Google Cloud Learning Roadmap
Seven stages from cloud fundamentals to production RAG and agents — 65 topics, ~47 hours. Click any topic with a page to dive in; completed topics fill in from your local progress.
1
Stage 1 · Cloud Foundations
The vocabulary and mental models every cloud engineer needs before touching Google Cloud specifics.
What is cloud computing?
Beginner Concept ⏱ 20m
Public / private / hybrid / multi-cloud
Beginner Concept ⏱ 25m
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
Beginner Concept ⏱ 20m
Serverless computing
Beginner Concept ⏱ 20m
Cloud Run · Cloud Functions
Containers & managed services
Beginner Concept ⏱ 25m
Cloud Run · GKE
Shared responsibility model
Beginner Security ⏱ 20m
Cloud economics & elasticity
Beginner FinOps ⏱ 25m
Scalability, availability, reliability
Beginner Architecture ⏱ 30m
Regions, zones & points of presence
Beginner Concept ⏱ 20m
Projects, billing accounts & resource hierarchy
Beginner Governance ⏱ 30m
Resource Manager
2
Stage 2 · Google Cloud Foundations
How you actually interact with Google Cloud — tooling, identity, and project structure.
Cloud Console, gcloud CLI & Cloud Shell
Beginner Tooling ⏱ 30m
Application Default Credentials
Beginner Security ⏱ 25m
IAM
Client libraries & Cloud APIs
Beginner Tooling ⏱ 25m
Service accounts
Intermediate Security ⏱ 30m
IAM
Projects, folders & organizations
Intermediate Governance ⏱ 30m
Resource Manager
Billing accounts & Resource Manager
Beginner Governance ⏱ 25m
Billing
Labels, tags & quotas
Beginner Governance ⏱ 25m
Service enablement & environment separation
Intermediate Governance ⏱ 25m
3
Stage 3 · Core GCP Services
The building blocks: compute, storage, databases, messaging, networking, and operations.
Compute Engine
Intermediate Compute ⏱ 60m
Compute Engine
Cloud Run & Cloud Run Jobs
Intermediate Compute ⏱ 60m
Cloud Run
Google Kubernetes Engine
Advanced Compute ⏱ 90m
GKE
Cloud Storage
Beginner Storage ⏱ 45m
Cloud Storage
Cloud SQL & AlloyDB
Intermediate Database ⏱ 60m
Cloud SQL · AlloyDB
Firestore, Bigtable & Memorystore
Intermediate Database ⏱ 60m
Firestore · Bigtable
BigQuery
Intermediate Analytics ⏱ 60m
BigQuery
Pub/Sub, Eventarc & Cloud Tasks
Intermediate Messaging ⏱ 60m
Pub/Sub · Eventarc
Workflows & Cloud Scheduler
Intermediate Orchestration ⏱ 45m
Workflows
API Gateway & Cloud Load Balancing
Intermediate Networking ⏱ 45m
API Gateway
Cloud CDN, DNS & Cloud Armor
Intermediate Networking ⏱ 45m
Cloud Armor
Cloud Monitoring, Logging & Secret Manager
Intermediate Operations ⏱ 45m
Cloud Logging
4
Stage 4 · Backend & Application Engineering
Turning services into production APIs: auth, background work, and distributed concerns.
Deploying Python & FastAPI
Intermediate Backend ⏱ 60m
Cloud Run
REST API design & versioning
Intermediate Backend ⏱ 45m
API & service-to-service authentication
Intermediate Security ⏱ 45m
IAM
Background processing & task queues
Intermediate Backend ⏱ 45m
Cloud Tasks
File uploads & signed URLs
Intermediate Backend ⏱ 40m
Cloud Storage
Database connectivity & pooling
Intermediate Backend ⏱ 45m
AlloyDB · Cloud SQL
Caching
Intermediate Backend ⏱ 30m
Memorystore
Retries, idempotency & correlation IDs
Advanced Reliability ⏱ 45m
Distributed tracing & multi-tenant design
Advanced Operations ⏱ 45m
Cloud Trace
5
Stage 5 · Production Architecture
Designing systems that stay up, stay secure, and stay affordable under real load.
Stateless services & horizontal scaling
Intermediate Architecture ⏱ 40m
Cloud Run
Load balancing & private services
Advanced Networking ⏱ 45m
Cloud Load Balancing
Multi-zone architecture & DB replicas
Advanced Reliability ⏱ 45m
Cloud SQL
Asynchronous & event-driven processing
Advanced Architecture ⏱ 45m
Pub/Sub
Timeouts, retries & circuit breakers
Advanced Reliability ⏱ 40m
Dead-letter topics & fault isolation
Advanced Reliability ⏱ 40m
Pub/Sub
Disaster recovery & multi-region
Advanced Reliability ⏱ 60m
Spanner
Security boundaries & observability
Advanced Security ⏱ 45m
VPC Service Controls
Cost optimization
Intermediate FinOps ⏱ 40m
6
Stage 6 · Data Engineering
Moving, storing, and analyzing data at scale — batch and streaming.
Batch vs streaming processing
Intermediate Data ⏱ 40m
Dataflow
Data lakes & warehouses
Intermediate Data ⏱ 40m
Cloud Storage · BigQuery
BigQuery deep dive
Intermediate Analytics ⏱ 60m
BigQuery
Dataflow (Apache Beam)
Advanced Data ⏱ 60m
Dataflow
Dataproc & Cloud Composer
Advanced Data ⏱ 60m
Dataproc · Cloud Composer
Datastream & Dataform
Advanced Data ⏱ 45m
Datastream
BigLake & data governance
Advanced Data ⏱ 45m
BigLake
Data quality & lineage
Advanced Data ⏱ 40m
Dataplex
7
Stage 7 · Machine Learning & Generative AI
From classical ML on Vertex AI to production RAG systems and multi-agent orchestration.
Vertex AI & Model Garden
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 60m
Vertex AI
Model selection & prompt engineering
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 60m
Gemini
Embeddings & vector search
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 60m
Vector Search
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 90m
Vertex AI · AlloyDB AI
AI agents & tool calling
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 60m
Agent Engine · ADK
Agent orchestration & multi-agent
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 60m
Workflows
Model & agent evaluation
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 45m
Vertex AI Eval
LLM observability & responsible AI
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 45m
Cloud Trace
AI security & cost optimization
Advanced GenAI ⏱ 45m