GCP Fundamentals Cheatsheet

gcloud Setup & Config

# Auth + init
gcloud auth login
gcloud init

# Project / region defaults
gcloud config set project my-app-2026
gcloud config set compute/region us-central1
gcloud config set compute/zone us-central1-a
gcloud config list

# Named configs (switch accounts/projects)
gcloud config configurations create work
gcloud config configurations activate work

# Enable APIs
gcloud services enable compute.googleapis.com storage.googleapis.com

Resource Hierarchy

IAM

Bind & Manage

# Grant a role
gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding PROJECT \
  --member="user:dev@example.com" --role="roles/viewer"

# Service account
gcloud iam service-accounts create app-sa --display-name="App SA"

# View effective policy
gcloud projects get-iam-policy PROJECT

Member Prefixes

Compute Engine

# Create + SSH + delete
gcloud compute instances create web-1 \
  --machine-type=e2-medium --image-family=debian-12 \
  --image-project=debian-cloud --zone=us-central1-a
gcloud compute ssh web-1 --zone=us-central1-a
gcloud compute instances list
gcloud compute instances delete web-1 --zone=us-central1-a

# Firewall rule
gcloud compute firewall-rules create allow-http \
  --allow=tcp:80 --target-tags=http-server

# Managed instance group + autoscaling
gcloud compute instance-groups managed create web-mig \
  --template=web-tmpl --size=2 --zone=us-central1-a
gcloud compute instance-groups managed set-autoscaling web-mig \
  --zone=us-central1-a --max-num-replicas=10 --target-cpu-utilization=0.6

Storage & Data

# Cloud Storage
gcloud storage buckets create gs://my-bucket --location=us-central1
gcloud storage cp file.txt gs://my-bucket/
gcloud storage ls gs://my-bucket/
gcloud storage rm gs://my-bucket/file.txt

# Cloud SQL
gcloud sql instances create pg1 --database-version=POSTGRES_16 \
  --tier=db-f1-micro --region=us-central1

# BigQuery query
bq query --use_legacy_sql=false 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `proj.ds.tbl`'

Storage Classes

Cross-Cloud Map