Now let's get into the nitty-gritty of the Google Cloud Platform. Any cloud platform really is all about resources. It allows you to use resources for a fee. What's cool about Cloud Platforms is the great diversity and versatility in terms of what resources are available to us. This might include hardware such as virtual machine instances, or persistent disks, services such as BigQuery or BigTable or even more complex software such as Cloud ML Engine and the various APIs for machine learning. But in addition to just the hardware and software, there is a lot of little detailed networking, load balancing, logging, monitoring, and so on. The GCP, like other major cloud platforms, provides a great variety of services; take load balancing for instance, GCP load balancing options span to four different layers (that is, data link, network, transport, and application layers) of the OSI networking stack.

You will learn the following topics in this chapter:

• The difference between regions and zones
• The organization of resources in a GCP project
• Accessing cloud resources using Cloud Shell and the web console