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GCP Cloud : Day 01 - GCP Resource Hierarchy (Organization, Folders, Projects)

  1. Organization:
    • The top-level container for all GCP resources.
    • Usually mapped to a company’s domain in Google Workspace or Cloud Identity (e.g., example.com).
    • You only have one Org node per domain.
    • Policies applied here flow down to all folders, projects, and resources.****
    • Example: Org = company.com
  2. Folders:
    • *Optional layer used to group projects.
    • Can represent business units, departments, or environments (e.g., Finance, R&D, Prod, Dev).
    • Supports nested folders (hierarchies within business units).
    • Useful for delegating admin roles or enforcing org policies at a department level.
    • Example:
      • Org –> Folder: Finance
      • Org –> Folder: Engineering
  3. Projects:
    • The base unit of organization in GCP.
    • Required for any resource (you cannot create a VM, bucket, DB without a project).
    • Contains:
      • Resources (VMs, buckets, databases, etc.)
      • APIs & Services enabled
      • Billing association
      • IAM policies specific to the project
    • Projects are identified by:
      • Project Name (human-readable)
      • Project ID (unique, immutable)
      • Project Number (unique, system-generated) 👉 Example:
      • Folder: Engineering –> Project: eng-prod
      • Folder: Engineering –> Project: eng-dev
  4. Resources
    • The actual services you create and use.
    • Examples:
      • Compute Engine VM
      • Cloud Storage bucket
      • BigQuery dataset
      • GKE cluster
    • Resources inherit IAM policies & org policies from the project, folder, and organization. 👉 Example:
      • Project: eng-prod → Resource: VM instance
      • Project: finance-prod → Resource: BigQuery dataset
flowchart TD A[Organization: company.com] --> B[Folder: Finance] A --> C[Folder: Engineering] B --> D[Project: finance-prod] B --> E[Project: finance-dev] C --> F[Project: eng-prod] C --> G[Project: eng-dev] D --> H[Resource: BigQuery dataset] E --> I[Resource: Cloud SQL] F --> J[Resource: GKE cluster] G --> K[Resource: VM instance]

Task:
- Create User - CLI Command - Create Admin Group - Create Service Account and generate API key - Commands to create folders/projects - Write terraform code/modules for the same

August 20, 2026 ∙