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⚡  GMapsBook.com is crafted by Jozef Sorocin (🟢 Book a consulting hour) and powered by:

• g-Xperts (Google Cloud & Business Profile Partner)
• Spatialized.io (Elasticsearch & Google Maps consulting).
• and Garages-Near-Me.com (Effortless parking across Germany)

The Maps Platform runs on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

<aside> 🔑 Roughly speaking, GCP is Google’s answer to Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. But in terms of geospatial tooling, nothing comes close to Google’s extensive offering.

</aside>

Now, even if you only intend to use GCP’s map-related features, you’ll still need:

• a GCP account
• a GCP billing account
• a GCP project
• and a GCP Maps Key.

That’s a bunch of new terms so let’s visualize a typical, moderately complex scenario which will help us understand the moving parts.

Use case

I have a web application consisting of a frontend and a backend. I need two separate API keys – one to display a map on the frontend and another to run geospatial workloads from the backend.

Approach

From GCP’s point of view, the hierarchical architecture for the above scenario looks as follows:

↳ (user) account
	↳ billing account
    ↳ project A
      ↳ Frontend API key
			↳ Backend API key
      ↳ Development/testing key (optional)

Account, Project, Billing Account

Assuming you already have a google account (e.g. a @gmail.com email or a company email running on Google Workspace):