How to Manage Your Cloud Infrastructure with GCP Organizations

Introduction :

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a powerful suite of tools for businesses, but managing resources across various departments or teams can become complex. This is where GCP Organizations come in – providing a structured way to manage resources and enforce governance across your entire cloud environment.

In GCP, an Organization represents the root of your cloud resource hierarchy. It allows you to manage billing, access, and policies across your entire enterprise, ensuring resources are organized efficiently and securely.

Understanding the GCP Hierarchy:

• Organization: The top-level container for all resources.

• Folders: Containers for grouping projects (you can have multiple folders to organize resources by department, region, etc.).

• Projects: The core unit where resources like Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, etc., are deployed

Why Use GCP Organizations?

• Policy Management: Enforce organization-wide security and compliance policies.

• Centralized Billing: Consolidate billing and reduce management overhead.

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Grant appropriate permissions at different levels to maintain security.

Best Practices for Managing GCP Organizations

• Use folders to organize projects by department, region, or environment (e.g., dev, staging, production).

• Leverage organizational policies to ensure consistency and security across resources.

• Regularly audit roles and permissions to maintain the principle of least privilege.

Overriding Behavior:

• Lower-level policies override higher-level policies: If there is a conflict between a policy applied at a higher level (e.g., organization) and one at a lower level (e.g., folder or project), the lower-level policy takes precedence.

• Inherited policies: If no explicit policy is set at a lower level (folder or project), the policy from the higher level (organization or folder) will apply.

For example:

• If a deny policy is set at the organization level to prevent the creation of certain resources, that rule will apply to all projects unless a specific policy is set at the project level to allow those resources.

Examples of Organizational Policies:

• Service Account Restrictions: Preventing the creation of service accounts that grant excessive permissions.

• Network Policies: Ensuring that certain network configurations are used across the organization.

• Resource Location Restrictions: Restricting the regions in which resources can be provisioned to comply with data residency requirements.