<p>This is my first time using GCP, I have always been an AWS person before this.</p>
<p>As a small team without dedicated DevOps, should we separate our prod and sandbox environments into 2 clusters / VPCs under one GCP project, or should we be going through the hassle of entirely separate GCP projects as well?</p>
<p>What is the industry standard here? If we have IAM setup correctly, what would be the con to having them both in the same project?</p>

<p>A common approach is to use separate projects for staging and production.</p>
<p>With that, you will get the <strong>isolation</strong>, and clear <strong>separation</strong> between the <strong>staging</strong> &amp; <strong>production</strong> environment. Prevents accidental changes or testing and also prevents downtimes etc.</p>
<p><strong>Resource management</strong> across the project would be easy for you will have to a better idea bout the resources &amp; management across the project. You properly get a list of resources &amp; billing details in the project.</p>
<p><strong>Access Management</strong> : Separate projects also have better access control, as only specific users will have prod project across so not everyone hang around the project or view/update the resources.</p>
<p>But the separate project also comes with the challenges of <strong>admin</strong> <strong>work</strong> so you mentioned you are a <strong>small team</strong> without <strong>DevOps</strong> it would be better to go with a <strong>Single project</strong> with <strong>multiple clusters</strong> managed with proper <strong>labels, networks &amp; IAM roles</strong>.</p>
