Cloud Digital Leader Cheat Sheet

Google Cloud has regions (multi-AZ) and zones (an individual datacenter)

A region has ≥3 zones; deploying multi-zone = high availability

Points of presence for CDN (Cloud CDN, Cloud Interconnect)

Google’s SDN that controls the VM network

Premium Network Tier: Google’s private network (lower latency). Standard: public internet.

Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Recommit, Retire, Retain

Rehost: move VMs unchanged (fastest migration, fewer cloud benefits)

Refactor: rewrite to take advantage of cloud-native services

AI/ML, data analytics, multicloud as business accelerators

Google secures the infrastructure, the customer secures data and access

Identity and Access Management — who can do what on which resource

Grant only the permissions that are needed

Identity for applications and workloads (not humans)

Encryption key management; CMEK = customer-managed encryption keys

Security perimeters for sensitive data

WAF and DDoS protection

ML platform (since 2026 part of Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform)

Train models without ML expertise

Vision, Speech, Natural Language, Translation — no training required

Train ML models directly with SQL

Google’s generative AI model, available in Vertex AI

Fairness, Interpretability, Privacy, Security as pillars

Billing isolation unit

Linked to projects, receives the charges

Notifications when spend exceeds defined thresholds

1-3 years, up to 55% (70% on memory-optimized)

Automatic discount for continuous monthly usage

Up to 91% discount, can be terminated in 30 s (formerly preemptible)

Detailed spend analysis

No deep technical knowledge required: focus on business value

No infrastructure to manage, pay per query

Run = containers, Functions = individual functions

Zone = a single datacenter. Region = multiple zones

GKE Multi-Cloud and Google Distributed Cloud (formerly Anthos): apps on GCP, on-premises, and other clouds

Google Cloud’s SIEM/SOAR (formerly Chronicle)