Incident response on GCP: a calm, repeatable workflow

When things go wrong, calm beats clever. Define roles, evidence capture and communication paths before the fire.

Roles & escalation

Define incident commander, comms lead, scribe and technical leads. Set paging/escalation paths.

Evidence & containment

Snapshot disks, export logs, capture metadata. Contain access by revoking tokens/keys and isolating instances or service accounts.

Communication

Use templated updates for stakeholders and customers. Keep a single source of truth (timeline + decisions).

Aftercare

RCA with actions and owners. Update runbooks and conduct a short tabletop focused on the weak links.

This article is for engineering guidance. It is not legal advice.