Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Google's public cloud computing platform offering on-demand compute, storage, networking, databases, machine learning, and managed services that run on the same infrastructure powering Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail. GCP competes with AWS and Azure by emphasizing deep AI/ML integration, global networking performance, and serverless-first architectures. A key mental model: GCP services are organized around resource hierarchy (organizations → folders → projects → resources) with IAM for fine-grained access control, making multi-project, multi-team deployments easier to govern at scale than flat permission models.

---