Setting up a GCP landing zone from scratch — a step-by-step approach for DevOps engineers new to GCP. Let's consider a familiar situation: a company has decided to move part of its IT to Google Cloud. They assigned the job to a DevOps engineer — not a GCP expert, but someone with enough knowledge and experience to set up and deploy services on GCP. Sound familiar? Thousands of companies have been exactly in this position — and thousands more will be. Here we describe an approach to setting up Google Cloud for a small company — a startup, for example — or for a single system within a large company, using Merlin Studio ( https://site.merlin-studio.cloud ). We assume the company has no strict regulatory requirements (such as HIPAA or GDPR), but the company does care about following best practices and leaving room for seamless extension in the future.…