GCP for DevOps — Practice Projects

Practice Projects

This chapter provides five end-to-end practice projects that integrate multiple GCP services and DevOps concepts covered throughout this tutorial. Each project builds real-world infrastructure you might encounter in production environments.

Project Roadmap

Practice Project Roadmap:
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                                         │
│  Project 1: Production VPC with Terraform               │
│  ├── VPC, subnets, firewall, Cloud NAT                 │
│  └── Terraform modules, remote state in GCS            │
│                                                         │
│  Project 2: GKE Autopilot CI/CD Pipeline               │
│  ├── GKE Autopilot cluster                             │
│  ├── Cloud Build triggers                              │
│  └── Cloud Deploy delivery pipeline                    │
│                                                         │
│  Project 3: Serverless REST API                        │
│  ├── Cloud Run services                                │
│  ├── API Gateway                                       │
│  └── Firestore + Secret Manager                        │
│                                                         │
│  Project 4: Terraform 3-Tier Architecture              │
│  ├── Load balancer → App (MIG) → Cloud SQL             │
│  └── Full IaC with modules                             │
│                                                         │
│  Project 5: Monitoring & Alerting System               │
│  ├── Custom metrics + dashboards                       │
│  ├── Alerting policies + notification channels         │
│  └── Log-based metrics + SLOs                          │
│                                                         │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

What You Will Build

#	Project	Services Used	Difficulty
1	Production VPC	VPC, Subnets, NAT, Terraform	★★☆☆☆
2	GKE CI/CD Pipeline	GKE, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy	★★★☆☆
3	Serverless REST API	Cloud Run, API Gateway, Firestore	★★★☆☆
4	Terraform 3-Tier	LB, MIG, Cloud SQL, Terraform	★★★★☆
5	Monitoring System	Cloud Monitoring, Logging, SLOs	★★★☆☆

Prerequisites

Before starting these projects, ensure you have:

• A GCP project with billing enabled
• gcloud CLI installed and configured
• Terraform ≥ 1.5 installed
• kubectl installed
• Basic familiarity with all previous chapters

Tips for Success

1. Start with Project 1 — it builds foundational networking used by other projects
2. Use a dedicated project — create a separate GCP project for practice to avoid impacting production
3. Clean up after each project — destroy resources with terraform destroy or manual deletion to avoid charges
4. Label everything — use consistent labels (project=practice, env=dev) for easy cleanup
5. Commit your code — use Git to version control your Terraform and application code

Start with → Production VPC with Terraform