Before starting with Google Cloud, let us first understand What Cloud Computing is:
What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing, in simple words, is accessing and storing data over the Internet instead of doing it on your personal hard drive.
It offers services like storage, database, networking, and moreover the Internet to provide faster, innovative, and flexible resources to its customers. The customers get to pay only for the resources they use, hence helping them lower their operating costs and run their business infrastructure more efficiently.
Now, among various cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, VMWare, IBM, etc., Google Cloud has been the talk of the town in recent years and there are enough reasons behind it. Let’s begin with starters and understand what Google Cloud is.
Want to read about cloud computing from scratch? Here is a blog on ‘What is cloud computing‘.
What Is Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud is a suite of Cloud Computing services offered by Google. The platform provides various services like compute, storage, networking, Big Data, and many more that run on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end users like Google Search and YouTube.
Google server hasn’t gone down in years. So, if you are planning to run your application on the Google Cloud infrastructure, then you can be assured of your applications being safe and secure.
Why Google Cloud?
Google Cloud has been one of the top cloud providers in the IT industry. The services they offer can be accessed by software developers, as it provides a reliable and highly scalable infrastructure to build, test, and deploy their applications.
As mentioned earlier, Gartner announced Google as a leader in the 2018 Gartner Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant. It compared Google with other cloud providers and identified Google as one of the top three leaders in the market. So, if you are looking for a cloud platform with an extensive catalog of services and offerings with global recognition, Google Cloud is the right choice for you.
Here’s a brief comparison of the top three cloud contenders.
Best Pricing: Google Cloud hosting plans are cheaper than other platforms’ hosting plans. Google Cloud offers to its customers the pay-as-you-go feature where the users only have to pay for the resources they use.
Work from Anywhere: Employees gain complete access to information across devices from anywhere in the world through web-based applications powered by Google.
Private Network: Google provides its own network to every customer so that they have more control and scalability over the network. It uses fiber-optic cables to spread its network, as they tend to bear any amount of traffic. Users get the maximum time and efficiency due to this private network.
Security: Google has hired a large set of security professionals who help in protecting the data on servers. All data on the Cloud platform is encrypted. So, users can be sure of their data being safe and secure. Redundant Backup: Google has its own in-built redundant backups. So, if the data stored by the user is lost, then Google would have created a backup for it. So, your data is technically not lost! Redundancy helps ensure data integrity, reliability, and durability.
Google Cloud Services
Google Cloud has been expanding across the globe. The reason is the wide array of services it offers to its users:
Google Cloud Compute Services
Google Cloud Storage Services
Networking
Big Data Services
Security and Identity Management
Management Tools
Cloud AI
IoT
Let’s get a brief information on each:
Google App Engine: Platform as a Service to deploy Java, PHP, and other applications. It is a Cloud Computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. It offers the automatic scaling feature, i.e., as the number of requests for an application increases, the App Engine automatically allocates more resources for the application to handle additional demand.
Compute Engine: Infrastructure as a Service to run Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines. It is a component of the Google Cloud platform which is built on the same infrastructure that runs Google’s search engine, YouTube, and other services.
Kubernetes Engine: It aims at providing a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. It works with a wide range of container tools including docker.
Storage Services
Google Cloud Storage: An online file storage web service for storing and accessing data on a Google Cloud platform infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google Cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities.
Cloud SQL: A web service that allows you to create, configure, and use relational databases that live in Google Cloud. It maintains, manages, and administers your databases allowing you to focus on your applications and services.
Cloud Bigtable: A fast, fully managed, and a highly scalable NoSQL database service. It is designed for the collection and retention of data from 1 TB to hundreds of PB.
Networking
VPC: Virtual Private Cloud provides a private network with IP allocation, routing, and network firewall policies to create a secure environment for your deployments.
Cloud Load Balancing: It is a process of distributing workloads across multiple computing resources. This reduces the cost and maximizes the availability of the resources.
Content Delivery Network: A geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal here is to provide high availability and high performance by spatially distributing the service relating to end users.
Big Data
BigQuery: Google BigQuery Service is a fully managed data analysis service that enables businesses to analyze Big Data. It features highly scalable data storage, the ability to perform ad-hoc queries, and the ability to share data insights via the web.
Google Cloud Datastore: A fully managed, schema less, non-relational datastore. It supports atomic transactions and a rich set of query capabilities and can automatically scale up and down depending on the load.
Google Cloud Dataproc: A fast, easy-to-use and manage Spark and Hadoop service for distributed data processing. With Cloud Dataproc, you can create Spark or Hadoop clusters, sized for your workloads precisely when you need them.
Cloud AI
Cloud Machine Learning Engine: A managed service that will enable you to build Machine Learning models based on mainstream frameworks.
Cloud AutoML: A Machine Learning product that enables developers to provide their data sets and obtain access to quality trained models by Google’s transfer learning and Neural Architecture Search.
Management Tools
Google Stackdriver: Provides performance and diagnostics data in the form of monitoring, logging, tracing, error reporting, and alerting it to public cloud users.
Google Cloud Console App: A GCP console is a native mobile application that enables customers to manage the key Google Cloud services. It provides monitoring, altering, and the ability to take action on resources.
Identity and Security
Cloud Data Loss Prevention API: It helps you manage sensitive data. It provides a fast and scalable classification for sensitive data elements like credit card numbers, names, passport numbers, and more.
Cloud IAM: Cloud Identity and Access Management refers to a framework of policies and technologies for ensuring that proper people in an enterprise have the appropriate access to technology resources. It is also called identity management (IdM).
IoT
Cloud IoT Core: It is a fully managed service that allows you to easily and securely connect, manage, and ingest data from devices that are connected to the Internet. It permits utilization of other Google Cloud services for collecting, processing, analyzing, and visualizing IoT data in real time.
Cloud IoT Edge: Edge computing brings memory and computing power closer to the location where it is needed.