Learning GCP after AWS

Question

I have some experience with AWS and an AWS Developer Associate certification. I have been told that I am being moved to a project where I will be using GCP. How easy/hard would it be to learn GCP with AWS experience? Alternatively, how can I facilitate my entry into GCP with an AWS background?

Answer 1

The fundamentals are similar in AWS, GC and Azure, although the terminology is different. There are differences of course (for example, su.nets in GC are regional whereas in AWS they're in AZs) but they're easy not too difficult to understand once you get into it.

There's a course by Google in Coursera, which is designed for people familiar with AWS - https://www.coursera.org/learn/gcp-fundamentals-aws

The GC learning resources should also help - https://cloud.google.com/training?hl=en

Answer 2

I think the main difference between AWS and GCP is how projects are managed. I'm referring to Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Resource Manager . In GCP you manage projects in a hierarchical way, using an approach called Resource Hierarchy .

In GCP you always have an Organization, a Project and resources. You might also have Folders. In GCP, basically everything is a resource (like in a REST API). All GCP resources belong to a project, and an individual GCP account can manage multiple projects.

You can manage each GCP project individually, or you can group related projects into folders and manage them from there, or even manage everything from the top-level GCP Organization.

By managing, I mean applying policies: what this resource can do, which accounts can use it.

GCP accounts are sometimes called IAM principals . An IAM principle can be a user account, a Google group (ie a bunch of user accounts), a service account (ie an account assigned to a program).

The relationship between 1 resource (eg a GCP project) and N IAM principals (eg 2 user accounts, 1 service account) that have that set of privileges is called IAM binding. A IAM policy is a set of IAM bindings.

As for the services AWS, Azure and GCP offer, there is this nice comparison chart .

So to recap, focus on learning IAM and resource hierarchy first. You will need it whatever GCP service you will end up using.