PCCP - Professional Cloud Certified Professional key terms

The root of the Google Cloud resource hierarchy, grouping all folders, projects, and resources under one company identity so policies, billing, and access can be administered centrally.

A container inside an organization that groups projects or other folders, letting administrators delegate ownership and apply policies at a level below the whole company.

The fundamental grouping unit in Google Cloud that owns resources, enables APIs, holds billing linkage, and forms the boundary for quotas and most access control decisions.

The rule that allow policies set on a parent resource (organization, folder, project) also apply to every descendant, with effective permissions being the union of all inherited grants.

A non-human identity owned by a project, used by workloads and applications to authenticate to Google Cloud APIs, and authorized through IAM roles rather than user credentials.

A mechanism that lets external workloads such as AWS, Azure, or on-premises systems exchange their own credentials for short-lived Google Cloud tokens, avoiding downloaded service account keys.

The security principle of granting each identity only the permissions it genuinely needs for its task, minimizing blast radius if credentials are compromised or misused.

A control that divides sensitive responsibilities among different identities, so no single person or account can both make and approve a high-risk change.

A constraint framework applied at organization, folder, or project level that restricts resource configurations, such as limiting allowed locations or blocking public bucket access, regardless of IAM permissions.

A security perimeter around Google Cloud services and APIs that helps prevent data exfiltration by restricting which networks and identities can reach protected resources.

A networking design where a host project owns subnets and centrally manages connectivity while multiple service projects attach their resources to those shared subnets.

A private connection between two Virtual Private Cloud networks that routes traffic using internal IP addresses, without gateways or public internet exposure.

A dedicated or partner-provided private physical connection between an on-premises network and Google Cloud, offering more predictable latency and bandwidth than internet-based VPN.

A managed routing service that exchanges routes dynamically between a VPC network and on-premises or other networks using BGP, commonly paired with VPN or Interconnect.

A Google Cloud load balancing product that terminates traffic at a global anycast IP, routes users to the nearest healthy backend, and supports HTTP(S) or TCP/SSL proxying.

A periodic probe that load balancers and managed instance groups use to decide whether a backend is able to receive traffic, removing unhealthy instances from rotation.

The automatic adjustment of compute capacity, such as managed instance group size or GKE pod count, based on metrics like CPU utilization, load, or queue depth.

A Compute Engine construct that maintains a specified number of identical VM instances, recreating failed ones and supporting autoscaling and rolling updates.

A reusable definition of VM properties such as machine type, image, disks, and startup script, used to create or update instances in a managed instance group.

A project-level limit on how much of a resource or API throughput can be consumed, protecting both the platform and the customer from unexpected runaway usage.

A Cloud Billing configuration that notifies recipients when spend or forecasted spend crosses defined thresholds, enabling cost oversight without hard spending caps.

A pricing arrangement in which a customer commits to a level of compute or database usage for one or three years in exchange for a reduced hourly rate.

An automatic discount applied to Compute Engine usage that runs for a significant portion of the billing month, rewarding steady workloads without any upfront commitment.

The managed observability service that collects metrics, uptime checks, and dashboards for Google Cloud and hybrid resources, and drives alerting policies.

A Cloud Monitoring rule that evaluates a condition, such as a metric threshold or absence of data, and notifies responders or triggers automation when the condition holds.

A service level objective states a measurable target for reliability, such as 99.9 percent of requests succeeding over 30 days, and anchors error budget decisions.

The amount of unreliability a service may experience within an SLO window, calculated as the gap between the target and 100 percent, used to balance release velocity against stability.

An architecture that runs workloads in more than one geographic region so that a regional outage does not stop service and latency can be reduced for distributed users.

Recovery time objective is the maximum acceptable duration to restore a service after a disruption, guiding backup strategy and failover automation design.

Recovery point objective is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, determining how frequently backups or replication must occur.

The process of shifting traffic or workloads from a failed primary system to a standby system, whether automated or manual, to restore service continuity.

Managing cloud resources through versioned, machine-readable configuration files so deployments are repeatable, reviewable, and consistent across environments.

An open-source declarative tool that provisions Google Cloud and other providers' resources from configuration files and tracks current state against desired state.

An automated sequence that builds, tests, and deploys changes, often including infrastructure changes, with gates that catch defects before they reach production.

A deployment technique that releases a change to a small subset of traffic or instances first, then expands it gradually while monitoring for regressions.

A progressive release pattern where a new version serves a small share of traffic and is compared against the stable version before full promotion or rollback.

Google Cloud guidance organized around pillars such as reliability, security, cost optimization, and operational excellence, used to review and improve architectures systematically.