Google Cloud Glossary

Application Load Balancer: An Application Load Balancer in Google Cloud is a fully managed, proxy-based Layer 7 load balancer that makes routing decisions based on HTTP(S) request attributes (like headers, paths, and hostnames), providing advanced traffic management capabilities such as content-based routing, SSL termination, and integration with other Google Cloud services like Cloud CDN and Identity-Aware Proxy.

apt: apt (Advanced Package Tool) is a command-line package management utility used on Debian-based Linux distributions (like Ubuntu, which is commonly used on Google Cloud VMs) for installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages. It simplifies the process of managing software by handling dependencies and retrieving packages from repositories.

Automatic scaling: Automatic scaling, in the context of cloud computing like Google Cloud, refers to the capability of a system to dynamically adjust its resources (such as the number of virtual machines, containers, or processing capacity) up or down based on real-time demand or predefined metrics, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency without manual intervention.

Balanced Persistent Disk: A Balanced Persistent Disk (pd-balanced) in Google Cloud is a solid-state drive (SSD) based block storage option that offers a cost-effective balance of performance and price, making it suitable for a wide range of general-purpose workloads that require better IOPS and throughput than Standard Persistent Disks but don’t necessarily need the higher performance of SSD or Extreme Persistent Disks.

CLI: CLI stands for Command-Line Interface. It’s a text-based way to interact with your computer or software, where you type commands and receive text-based responses, as opposed to using a graphical user interface (GUI) with buttons and menus.

Cloud Console: The Google Cloud Console is a web-based graphical user interface that allows you to manage and monitor your Google Cloud projects and resources.

Cloud IAM: Cloud IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a Google Cloud service that enables you to manage access control by defining who (identities) has what access (roles) to which resources.

Cloud Run: Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform on Google Cloud that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It abstracts away all infrastructure management,allowing you to simply deploy your containerized application and have it automatically scale up or down based on demand, paying only for the resources you consume.

Cloud Shell: Cloud Shell is a browser-based interactive shell environment for managing Google Cloud Platform resources, providing you with command-line access directly from your web browser, pre-configured with the gcloud CLI and other useful tools. It offers a temporary virtual machine instance with persistent storage for your home directory, making it convenient for quick tasks, experimentation, and managing your cloud environment without needing to install anything locally.

Compute Engine: Compute Engine is Google Cloud’s IaaS offering that lets you create and run virtual machines on Google’s infrastructure.

Container Cluster: A container cluster is a group of interconnected machines managing containerized applications, and in Google Cloud, this is primarily implemented through Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), a managed Kubernetes service.

Container Registry: Container Registry is a private Docker image registry service provided by Google Cloud that allows you to store, manage, and secure your Docker container images, making them readily available for deployment on Google Cloud services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run, and Compute Engine.

Dashboard: A Google Cloud dashboard is a customizable visual interface providing a centralized view of key metrics, logs, and operational data for monitoring your cloud resources and applications at a glance.

Debian: Debian GNU/Linux, often simply called Debian, is a stable and secure free and open-source Linux distribution known for its commitment to the principles of free software and its extensive package management system.

Dialogflow API: The Dialogflow API allows developers to build conversational interfaces (chatbots, voice assistants) that understand and respond to natural language input.

e2-medium: e2-medium is a predefined machine type in Google Cloud’s Compute Engine within the cost-effective e2 series. It offers 2 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4 GB of memory, making it a good fit for small to medium-sized general-purpose workloads like web servers, application servers, and development environments where cost optimization is a key consideration.

Editor role in Google Cloud IAM: The Editor role in Google Cloud IAM is a predefined role that grants permissions to view and modify most resources within a project. Principals with the Editor role can create, update, and delete resources, but they cannot manage roles and permissions (which is typically reserved for the Owner role). It strikes a balance between read-only access and full administrative control.

Environment variables: Environment variables in Google Cloud are dynamic name-value pairs used to configure applications running on various services without modifying their code directly, enabling flexibility, security, and environment-specific settings.

External IP: An External IP address in Google Cloud is a publicly routable IP address that allows your resources, like virtual machines, to communicate with the internet. These can be either ephemeral (assigned temporarily and released when the resource is stopped or deleted) or static (reserved and persistently assigned to your resource until you explicitly release it).

gcloud: The gcloud command is the primary command-line interface tool for interacting with Google Cloud. It allows you to manage various Google Cloud services and resources directly from your terminal or through scripts.

gcloud auth list: The gcloud auth list command displays a list of the Google Cloud accounts that you are currently authenticated as in the gcloud CLI. It shows the account email addresses and indicates the currently active account with an asterisk (*). This command is useful for verifying which accounts you have authorized the gcloud CLI to use and for checking which account’s credentials will be used for subsequent gcloud commands.

Google Cloud: Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google, providing scalable and reliable infrastructure, platform, and software services.

Google Cloud APIs: Google Cloud APIs are a suite of programmatic interfaces that allow you to interact with and manage Google Cloud services.

Google Cloud Console: The Google Cloud Console is a web-based graphical user interface for managing and monitoring your Google Cloud projects and resources.

Google Cloud project: A Google Cloud project organizes all your Google Cloud resources, such as Compute Engine instances and Cloud Storage buckets, and serves as a container for billing, settings, and permissions.

Google Front End (GFE): The Google Front End (GFE) is Google’s globally distributed, software-defined network layer that serves as the entry point for user traffic to many of its services, including Google Cloud. In the context of Google Cloud load balancing, the GFE is the underlying infrastructure for the Global HTTP(S) Load Balancer, terminating TLS connections, providing DDoS protection, and routing traffic to the nearest healthy backend instances across different regions using a single anycast IP address.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed Kubernetes service provided by Google Cloud that simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications using¹ the open-source Kubernetes system.

GUI: GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. It’s a type of user interface that allows you to interact with software using visual elements like windows, icons, and menus, typically controlled by a mouse, trackpad, or touch screen, making it more visually intuitive than a command-line interface (CLI).

Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an open-source platform that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Kubernetes Service: A Kubernetes Service is an abstraction layer that defines a logical set of Pods (containers) and a policy by which to access them, providing a stable IP address and DNS name for accessing applications running in a dynamic Kubernetes environment. In Google Cloud, these Services are a fundamental component of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and can be exposed internally within the cluster or externally using Load Balancers or NodePorts.

Load balancer: A Google Cloud load balancer distributes incoming network traffic across multiple backend instances (like virtual machines or containers) to improve application availability, scalability, and performance by preventing any single instance from being overwhelmed.

Machine Type: In Google Cloud Compute Engine, a machine type defines the set of virtualized hardware resources available to a virtual machine (VM) instance, including the number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs), the amount of memory (RAM), and sometimes other features like network performance. You select a machine type based on the resource requirements of your workload. Google Cloud offers predefined machine types optimized for various use cases (general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, accelerator-optimized) as well as the option to create custom machine types with specific vCPU and memory configurations.

Managed Instance Groups: Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) in Google Cloud provide a way to create and manage multiple identical virtual machine (VM) instances as a single entity, offering features like autoscaling, autohealing, regional (multi-zone) deployment for higher availability, and automatic updates to ensure consistency and resilience for your applications.

Network Load Balancer: A Network Load Balancer in Google Cloud is a non-proxied, high-performance load balancer that operates at the transport layer (TCP/UDP), distributing network traffic based on IP address and port, making it ideal for low-latency and high-throughput applications.

NGINX: NGINX (pronounced “engine-x”) is a popular, open-source web server software known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. While primarily used as a web server, it also functions as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. Its event-driven architecture allows it to handle a large number of concurrent connections efficiently, making it a preferred choice for many high-traffic websites and applications.

Node pools: Node pools in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) are groups of nodes (virtual machines) within a cluster that share the same configuration, such as machine type, disk size, and node labels, allowing you to manage and scale different types of workloads within the same GKE cluster.

Owner role in Google Cloud IAM: The Owner role in Google Cloud IAM is a powerful predefined role that grants the broadest level of access to a project, folder, or organization. Principals assigned the Owner role have full control over all resources, including the ability to manage roles and permissions, billing, and even delete the project itself. Due to its extensive privileges, the Owner role should be granted sparingly and only to those who require complete administrative control.

Qwiklabs: Qwiklabs provides hands-on learning environments for Google Cloud Platform, offering temporary credentials to access real Google Cloud services for labs and courses covering various topics and skill levels.

Regions: In Google Cloud, regions are independent geographic areas that consist of multiple availability zones, providing a way to deploy resources closer to users for lower latency and to build fault-tolerant and highly available applications across different locations.

Remote Desktop Protocol: In Google Cloud, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) enables users to remotely connect to and control the graphical interface of a virtual machine instance, typically running Windows Server.

Series: In Google Cloud Compute Engine, a series is a group of machine types sharing a common underlying processor architecture and optimization focus for specific workload types.

SSH: SSH (Secure Shell) is a cryptographic network protocol used for secure communication between two computers. It’s commonly used to remotely access and manage servers and network devices, providing an encrypted channel that protects data from eavesdropping and tampering during the connection. SSH typically uses port 22 and allows for secure command-line access, file transfers (using SFTP or SCP), and other secure tunneling applications.

sudo: sudo (Superuser Do) is a command-line utility in Unix-like operating systems (including Linux and macOS, which underpin many Google Cloud services) that allows permitted users to execute commands as the superuser or another user, as specified by the security policy. It’s a fundamental tool for administrative tasks, granting temporary elevated privileges when needed.

URL map: A URL map in Google Cloud’s global HTTP(S) load balancing is a resource that defines how the load balancer should route HTTP(S) requests to different backend services or backend buckets based on the hostname and path of the incoming URL. It acts as a traffic director, examining the URL of each request and forwarding it to the appropriate backend based on the defined rules, enabling content-based routing and flexible application deployment.

vCPU: A vCPU, or virtual Central Processing Unit, is a unit of processing power provided by a cloud provider to a virtual machine (VM). It represents a share of the underlying physical CPU on the host server. The number and type of vCPUs allocated to a VM significantly impact its processing performance. Cloud providers often oversubscribe physical CPUs, meaning they allocate more vCPUs to VMs than the actual number of physical cores, relying on time-sharing to manage workloads. Different cloud providers and machine types may have varying ratios of vCPUs to physical cores and different underlying CPU architectures, which can affect performance characteristics.

Viewer role in Google Cloud IAM: The Viewer role in Google Cloud IAM is a predefined role that grants read-only access to resources within a project, folder, or organization. Principals assigned the Viewer role can view the configuration and metadata of resources but cannot make any modifications. This role is useful for users who need to monitor or observe resources without the ability to alter them.

Virtual machines (VMs): Virtual machines (VMs) are software-based emulations of physical computers, allowing you to run operating systems and applications within a simulated hardware environment. They abstract the underlying physical hardware, providing flexibility and resource efficiency by enabling multiple VMs to run on a single physical machine.

VM Instances: VM Instances, short for Virtual Machine Instances, are virtual servers hosted on the infrastructure of a cloud provider like Google Cloud’s Compute Engine. They emulate physical hardware, allowing you to run operating systems and applications in an isolated environment, providing scalable and configurable computing resources on demand.

Zonal resources: Zonal resources in Google Cloud are resources that are deployed and operate within a specific zone. This means they are tied to a single availability zone and are not automatically replicated across other zones in the same region. If that zone experiences an outage, the zonal resources within it may become unavailable. Examples of zonal resources include Compute Engine virtual machines and zonal persistent disks.

Zones: In Google Cloud, zones are isolated locations within a region. They are designed to be independent failure domains, meaning that a failure in one zone is unlikely to affect the others in the same region. Deploying resources across multiple zones helps to improve the availability and fault tolerance of your applications.