Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for .NET and Full Stack Developers

GCP fundamentals — resource hierarchy (organisation, folders, projects), regions and zones, Cloud IAM and service accounts; compute (Compute Engine, Cloud Run, GKE, App Engine, Cloud Functions), storage (Cloud Storage), databases (Cloud SQL for SQL Server/PostgreSQL/MySQL, AlloyDB, Spanner, Firestore, Bigtable, Memorystore), analytics (BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Dataflow), networking (VPC, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS), security (Secret Manager, Cloud KMS, Identity Platform), operations (Cloud Logging, Monitoring, Trace), CI/CD (Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Cloud Deploy), deploying ASP.NET Core to Cloud Run, Vertex AI, cost management and GCP interview questions.

What it is & where it is used

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google's public cloud. Its strengths are data and analytics (BigQuery), Kubernetes (GKE — Google created Kubernetes), a global network (premium tier, global load balancing), serverless containers (Cloud Run) and AI (Vertex AI, Gemini).

For a .NET/full stack developer the most common setup is: ASP.NET Core in a container on Cloud Run + Cloud SQL (SQL Server or PostgreSQL) + Cloud Storage + Secret Manager + Cloud Logging/Monitoring, built with Cloud Build.

See the Azure ↔ AWS ↔ GCP service map in the AWS course. Key GCP names: Compute Engine (VMs), Cloud Run (serverless containers), GKE (Kubernetes), Cloud Storage (objects), Cloud SQL (managed relational), Firestore (documents), Pub/Sub (messaging), BigQuery (warehouse), Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS, Secret Manager, Cloud KMS, Cloud Logging/Monitoring/Trace, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry.

Versions & history

Year	Milestone
2008	App Engine — Google's first cloud platform (PaaS)
2010–2012	Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Compute Engine (2012 preview, GA 2013)
2014–2015	Kubernetes open-sourced (2014); GKE GA (2015); Pub/Sub
2016–2017	Cloud Functions, Spanner GA, Firestore (2017), Cloud SQL PostgreSQL
2019	Cloud Run GA (serverless containers), Anthos, Cloud SQL for SQL Server
2021–2022	Vertex AI, AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, GKE Autopilot
2023–2025	Gemini models across GCP, Cloud Run jobs/GPUs, Cloud Functions merged into Cloud Run functions, Infrastructure Manager (Terraform-based)

Lifecycle

Deploying an ASP.NET Core API on GCP:

Create a project (billing account linked), enable APIs (run.googleapis.com, sqladmin.googleapis.com, secretmanager.googleapis.com).
Database: Cloud SQL instance (SQL Server or PostgreSQL) with private IP or the Cloud SQL Auth Proxy/connector; HA (regional) and automated backups.
Secrets: store the DB password/connection string in Secret Manager.
Build: gcloud builds submit (Cloud Build) or GitHub Actions → container image in Artifact Registry.
Deploy: gcloud run deploy — Cloud Run gives an HTTPS URL, autoscaling (including to zero), revisions and traffic splitting.
Edge: custom domain + global external HTTPS load balancer with Cloud CDN and Cloud Armor (WAF) if needed.
Operate: Cloud Logging (stdout JSON logs collected automatically), Cloud Monitoring alerts, Cloud Trace (OpenTelemetry), Error Reporting, budgets.

Tools used to develop

Google Cloud Console, gcloud CLI (gcloud init, gcloud run deploy), Cloud Shell (browser terminal with tools pre-installed).
Google Cloud .NET client libraries (Google.Cloud.Storage.V1, Google.Cloud.PubSub.V1, Google.Cloud.SecretManager.V1, Google.Cloud.Diagnostics.AspNetCore3), Cloud Code extensions for VS Code/JetBrains.
IaC: Terraform (most common), Infrastructure Manager, Config Connector (Kubernetes CRDs).
Learning: Google Cloud Skills Boost, free tier ($300 credit for new accounts + always-free usage limits), Architecture Framework.