Google Cloud Platform: consulting, management and migration on GCP

Google Cloud is our primary cloud: the platform we run most of our projects on and know best. We don’t just open a project and spin up machines: we design the infrastructure, keep it tidy and keep its costs in check, with documented configurations and a single point of contact. The goal is a clear, secure and maintainable GCP environment that stays yours even on the day we stop working together.

Overview

GCP’s catalogue is broad, but the difference lies in how the pieces are put together. A sound base starts with a sensible project hierarchy - production kept separate from staging and testing - VPC networks designed with care, IAM permissions cut down to the essentials, and cost management active from day one, not after the first bill that’s gone off the rails.

We’ve worked on Google Cloud for years and value its practical side: per-second billing, committed use discounts, managed services like Cloud SQL that take away maintenance without taking away control, and a global network that simplifies load balancing and latency. Our job is to make the infrastructure predictable: resources sized to the real workload, spend attributed through labels, access that’s traced, and configurations described in versioned files rather than clicks that are hard to reconstruct. Less magic, more control.

Typical problems we solve

• The GCP project started as a free trial and grew one click at a time → a full assessment of resources, networks, IAM and spend, then we tidy up step by step.
• The bill keeps rising and nobody can say what it’s for → labels by cost centre, budgets with alerts and a readable report of the main line items.
• Service accounts with the Owner role and keys scattered across repositories → least-privilege IAM roles, regenerated keys and traceable access.
• Production, staging and test all sit in the same project → we split environments into separate projects, each with its own permissions and budget.
• VMs running 24/7 for jobs that take an hour a day → rightsizing, scheduled shutdowns and spot instances for batch workloads.
• Snapshots never scheduled and restores never tested → we schedule snapshots and backups to Cloud Storage and verify them with test restores.
• Everything needs to move to GCP from on-premise or another provider → a phased migration, tested beforehand, with a written rollback plan.

What’s included

• Initial assessment: a snapshot of projects, resources, networks, IAM and spend, with priorities put in writing.
• Compute Engine: virtual machines sized to the real workload, images, disks, scheduled snapshots and instance groups where they’re needed.
• Networks and VPC: subnets, firewall rules, Cloud NAT and load balancers designed to isolate and protect services.
• Cloud Storage: buckets for backups, assets and archives, with storage classes and lifecycle policies suited to the data.
• IAM and security: least-privilege roles and service accounts, separated environments and access that can be reconstructed after the fact.
• Cost control: budgets, billing alerts, spend labels, rightsizing and committed use discounts where they genuinely pay off.
• Terraform where it helps: infrastructure described as code when the complexity justifies it; direct, documented configuration everywhere else.

Stack and technologies

On Compute Engine we install Linux VMs, usually on a Debian or Ubuntu Server base, with our projects’ application stack: Nginx or Apache, PHP-FPM, MariaDB or PostgreSQL when the database runs on an instance, Cloud SQL when the managed service is the better fit. Cloud Storage covers backups, assets and archives; Cloud DNS and load balancers round out how services are exposed. We design VPC networks with subnets, firewalls and Cloud NAT; identities run on IAM and dedicated service accounts for each application.

For automation we use Terraform where the complexity justifies it - never as a matter of principle - and the gcloud CLI with readable scripts for one-off tasks. Monitoring runs through Cloud Monitoring or through Prometheus and Grafana, depending on what you already use. Everything ends up in versioned files with the choices explained: no configuration that lives only in the console.

A real-world example

A software house asked us to take over the Google Cloud project running its clients’ applications: a single project for everything, Owner-role service accounts shared across multiple applications, and a rising bill nobody could explain. We started with an assessment: a resource inventory, an access map, spend by service. Then, step by step: environments split into separate projects, IAM roles cut down to what’s needed, keys regenerated, cost labels and budgets with alerts, scheduled snapshots for the disks and a first documented test restore. Oversized VMs were resized based on usage data collected over a month of observation. Result: spend attributable client by client, a bill that’s predictable again, and a document describing the whole infrastructure, handed over to them.

Who it’s for

• Companies and teams already using Google Cloud who want order, security and spend they can account for.
• Software houses and agencies looking for a partner to design or manage the GCP infrastructure behind their projects.
• Anyone migrating from on-premise or another cloud to Google Cloud in a planned way, with no leaps in the dark.
• Growing projects that want reproducible infrastructure described in readable files, not improvised.

How we work

The first step is always the assessment: what’s running, who has access, what it costs. From there we propose interventions in priority order and apply them step by step, testing changes before touching production; migrations proceed in phases, with verified backups and a rollback ready. We set budgets and alerts together with you, so spend stays a known figure, not a surprise.

Standard coverage runs Monday to Friday, 10:00-18:00 , with priority triage described on the response times page; for recurring GCP management, the typical option is hour packages, which never expire. Quotes are free, with a reply within one business day. And the project stays in your name: no lock-in, ever.