe endpoints/workflows from the user perspective (external monitoring); pair with passive monitoring to catch issues proactively.
Prerequisites: Workflows
Cloud DNS routing policies and split-horizon
Advanced Cloud DNS resolution: geolocation (vary by source region) and failover (switch to backup on primary failure) routing policies, plus split-horizon DNS resolving the same name differently via public/private zones.
Prerequisites: Cloud DNS
Dynamic routing mode (global/regional)
A VPC setting that determines how far BGP routes learned by Cloud Router propagate: regional stays within one region; global propagates to all regions. Use global to span multiple regions.
Prerequisites: Cloud Router
Hybrid DNS (forwarding zones/inbound policy/DNS peering)
Configurations for bidirectional name resolution between on-prem and Cloud DNS: forwarding zones query on-prem from cloud, inbound server policy resolves cloud from on-prem, and DNS peering references a zone in another VPC.
Prerequisites: Cloud DNS
Route priority
A value that decides which route is chosen when multiple share a destination; a lower value wins. Combine with network tags to scope where it applies.
Secure Web Proxy
A proxy that allowlists egress by URL/SNI; unlike Cloud NAT (general internet egress), it controls "where egress is allowed" at the application layer.
Prerequisites: Cloud NAT
Provisioned vs. serverless
A capacity-model contrast. Provisioned reserves capacity ahead (predictable, steady load—can be cheaper); serverless auto-follows demand, pay-per-use, no capacity management (intermittent/unpredictable load). A choice across Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, etc.
Prerequisites: Serverless (FaaS)