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6.2. Quick Reference
🎯 Quick Reference: Compute Platform Decision
| Scenario Signal | Choose This |
|---|---|
| Needs OS-level control, specific licensing, or legacy dependencies | Compute Engine |
| Containerized, needs complex orchestration and fine-grained control | GKE Standard |
| Containerized, wants Google to manage nodes entirely | GKE Autopilot |
| Stateless container, scales to zero, no Kubernetes concepts wanted | Cloud Run |
| Small, event-triggered logic, source code (not a container) | Cloud Run functions |
| Hosting a built AI agent | Agent Runtime (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) |
Remember: "Control costs operational effort — the more Google manages, the less you configure, but the less you can override."
🎯 Quick Reference: Data Product Decision
| Requirement | Choose This |
|---|---|
| Relational, moderate scale, familiar SQL | Cloud SQL |
| Relational, global scale, strong consistency | Spanner |
| High-performance transactional + analytical hybrid | AlloyDB |
| Document model, real-time mobile/web sync | Firestore |
| Massive-scale, low-latency wide-column (IoT/time-series) | Bigtable |
| Large-scale analytics and reporting (OLAP) | BigQuery |
| Moving/transforming data in motion | Dataflow |
| Decoupled asynchronous messaging | Pub/Sub |
| Sub-millisecond caching | Memorystore |
🎯 Quick Reference: IAM Role Type Decision
| Requirement | Choose This |
|---|---|
| Broad access, small sandbox environment only | Primitive role (rarely correct on this exam) |
| Common job function, ready-made bundle | Predefined role |
| Exact permission set, no predefined role fits | Custom role |
🎯 Quick Reference: Network Connectivity Decision
| Requirement | Choose This |
|---|---|
| Lower cost, encrypted, over the public internet | Cloud VPN |
| Two Google Cloud VPCs need private connectivity | VPC Network Peering |
| Highest bandwidth, most predictable latency, no public internet | Cloud Interconnect |
| Private instance needs outbound-only internet access | Cloud NAT |
Remember: "NAT goes out, never in. VPN and Interconnect go both ways — the only question is cost versus bandwidth."
Written byAlvin Varughese
Founder•18 professional certifications