GCP for AWS Professionals

Why Should AWS Professionals Learn GCP?

• Multi-Cloud is the Future: More companies are adopting multi-cloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in and leverage the best services from each provider. Knowing both AWS and GCP makes you a more valuable asset.
• Career Growth: Adding GCP to your skillset opens up new job opportunities and consulting engagements.
• Unique Strengths: GCP has industry-leading services in data analytics (BigQuery), machine learning (Vertex AI), and container orchestration (Google Kubernetes Engine).
• Cost Savings: GCP's billing models, such as per-second billing and automatic sustained use discounts, can offer significant cost advantages over AWS for certain workloads.

Key Structural Differences: AWS vs. GCP

While many services have direct equivalents, the fundamental architecture of GCP has some important distinctions from AWS.

• Resource Hierarchy: AWS is account-centric. In GCP, the fundamental unit is the Project. All resources belong to a project, which in turn belongs to a folder, and then an organization. This creates a clear hierarchy for managing policies and billing.
• Global Networking: GCP's VPCs are global by default, whereas AWS VPCs are regional. This means you can have subnets in different regions within the same GCP VPC, simplifying global network architecture.
• IAM Inheritance: GCP's Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies are inherited down the resource hierarchy. Permissions granted at the organization level flow down to folders, projects, and resources.