What is Google Cloud?

Almost everyone in the world uses Google tools in their work tasks and everyday life. Such well-known services as Google search, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail and Google Meet have long been part of our everyday life. But are you familiar with the Google Cloud Platform behind the speed and availability of these solutions? And did you know that thousands of companies, from small businesses to large corporations, also use it?

Cloud technologies have been gaining more and more popularity in recent years, and the pandemic and full-scale invasion have significantly accelerated this process for Ukrainian organizations. In this material, we will talk about Google Cloud, one of the most powerful solutions for online services and business. Let’s talk about what instruments this platform consists of, give a brief historical background, and tell about various options for using the platform.

What is GCP?

Google Cloud Platform, like competitors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is a public cloud computing platform. With GCP, customers can access computing resources located in Google data centers around the world, both for free and on a pay-as-you-go basis.

If you want to create more than just a standard website, but a web application or service that will help your customers, you need Google Cloud Platform. For example, you can create a platform for online orders with a search for your stores on Google Maps, a social network or any other interactive online service. By creating functional sites and applications, you not only offer convenient services, but also build a good image for your brand.

What is the difference between Google Cloud and Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud is a combination of services available over the Internet that can help organizations leverage multiple digital technologies, including cloud computing, generative artificial intelligence, data analytics, geolocation services, and more. Google Cloud solutions also include the Google Workspace collaboration platform. In turn, Google Cloud Platform or GCP is precisely the infrastructure for hosting web applications. So Google Cloud Platform is part of Google Cloud. However, these names are often used interchangeably.

Google Cloud provides a variety of computing services to solve a wide range of tasks, including data processing, delivery of video and other content over the Internet, as well as machine learning tools, generative artificial intelligence, geospatial services and powerful analytics.

History of Google Cloud

GCP first appeared on the Internet in 2008 with the launch of a product called App Engine. In April 2008, Google announced the release of a beta version of App Engine, a developer tool that allowed customers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure.

According to Google, the goal of App Engine was to “make it easy to get started with a new web application, and then make it easy to scale when that application reaches the point where it’s getting significant traffic and has millions of users.”

To get the feedback needed to improve this beta version, App Engine has been given to 10,000 developers. These early developers could run applications with 500 MB of memory, 200 million CPU megacycles per day, and 10 GB of bandwidth per day.

In late 2011, Google took App Engine out of beta and made it an official, fully supported Google product. Over the past decade, Google has developed and acquired many services and products to improve the user experience of its cloud platform.

Today, Google Cloud Platform is one of the leading public cloud providers in the world. Google Cloud customers include Nintendo, eBay, UPS, The Home Depot, Etsy, PayPal, 20th Century Fox and X (ex. Twitter).

Google Cloud Platform Infrastructure, Regions, and Zones

Currently, Google’s global infrastructure includes 40 regions around the world where Google Cloud Platform resources are located. There are accessibility zones within the region. These zones do not depend on SPOF (Single Point Of Failure) — points at which a complete service outage can occur. Some resources, like the global HTTP load balancer, are global and can receive requests from any Google location and region. Other resources, such as storage, may be regional. Storage is distributed across multiple zones within a region for redundancy. Finally, zoned resources, including compute instances, are only available in one specific zone within one specific region.

When deploying applications on GCP, you should choose a location based on the performance, reliability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of your organization’s mission.

Main services of Google Cloud Platform

Each GCP region offers a specific category of services. Some services are limited to certain regions. The main services of Google Cloud Platform include:

• Compute Engine — Primary tool for hosting computing resources on Google’s servers
• Cloud Storage — Secure, fast and scalable cloud storage for business.
• Bigquery — Repository for the analytical data you need to get business insights
• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — Scalable environment for running containerized applications and workloads
• Cloud RUN — Simple and fast platform for container applications
• Cloud CDN and Media CDN — Content delivery network (video, web content, etc.)
• Cloud SDK — Google Cloud command-line tools and libraries
• Cloud SQL — Relational databases for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server
• Apigee API Management — API management tool of Google Cloud
• Looker — Platform for business intelligence (BI), analytics and data processing applications
• Vertex AI platform — Unified platform for working with artificial intelligence and large language models

You can see the full list of GCP products here.

How is the cost of using Google Cloud calculated?

How is the cost of using Google Cloud calculated?

• No Upfront Cost — Users never have to make an upfront investment to use any GCP services.
• Pay as you go — Google charges for compute, storage and data transfer only for the resources actually used, giving users the flexibility to scale up and down.
• No Termination Fees — Users can always reduce the amount of calculations or turn off the services without any additional costs.
• Free Tier — Google offers a free trial with a $300 credit for all of its cloud services. Google Cloud also offers a free plan — the use of many important services is free, as long as the project does not exceed data usage limits. You can find out the list of tools and limits by following the link.

Pros and cons of Google Cloud Platform

Strengths of GCP

• Google is a perfectly connected platform, where each tool is designed to work with other tools according to well-defined rules of interaction.

• Google Cloud Platform documentation is second to none. For each function, there is both a theoretical and a practical section, which greatly simplifies work with the platform at the familiarization stage.

• Another strength of GCP is its global backbone network, which uses advanced software-defined networking and edge caching services to deliver fast, consistent, and scalable performance. A premium WAN costs a bit more, but developing architectures using a virtual private cloud (VPC) that automatically routes traffic across the WAN is a unique business advantage.

Weaknesses of GCP

• New trendy public cloud solutions may appear with a delay. The Google team usually takes a little longer to roll out new services.

• GCP technical support can be slow for companies that don’t work through an official Google Cloud partner and do not use a premium support plan.

In summary, we can say that the philosophy of Google Cloud is as follows: to make an ecosystem in which everything will work like clockwork, predict specific ways of interaction and release new services when they will work correctly.

Options for using Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud solutions can be recommended to anyone who needs a cloud platform for deployment. But there are several scenarios in which Google Cloud is the unequivocal leader:

• If you’re a large organization that needs to configure a lot of permissions while working on projects, Google has a great organizational hierarchy that lets you set policies at the top level and forget about it. This allows departments to move quickly but remain bound by organizational constraints. In GCP, all resources belong to a specific GCP project. And when that project is deleted, all resources are removed from the platform, preventing resources from remaining, resulting in increased costs. Plus, there’s a great feature that allows you to assign projects to different billing accounts over time.

• If your company needs to use geolocation services to build logistics, simplify the process of online orders or increase the security of financial transactions, Google Cloud is your choice. Having access to the most accurate online map service, which is used by almost the whole world, Google is actively integrating it into the cloud, turning customer service into a powerful business tool.

• Another ideal use case for GCP is for organizations that need the benefits of advanced big data, machine learning, and analytics solutions. Businesses can upload data to GCP and then get key performance indicators for their products or collect customer data to recommend additional purchase offers based on purchase history. With the development of Vertex AI, these capabilities have reached a completely new level. In Google Cloud, you can flexibly use all the power of artificial intelligence, charged with your data and the data of the most popular search engine in the world. Create intelligent search, train enterprise chatbots, generate images — do everything the revolutionary tools of big language models are capable of.

Learning GCP

If you’re interested in improving your Google Cloud skills and advancing your organization’s future goals, you may want to consider which GCP certification path or career path is right for you.

• If you are new to the cloud, you can start with the new introductory Google Cloud Digital Leader certification. The Google team has also prepared an up-to-date selection of free courses.

• Take training courses and get certifications at https://cloud. google.com/learn, or international educational platforms such as Coursera or Udemy.

• If you have little technical experience, you can start preparation for the Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer certification on a learning platform convenient for you. This knowledge will provide you with a solid foundation to work directly with Google cloud resources.  After the Associate Cloud Engineer exam, you should recheck GCP certification paths.

• Practice is an integral part of learning. Google Cloud provides free tier program and $300 for the first three months of use for each account.