Autoscaling: Managed Instance Groups and Instance Templates ☁ GCP 🟢 Beginner Autoscaling MIG Instance Template Scenario A single Compute Engine VM is a single point of failure and cannot handle varying amounts of traffic. To solve this, you use a…

Traffic Routing: Global External Application Load Balancer ☁ GCP 🟢 Beginner Load Balancing Backend Service Global Proxy Scenario You have an unmanaged group of instances (or an empty backend for right now) and you need to deploy Google’s globally distributed…

API Security: Validating Identity Platform JWTs at the Gateway ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate API Gateway Identity Platform JWT Security Scenario Your mobile app allows users to log in (using email or Google OAuth). This process leverages GCP Identity Platform (formerly…

State Architecture: Multi-Environment Workspaces and GCS ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate Terraform Backend Workspaces GCS Scenario You are building infrastructure that supports “dev”, “staging”, and “prod” environments. Instead of using completely separate Git directories with duplicate code, you will use a…

Guardrails: Enforcing Organization Policies ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate Org Policy Governance Location Restriction Scenario Your legal department mandates that all data must reside in the United States or the European Union. Developers should not be able to accidentally deploy a…

Kubernetes Security: GKE with Workload Identity ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate GKE Workload Identity IAM Kubernetes Scenario In a GKE cluster, the worker nodes (Compute Engine VMs) have a Service Account. Historically, all pods running on those nodes inherited the node’s…

Database Architecture: Cloud SQL HA and Read Replicas ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate Cloud SQL High Availability Read Replica Database Scenario Your e-commerce database is mission-critical. If an availability zone goes down, your system must failover instantaneously. Furthermore, your analytics team…

Serverless: API Gateway to Cloud Functions to Firestore ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate API Gateway Cloud Functions Firestore Serverless Scenario You are building a microservice to track user high scores. Exposing individual Cloud Functions directly to clients is difficult for routing…

Architecture: Production VPC Topology ☁ GCP 🔥 Intermediate VPC Cloud NAT Firewalls IAP Scenario In a production environment, you never use the `default` VPC network. You need a custom VPC with strict boundaries. You will build a foundational networking stack…