Glossary#

  • Account - The Google account (email) associated with an individual. This is the identity that you use to access console and takes the form of an email address.

  • API - Application Programming Interface (API). An external interface for a library or software, usually well documented. The cloud uses remote accessible APIs to allocate and control resources.

  • Billing Account - an account used to pay for Google Cloud services. A Billing Account is associated with a Project and enables resource allocation. A project has only one Billing Account associated with it. A Billing account can be used for multiple Projects.

  • Bucket - A collection of key value pairs (similar to a Python dictionary) and is often called object storage. Object storage in Google is called Cloud Storage and is similar to Amazon S3.

  • Cloud Shell - A Linux command line interface (CLI) running inside the GCP web console.

  • Disk Image - The operating system disk for a VM Instance such as Ubuntu, Debian, and other Linux distributions.

  • Organization - A top level container for projects in an institution, usually one per institution.

  • Project - Resources and services in Google Cloud are created within a single Project.

  • Project Name - The long human readable name of your project. You can change this.

  • Project ID - an alpha-numeric string identifier for the project. This is not changeable.

  • Project Number - a long number that also identifies the project but is rarely used (it is an internal identifier).

  • Region - A geographical region within the world (typically a city) in which a number of physical or logical data centers are located (each is a different zone). An example of a region is us-west2, which is located in Los Angeles.

  • Service Account - A machine account or identity that is used to give permissions to a resource, such as a VM Instance in GCP. These take the form of an email, usually ending with gserviceaccount.com.

  • Label - A key value pair attached to a resource to aid in finding resources, allocating billing, debugging, etc.. A Label is similar to a tag in AWS and Azure.

  • VM Instance - A Virtual Machine (VM) is a virtual computer running in a zone.

  • Zone - A logical or physical data center (a building with computers in it) in which cloud resources physically reside. Each zone in a region have different resources. An example of a zone is us-west2-c.