Part-124: 🌥️Understanding Google Cloud Resource Hierarchy — Made Simple

When you start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), one of the first things to understand is how resources are organized. GCP uses a hierarchical structure to help you manage permissions, policies, and billing efficiently — especially for large organizations with multiple teams and projects.

Let’s break it down with two easy visuals 👇

🧩 1. Google Cloud Organization Structure

In GCP, everything starts with your Organization (like your company).
Here’s the breakdown from top to bottom:

🏢 Organization

• This is the root node for your company.
• All resources (projects, folders, VMs, etc.) live under this organization.
• Created automatically when your company uses Google Workspace or Cloud Identity.

📂 Folders

• Think of folders like departments or business units (e.g., Department A, Department B, Shared Infra).
• Folders can contain teams, products, or projects.
• They help apply policies and IAM roles at a broader level — for example, “Give all developers in Team A access to Dev projects.”

🧱 Projects

The main container for all resources (VMs, Cloud Storage, Databases, etc.).

Each project has:

• A unique Project ID
• Billing association
• IAM policies

You can have separate projects for Development, QA, and Production.

⚙️ Resources

These are the actual services you use:

• 🖥️ Compute Engine (VMs)
• ☁️ Cloud Run (Serverless apps)
• 📦 Cloud Storage (File storage)

These exist inside projects.

👉 This layered approach helps keep your infrastructure organized, secure, and scalable.

🏗️ 2. Google Cloud Resource Hierarchy (with Billing)

💳 Payments Profile

• Represents your payment method — similar to adding a credit card.
• Connected to a Billing Account.

🧾 Billing Account

• Pays for all the projects linked to it.
• One billing account can cover multiple projects across folders or even organizations.

🏢 Organization → Folders → Projects → Resources

The same structure continues:

• Organization manages overall access.
• Folders group related projects.
• Projects contain actual cloud resources like VM, DB, and storage.

IAM (Identity and Access Management) policies flow downward — meaning if someone has access at the Organization level, they can access everything below (unless restricted).

🪄 Example — A Real-World Analogy

Imagine your company is “TechCorp”:

• Organization: TechCorp (root)
• Folders:

1. Dept A (Engineering)
2. Dept B (Marketing)

1. Development Project
2. QA Project
3. Production Project

1. Compute Engine (VMs) for app servers
2. Cloud Storage for static files
3. Cloud Run for backend APIs

So — all access, billing, and policies are managed from the top-down structure.

💡 Key Takeaways

• GCP resources are hierarchical for better control and governance.
• Every resource has one parent, except the Organization (which is the root).
• Projects are the building blocks of all workloads.
• Folders are optional but powerful for large organizations.
• IAM and billing flow from top to bottom.

🌟 Thanks for reading! If this post added value, a like ❤️, follow, or share would encourage me to keep creating more content.

— Latchu | Senior DevOps & Cloud Engineer

☁️ AWS | GCP | ☸️ Kubernetes | 🔐 Security | ⚡ Automation
📌 Sharing hands-on guides, best practices & real-world cloud solutions