What Is the Associate Cloud Engineer? Glossary & Key Terms

IAM
Identity and Access Management — the Google Cloud service that controls who (identity) has what access (role) to which resource.
Service Account
A non-human account used by applications or VMs to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs, assigned IAM roles like any other identity.
Project
The base-level container in Google Cloud that organizes resources, enables billing, and provides the boundary for API enablement and IAM policies.
Compute Engine
Google Cloud's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering for creating and managing virtual machine instances.
Managed Instance Group (MIG)
A group of identical Compute Engine VMs managed together, supporting autoscaling, autohealing, and rolling updates from an instance template.
Instance Template
A reusable specification defining machine type, boot disk image, and network settings used to create Compute Engine VM instances.
Preemptible VM / Spot VM
A low-cost, short-lived Compute Engine instance that Google may terminate at any time, intended for interruption-tolerant workloads.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Google Cloud's managed service for running and orchestrating containerized applications using Kubernetes.
App Engine
A fully managed Platform-as-a-Service for deploying web applications and APIs without provisioning or managing servers.
Cloud Run
A managed serverless platform for running stateless containers that automatically scales, including down to zero.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
A global, software-defined private network in Google Cloud that provides connectivity for resources across regions via regional subnets.
Subnet
A regional range of IP addresses within a VPC network where resources such as VM instances are assigned addresses.
Firewall Rule
A VPC-level configuration that allows or denies specified network traffic to or from resources based on direction, protocol, port, and source/target criteria.
Cloud NAT
A managed service that provides outbound internet connectivity for resources without external IP addresses, without allowing unsolicited inbound connections.
Cloud Load Balancing
A fully distributed, managed service for automatically distributing user traffic across multiple backend instances or regions.
Cloud Storage
Google Cloud's object storage service for storing unstructured data in buckets, offering multiple storage classes for different access patterns.
Persistent Disk
Durable, network-attached block storage for Compute Engine VMs that persists independently of the instance lifecycle.
Cloud SQL
A fully managed relational database service supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server engines.
Cloud Spanner
A fully managed, horizontally scalable relational database service offering global consistency and high availability.
Firestore
A fully managed, serverless NoSQL document database designed for flexible, hierarchical data and real-time synchronization.
BigQuery
Google Cloud's serverless, highly scalable enterprise data warehouse for running SQL-based analytics over large datasets.
Cloud Monitoring
A service that collects and visualizes metrics, uptime checks, and dashboards, and triggers alerts on Google Cloud resource health.
Cloud Logging
A centralized service for ingesting, storing, searching, and exporting log entries from Google Cloud services and applications.
Cloud Audit Logs
Logs generated by Google Cloud services that record administrative activity, data access, and system events for auditing purposes.