Google Cloud Resource Manager

Definition

Google Cloud Resource Manager is a Google Cloud service for organizing projects into a hierarchy of folders and an organization node, so that IAM permissions and policies can be applied consistently across many projects.

Overview

Google Cloud's resource hierarchy places an organization node at the top, representing the company itself, with folders and projects nested beneath it, and individual resources such as virtual machines or storage buckets nested inside projects. Resource Manager is the API and console experience for creating and managing that hierarchy — creating folders, moving projects between them, and setting IAM policies or organization policies at any level so they are inherited by everything below. Folders can be nested to reflect a company's structure, commonly by department, team, or environment, and Organization Policies — a separate but closely related service — let administrators constrain what resources can do at any node in the hierarchy, for example restricting which regions resources can be created in or disabling external IP addresses on virtual machines. Because IAM bindings and organization policies both flow down the hierarchy, a permission or restriction set on the organization node or a high-level folder automatically applies to every project created beneath it, including projects created afterward, which removes the need to reconfigure governance for every new project. Resource Manager is the foundation Google Cloud recommends building a landing zone on, guided by Google's enterprise foundations blueprint, and it plays the same structural role that AWS Organizations and Azure Management Groups play in their respective clouds — giving a growing organization one place to reason about access, policy, and cost across every project it owns.

Key Features

• Hierarchical structure of organization, folders, and projects for grouping Google Cloud resources
• IAM policy inheritance from the organization node down through folders to individual projects
• Organization Policy Service integration for constraining resource configuration organization-wide
• Ability to nest folders to mirror a company's departmental or environment structure
• APIs and Cloud Console UI for programmatically creating and reorganizing the resource hierarchy
• Support for moving projects between folders as organizational needs change
• Central point for applying Google Cloud's enterprise foundations blueprint recommendations

Use Cases

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Frequently Asked Questions

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