What is Google Cloud Platform?

Have you ever heard of Google maps? How about Gmail or Youtube? Most likely the answer is yes, but you may not have heard of the Google cloud platform. And in this article, you will find out the products that makeup Google cloud along the way I talk you through the history, infrastructure, strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases for the Google cloud platform. If you’re ready, let’s get started.

What is Google Cloud Platform?

Google cloud is made up of a combination of multiple services available over the internet. And these services work towards accelerating an organization’s ability to go digital. Google Cloud includes the Google cloud platform, which provides public cloud infrastructure for hosting web-based applications. Second is Google workspaces, formerly known as G suite. In addition to Gmail and collaboration features, this package offers identity management for businesses. Third, are the enterprise versions of Android and Chrome OS. Users can connect to web-based applications using the operating systems on their phones and laptop. And the final component of Google cloud is the application programming interfaces for machine learning and enterprise mapping services. These provide software-to-software communication. We’re going to focus on the Google cloud platform known as GCP.

Also Read: What is Google Cloud?

History Of Google Cloud Platform

let’s start with the history. GCP first came online in 2008 with the launch of a product called app engine, and app engine helped customers launch web applications online. From there, Google built and acquired products to enhance the user experience of its cloud platform.

Google global infrastructure

There are presently 24 locations throughout the world where Google Cloud Platform resources are available under the Google global infrastructure. Locations, start with a region and within a region, our availability zones, these zones are isolated from a single point of failure. Some resources, like the HTTP global load balancer, are accessible worldwide and can be accessed from any Google edge site or area. Other resources like storage can be regional. The storage is distributed across multiple zones within a region for redundancy, and finally, zonal resources, including compute instances are only available in one specific zone within one specific region. When deploying applications on the Google cloud platform, you must select the locations depending on the performance, reliability, scalability, and security needs of your organization. Each region offers a category of services. Some services are limited to specific regions. Here’s a list of the major services of the Google cloud platform, computing and hosting services, storage services, database services, networking services, big data services, and machine learning services.

Competition

As you just heard, Google has services comparable to AWS and Azure. AWS is in the clear lead with Microsoft gaining ground and the Google platform is growing. Just not as fast as the other two more on this in the next section on strengths, and weaknesses.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Speaking of strengths, Google cloud platform documentation is second to none. I honestly enjoy how Google incorporates the actions into GCP’s documents. They are divided into an overview section, followed by a hands-on section, walking the reader through an implementation of the feature or service. Another strength of GCP is the global backbone network that uses advanced software-defined networking and edge caching services to deliver fast consistent, and scalable performance. And yes, the premium tier global network costs a little more, but in my opinion, designing architectures using a virtual private cloud that automatically routes traffic on a global network is worth it. And if I had to say GCP had a weakness, it would be that the Google cloud platform has far fewer services than those offered by AWS and Azure. In addition to that, Google’s cloud platform has an opinionated model of how their cloud services should be used and that’s geared towards software developers. My opinion is that Google finds it difficult to give Google Cloud Platform priority over the company’s larger revenue generators, such as search, ads, and YouTube. The primary lesson learned is that Google is investing in GCP rather than pursuing market dominance or growth.

Ideal Use Cases

Don’t get me wrong. Google is my cloud of choice. In my experience, it feels like using Legos to build architecture. Each service has its own use case and was designed to work with the next service and its well-defined rules of engagement. Here are a few of the ideal GCP scenarios. When working on projects, a large organization may need to set a lot of permissions. Google has a great organizational hierarchy that enables you to set policy at the top level and then forget about it. This enables departments to move fast yet remain bound to organizational constraints. Every resource in GCP is assigned to a single GCP project. Additionally, when a project is deleted, all of its resources are also erased from the platform, ensuring that no resources are left behind that could increase costs.

Additionally, there is a great function that enables tasks to be gradually assigned to various billing accounts. For enterprises that require the advantages of cutting-edge big data, machine learning, and analytics, GCP makes sense as another use case. Businesses can enter the data into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and use data mining to determine the key performance indicators for their products or to compile consumer information to make extra purchase recommendations based on past purchases.

Google Cloud ACE Preparation Course

Well, if you’re interested in honing your Google cloud skillset and leading your organization’s goals for the future, I highly recommend getting started with the Google cloud ACE preparation course. It doesn’t excellent job of introducing the main infrastructure components of the Google cloud platform while providing you with a solid foundation for working directly with Google cloud resources. Post the associate cloud engineer exam, the next step would be to move on to the Google professional cloud architect certification. If this article has piqued your interest in the Google cloud platform, then I hope you’re ready to get started with your Google cloud platform journey.

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FAQs

Q.1 What does Google Cloud Platform do?

The Google Cloud provides cloud management, security, developer tools, big data, networking, machine learning, and IoT services.

Q.2 What is Google Cloud Platform name?

The Google Cloud Platform is also know as GCP named by google is a collection of cloud computing services that Google offers. It employs the same internal infrastructure as Google does for its products including Google Search, Gmail, Drive, and YouTube.

Q.3 What is the difference between Google Cloud and Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud is a collection of online services that can assist businesses in going digital. Part of Google Cloud is Google Cloud Platform, which offers public cloud infrastructure for hosting web-based applications and is the subject of this blog article.

Q.4 Is Google Cloud free of cost?

Google Cloud offers three levels of service: Free, Basic, and Standard. The free tier allows up to 1TB of storage and 10GB of usage per month, while the basic tier offers 1TB of storage and 20GB of usage per month. The Standard tier offers 3TB of storage and 50GB of usage per month

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