Google Cloud recently announced the general availability of Google Cloud Setup, a new service designed to provide a guided pathway for users to establish a secure, best-practice-based foundational cloud environment.
With Cloud Setup, the company aims to simplify the initial configuration process for both new users and experienced teams migrating critical workloads. The authors of a Google blog post on the service explain:
Think of it as your expert guide, walking you through the essential first steps so you can focus on what truly matters: rapidly deploying your innovative applications and services.
Google Cloud Setup offers three distinct guided workflows to meet varying organizational needs:
- Proof-of-concept: A lightweight environment focused on minimal configuration for exploring the platform or running sandbox workloads.
- Production: A flow recommended for setting up production-ready infrastructure that adheres to Google Cloud’s best practices for security and scalability.
- Enhanced security: A more advanced option for workloads with rigorous security and compliance requirements, which defaults to stricter security controls.
(Source: Google blog post)
By choosing one of the workflows, users will be guided through a series of onboarding steps, presenting defaults backed by Google Cloud best practices. Furthermore, at the end of the guided flow, users can either deploy their configuration directly via the Google Cloud console or download a Terraform configuration file for later use with other Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methods. In addition, users can also extend their initial configuration and build their own architecture.
Both AWS and Microsoft Azure offer similar solutions, often referred to as “landing zones.” AWS provides AWS Control Tower, a managed service that automates the setup of a secure, multi-account environment with pre-configured guardrails for governance. Similarly, Microsoft Azure offers an Azure Landing Zone as a core part of its Cloud Adoption Framework, which provides a scalable and modular environment with predefined best practices for identity, governance, and security to support enterprise workloads from day one. Yet the key difference is that Google offers a complete out-of-the-box workflow to set up a landing zone for Google users.
According to Google, with the Google Cloud setup, there will be a significant reduction in manual setup efforts, enabling faster application deployment and quicker access to the platform’s capabilities. Richard Seroter, Chief Evangelist at Google, tweeted:
How much time should it reasonably take to set up a public cloud environment with enterprise-grade security, connectivity, and maintainability? For @googlecloud it used to take days or weeks. Now? Minutes.
Lastly, all components and service integrations enabled during the setup process are free or include some level of no-cost access.
