I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.
After writing about AWS Cloud Practitioner, I realized something: AWS gave me a really useful starting map, but a starting map is still just that, a starting map. And if I stay in one ecosystem too long, there’s a real risk that I start mistaking familiarity for understanding.
That’s not a great habit.
So this series is me doing something about it.
I want to learn GCP properly. Not in the shallow “oh yeah, that’s like the Google version of X” way. I mean properly enough that the ideas start standing on their own instead of always leaning on AWS comparisons.
Why Bother? #
Because cloud knowledge gets weirdly narrow if you let it.
You spend enough time around one provider and eventually its naming starts sounding like the naming, its service boundaries start feeling like the natural boundaries, and its defaults start passing themselves off as universal truths. That’s useful when you’re new. It gets limiting after a while.
I don’t want to be the guy whose entire mental model of cloud is just AWS with the serial numbers scratched off.
GCP feels like a good next step for me because it forces that boundary to widen. Different vocabulary, different service shapes, different tradeoffs, same broad category of problems. That’s exactly the kind of friction that usually leads to better understanding.
So What Is This Series? #
Not a certification speedrun.
Not a vendor comparison cage match.
Not one of those fake-clean learning paths where I pretend I already know exactly what all ten parts are going to be before I’ve even written part two.
This is just me learning GCP in public, turning the useful bits into posts, and building a reference I can actually come back to later.
Some of the posts will be foundational. Some will be practical. Some will be more architecture-heavy. Some will probably exist because I hit a concept, got confused, and had to sit down long enough to make it click.
Which, honestly, is usually where the best posts come from anyway.
What Kind of Topics? #
The rough direction is pretty clear even if the exact order isn’t.
I want to cover things like:
- how GCP is structured
- IAM and access boundaries
- networking
- Cloud Run and other compute options
- BigQuery and data platform topics
- Terraform on GCP
- pricing, governance, and the operational messier bits
And yes, there’ll probably be random detours as I go.
That’s intentional.
I don’t want this series to feel like a cloud brochure rewritten in markdown. If something interesting comes up, I’d rather follow that thread than force everything into a fake-perfect syllabus.
So the honest version is: follow along and we’ll find out where it goes.
How I Want to Write These #
The main thing I want to avoid is service-list writing.
You know the kind. A post that says a service is “fully managed, scalable, secure, and powerful,” and somehow you finish it knowing less than when you started.
I want these posts to be more useful than that.
So the bias here will be:
- concrete over broad
- tradeoffs over marketing
- examples over slogans
- system behavior over product blurbs
If I’m writing about a service, I want to understand:
- what problem it solves
- why it exists in this shape
- what tradeoff comes with using it
- what can go wrong if you misunderstand it
That feels like a better use of everyone’s time.
Where We’re Starting #
We’re starting with BigQuery.
Partly because it’s one of the most interesting things in GCP, and partly because it forces a lot of good questions immediately. Architecture, query execution, table design, pricing, governance, recovery, and so on. It’s one of those systems where you can’t poke it for very long without learning something useful.
After that? I don’t know yet.
Maybe Cloud Run.
Maybe Workflows.
Perhaps Dataflow?
Maybe I get distracted by some networking rabbit hole and we end up there instead.
That’s fine.
The whole point of this series is to expand the boundary, not to pretend the path was perfectly planned from day one.
Closing Thoughts #
AWS was a good place for me to start. I still think that. But I also think staying there forever would make my understanding smaller than it needs to be.
So this series is me stepping a little further out and seeing what else clicks. If you’re trying to do the same, come along and let’s find out!
