The same landing zone, authored six times

What happens when six squads each need Google Cloud infrastructure in the same quarter and there is no shared way to get it.

Duplication

The same service accounts, network and secret plumbing, written again by a team that could not find the last version or did not trust what it found.

Divergence

Six copies that started identical and are now six different answers to the same question, each one a separate thing to patch when something changes.

Review

Security reviews the same pattern repeatedly because each squad brings its own variant. Review effort scales with the number of teams, not of patterns.

No answer

What is deployed, who deployed it, and what did it cost — three questions with three different sources of truth, none of them complete on its own.

One catalogue, your projects

RAD is a catalogue of ready-made Google Cloud deployment options and an engine that provisions them. The engine hosts nothing; it writes Terraform into a project you nominate.

  • 350+ deployment options across 190+ applications and platform modules

    Most applications ship in both a Cloud Run and a GKE variant, so the operating-model choice stays yours rather than being made for you.

  • Subject to your org policies

    When RAD deploys into your project it runs inside your organisation's policy boundary. It cannot widen that boundary, and a deployment your policies forbid simply fails.

  • Every Google Cloud region stays available

    Region narrowing applies only to projects RAD creates and manages. In your own project you keep every region Google offers, and your residency rules apply unchanged.

  • Basic and advanced modes

    Basic mode asks only for the variables that are genuinely mandatory, and a first deployment is always Basic. The module's full variable set opens on update, once your credit balance covers the update's estimated cost, for cases where a default is wrong. In a RAD-managed project the few settings it cannot support are hidden rather than failing at apply.

A platform engineering team reviewing Google Cloud infrastructure

Your Terraform, your project, RAD's state

The ownership question, and the one thing you do not get: RAD holds the Terraform state.

What RAD writes

  • ArtefactStandard Terraform
  • State locationRAD's Cloud Storage
  • Project ownerYou
  • Cloud scopeGoogle Cloud only

What RAD is not

  • In the request pathNo
  • A hosting providerNo
  • A proprietary abstractionNo
  • Required to keep runningNo

If you stop using RAD

  • Your workloadsKeep running
  • Your resourcesStay in your project
  • The Terraform stateStays with RAD
  • Ongoing changesYour own tooling

Every deployment's Terraform backend points at RAD's own Cloud Storage bucket, not at yours, and there is no state download in the product today. The project, the resources and the module source are yours; the state file that tracks them is held by us.

If you leave, you keep the running infrastructure in your own project, under your own policies. What you would have to rebuild is the state. For a team that keeps every production resource under its own state file, the answer is not today.

RAD does not hold it indefinitely. After the retention period, an untouched deployment record whose owner has not signed in and holds no purchased credits is deleted with its state, once a warning email has been sent. Your resources are untouched; only RAD's record goes.

Traffic never passes through RAD

RAD provisions infrastructure and then steps out of the way. Nothing your users touch resolves to us, so an outage on our side is not an outage on yours.

What leaving actually looks like

The resources keep running: they were created in your project by ordinary Terraform. The state file does not come with you, so re-adopting those resources as code is real work.

Diligence reads plain Terraform

Whoever inspects your estate next, whether an internal audit, an acquirer's technical review or a new platform lead, reads Terraform they already understand rather than our abstraction.

It deploys multi-application solutions, not just single applications

The catalogue also contains 60+ pre-composed solutions, defining 290+ member deployments across twelve categories.

Dependency-ordered, not staged

A solution holds between three and eight applications. Members with no prerequisite provision three at a time; one consuming another member's outputs waits for that deployment, not a stage in front of it.

Pre-wired module pairs

Where a producer-and-consumer pair is wired, RAD is designed to copy the producer's Terraform outputs into the consumer's configuration before it builds. Other solutions leave the connections to your team.

Teardown runs the graph in reverse

A shared project or a shared service is destroyed after the things living inside it have gone, not before. Getting this ordering wrong turns a clean teardown into a set of failed destroys and orphaned resources.

Or a governed project, in four policy tiers

Bring-your-own project is the default. The alternative exists for teams inside your organisation without one: a proof of concept, a training cohort, an external contributor. Each tier is a separate Google Cloud folder with its own policy set, so rules cannot drift between tiers.

Sandbox

  • External IP addressesDenied
  • Default networkSuppressed
  • Serial port accessDisabled
  • Service-account keysCreation and upload blocked
  • Public bucketsPrevented
  • Public database IPsRefused
  • Enabled servicesAllowlist
  • Who can select itAny user

Development

  • Credential hygieneSame floors as sandbox
  • External IPRequires OS Login and Shielded VM
  • Public bucketRequires uniform bucket-level access
  • Public database IPAuth Proxy only; IP allowlisting blocked
  • Who can select itAny user

Production

  • Policy setGoverned
  • Resource ceilingsDevelopment's set, raisable per project
  • Compute Engine vCPU per region48
  • Cloud Run vCPU per region32
  • Memorystore Redis per region32 GB
  • BigQuery scan per day1 TiB
  • GPUs and Vertex AI acceleratorsZero
  • Monthly spend alertNotifies only; never blocks
  • Who can select itAny user

Lab

  • Policy setTightest guardrails
  • Intended useTraining cohorts
  • Who can select itNobody; it follows a cohort
  • Feature maturityEarly access
The RAD-managed project panel: a target-tier selector set to sandbox, a note that a sandbox project requires 100 purchased credits, and a region selector set to us-central1

The tier is chosen at deploy time, and it is the tier — not the module — that decides which organisation policies and quota ceilings the project inherits. The purchased-credit floor for that tier is stated in the same panel.

The production tier is governed and quota-bounded: it takes development's ceilings. A workload needing more than 48 vCPU or 32 GB of Redis in one region is refused, though every ceiling is raisable per project on request. Your own project keeps your own quotas.

Eight regions, one in each geography

A RAD-managed project deploys into one region in each of eight geographies: us-central1, europe-north2, northamerica-south1, me-west1, africa-south1, asia-east1, australia-southeast2 and southamerica-west1. Each is the cheapest available region in its geography.

Nearly every option works in a managed project

A short list opts out, each named on the catalogue page with the reason it cannot go there. Everything else can be deployed either way.

A verified email and purchased credits

The minimum is set per tier, appropriate to what that tier can do. Free monthly credits do not satisfy it.

Each managed project carries a spend alert

An alert notifies as spend approaches and exceeds the figure. It does not block an API call; the enforcement mechanism is separate.

Separation of duties, enforced by the platform

We hold no security certification or third-party audit attestation. What follows is the mechanism itself, described precisely enough for your reviewer to judge it.

What a private deployment is configured to

Every one of these is an administrator setting in the platform, not a bespoke build. A private instance is the same RAD, pointed at your boundary.

Your organisation, or one folder

The instance is bound to your Google Cloud organisation ID. Scope can be narrowed further to a single folder, so operations never reach beyond it, or left organisation-wide.

Your billing account

The billing account associated with the resources is yours. Nothing RAD provisions on your behalf lands on ours, and the spend is visible where you already track it.

Closed to your people

Private mode restricts access to internal users only. The instance does not accept public signups at all, so the only accounts on it are the ones you have provisioned.

The catalogue locked to your repository

Modules can be managed only in GitHub and synced automatically, with publishing and deleting from the console disabled. Your review process becomes the only way in.

Change control on running deployments

Any field a module has not marked update-safe can be made read-only while a deployment runs. Changing one then means destroy and redeploy, deliberately.

Retention on your terms

The retention period, the soft-delete grace window, orphan cleanup and whether users are warned before a record is deleted are all set by your own administrators.

What does not exist yet is a self-service installer. A private deployment is an engagement: we stand it up with you, against your organisation and your review.

Chargeback that reconciles

Every deployment is charged against a credit balance, and every charge is a row you can read and export. Credits are the unit: 10 credits = $1.

Fee shown up front

Between 40 and 300 credits depending on the module's complexity, and nothing at all for a handful of infrastructure and reference options. The figure appears in the confirmation step.

Build cost by the hour

Charged from how long the provisioning job actually ran, at a published per-hour credit rate. Most modules build in well under half an hour, and a failed build carries no module fee whatsoever.

An exportable credit ledger

Credit history is per-transaction and exportable, so a platform team can attribute spend back to the team or project that caused it rather than reconstructing it from cloud billing alone.

Reservation per solution

A solution reserves its cost as one sum across every member, with a bundle discount that widens as the solution grows: 15% on three to four modules, 20% on five to six, and 25% on seven or more.

Publish your own modules into the catalogue

The catalogue is not a closed set. The same publishing path that brings a partner's module in works for a module of your own.

Your repository, your Terraform

You connect a GitHub repository containing your own modules. RAD reads the module's variable definitions and renders the same guided form your teams already use for catalogue modules.

One interface, one audit trail

An internal pattern and a catalogue module are deployed the same way, charged the same way and recorded the same way, because two systems produce two answers to "what is deployed".

Internal-only visibility: ask us

If your requirement is that a published module is visible to your organisation and to nobody else, raise it with us as part of an evaluation rather than assuming it.

Where RAD is the wrong fit

Better to read this now than to discover it in week three of an evaluation.

Google Cloud only

Every module in the catalogue targets Google Cloud. If your requirement is one console spanning several cloud providers, RAD is not that.

Terraform is the contract

If your organisation has standardised on another infrastructure language and will not accept Terraform state as an artefact, the catalogue has nothing for you.

The platform is in beta

The catalogue, the engine and the documentation are built and running. Newer features such as cohort provisioning are early access.

Not cheapest for one application

RAD earns its keep across many deployments and teams. For one small application one engineer maintains forever, writing the Terraform yourself is cheaper.

How to evaluate this in a week

One module, into one project you already own, reviewed by the person who would have to sign it off.

RAD's purge dialog, warning that purging removes only RAD's records and Terraform state, that any cloud resources still running will keep running and incurring cost, and that RAD will no longer be able to remove them
The exit, in the product's own words. Purging takes RAD's records and state; what you deployed keeps running in your project — and RAD says plainly that it can no longer remove it.

What to read next

Everything a reviewer usually asks for is on this site or in the documentation. Nothing is behind a form.

How it works

The deployment path end to end: estate orchestration, teardown ordering, and the two places RAD deploys into.

Platform

The catalogue

350+ deployment options, 190+ applications and platform modules, and the ones excluded from a managed project.

Modules

Documentation

345+ hands-on labs, 520+ module configuration guides and 40+ certification study guides across 7 tracks.

Open the docs

The objections

Ownership, lock-in, what a spend alert does not do, and exactly who can see your deployments, and when.

FAQ

The brochure

The same argument in one document, for circulating to people who will not read a website: operating model and cost.

Read the brochure

Start a technical evaluation

Tell us which project you want to deploy into and which pattern your teams keep rewriting. We will help you get one module into one of your own projects this week.