Google Cloud Resource hierarchy

Google Cloud's resource hierarchy provides a way to organize and manage resources such as projects, folders, and organizations in a structured manner. This hierarchy helps in applying policies, setting permissions, and maintaining control over resources. Here’s a high-level overview:

1. Organization:

   • The top level of the hierarchy.

   • Represents a company or entity.

   • All resources within the Google Cloud environment fall under an organization.

   • Helps in centralizing the management and administration of resources.

   • Organization policies and IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles can be applied here and inherited by child resources.

2. Folders:

   • Nested under the organization.

   • Used to group projects and other folders for better organization.

   • Can have policies and IAM roles specific to them, inherited by contained resources.

   • Useful for departments, teams, or projects within a company to segregate resources.

3. Projects:

   • The primary unit for creating and using Google Cloud resources.

   • Everything in Google Cloud (e.g., VM instances, storage buckets, databases) is contained within a project.

   • Projects contain resources and services that can be managed together.

   • IAM roles and permissions can be set at the project level, controlling access to the project's resources.

4. Resources:

   • The actual services and entities created within projects (e.g., Compute Engine VMs, Cloud Storage buckets, BigQuery datasets).

   • Permissions and policies can be applied to individual resources, but typically inherit from the project level.

Organization (example.com)
  ├── Folder (Engineering)
  │   ├── Project (Dev Project)
  │   │   └── Resource (Compute Engine VM)
  │   └── Project (Test Project)
  └── Folder (Marketing)
      ├── Project (Website)
      └── Project (Analytics)

The diagram represents an example Google Cloud resource hierarchy in its complete form

Some Other things to remember