Updated May 24, 2023
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a collection of cloud computing services that Google introduced on 7th April 2008. GCP runs on the same infrastructure as Google’s products, such as the Google search engine, YouTube, etc. GCP provides various tools and services that help manage infrastructures, provision servers, and configure networks. GCP also offers modular cloud services, including computing, application development, machine learning, data analytics, and data storage. Developers, cloud administrators, and other IT professionals can access GCP (Google Cloud Platform) through public or dedicated networks.
Why is GCP Important?
GCP is regarded as the third biggest Cloud Service Provider (CSP) behind Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure.
The major reasons for one to opt for GDP over other CSPs are below:
1. Scalability: One of the major drawbacks of cloud computing is downscaling. But GCP provides extreme ease in up and downscaling.
2. Pricing: Google offers GCP services at the best price in the cloud market compared to its competitors. Google offers 4 major key factors in its pricing philosophy.
- Sub-hour Billing: Billing is made only for a particular requested time. For example, unlike other CSPs, GCP doesn’t round it to the next hour if service is requested for half an hour. Instead, billing is made only for half an hour.
- Sustained Use Discount: Google gives an increasing discount of 25% if we use it in sustained use of computing resources rather than using it for a temporary purpose.
- Custom Machine Type: GCP lets you dial in your application’s CPU power and memory and get billed accordingly. Up to 15% of the cost can be saved by this method.
- Preemptible Instances: If the system is built with fault tolerance, it can enable other systems, reducing costs.
3. Integrated Services: You can use various APIs, AI and ML, IoT, Compute engines, Databases, Big Data analytics, Developer tools, Security, and Storage simultaneously.
4. Quick Collaboration: GCP allows quick collaboration for all users. Multiple users can access and edit the projects at the same time.
5. Serverless Computing: It is a cloud-computing execution model in which CSP runs the server and dynamically manages resource allocation. So, the pricing will be based on the actual amount of resources consumed by the application rather than the pre-purchased amount of resources.
Google Cloud Services
GCP provides a wide range of products and services. They provide services from essential Cloud services to complex cloud services like ML, IoT, etc.
- Machine learning
- IoT(Internet of Things)
1. Machine Learning
AI and ML consist of three components.
i. AI Hub
- It consists of a hosted repository of plug-and-play AI components.
- It provides enterprise-grade sharing capabilities that let an organization privately host AI content among users and developers.
- It lets you easily deploy unique Google Cloud AI and AI technologies for experimentation and production.
ii. AI Building Blocks
It consists of components that let developers add sights, language, structured data, and conversation to their applications.
Sight:
- Vision AI: Lets you analyze images in the cloud or at the edge.
- Video AI: It provides precise video analysis– down to the frame.
Language:
- Natural Language: It includes multimedia and language processing.
- Translation: It provides fast, dynamic translation between different languages.
Conversation:
- Cloud Speech-to-text API: It provides speech recognition in over 120 languages.
- Cloud Text-to-Speech API: It provides human-like text-to-speech interactions.
Structured Data:
- AutoML Tables: This lets you easily build state-of-the-art ML models on structured data.
- BigQuery ML: This lets you build and operationalize custom ML models using familiar SQL language.
Cloud AutoML:
- A set of ML products enables developers with limited ML knowledge to train high-quality models using Google’s Neural Architecture Search technology.
iii. AI Platform
Code-based data science development environment that lets developers quickly take projects from ideation to deployment.
2. Internet of Things (IoT)
It offers all the device management and connects services.
- Cloud IoT core lets you have a secure device connection and management.
- Edge TPU (beta) is a purpose-built ASIC designed to run inference at the edge.
Compute Services
GCP provides a wide range of computing services, such as:
- Google Compute Engine delivers High-Performance and Highly Scalable VMs running in Google’s innovative data centers and worldwide fiber network, which boots quickly and comes with high-performance persistent and local disk options.
- Google App Engine is a platform for building scalable web applications, and IoT back ends.
- Google Kubernetes Engine is a powerful cluster manager and proportionate system for running your Docker containers.
- Google Cloud Container Registry is a private Docker repository with popular continuous delivery systems.
- Cloud Functions lets you construct applications of fully serverless models.
Big Data Services
- BigQuery scales with your storage and computing power needs, making it a fully managed, low-cost, serverless data warehouse.
- Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed service for transforming and enriching data.
- Cloud Dataproc enhances and simplifies the experience of using Apache Spark and Hadoop by providing a faster, fully managed, simpler, and more cost-efficient service.
- Cloud Pub/Sub is a serverless, large-scale, reliable, real-time messaging service that lets you communicate between independent applications.
- Cloud Datalab is an interactive notebook based on Jupyter, created to explore, analyze, transform, and visualize data and build machine-learning models.
Networking Services
Networking is one of the most essential and basic Google Cloud Platform Services offered by state-of-the-art Networking Services.
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets you connect and manage various GCP resources using the Google global network and isolate them using their VPC.
- Google Cloud Load Balancing lets you scale your applications quickly on Compute Engine according to your needs.
- Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) accelerates content delivery for websites and applications using Google’s globally distributed edge caches.
- Cloud Domain Naming System (DNS) is a managed authoritative DNS service running on Google’s infrastructure. It offers scalability, reliability, programmability, and the ability to manage domain names efficiently. It is a cost-effective way to make your application and services available to your users.
- Cloud Network Address Translation (NAT) enables you to provision application instances without public IP addresses while also allowing access to the internet in a controlled and efficient manner.
Storage and Database Services
- Cloud Storage is a secure and highly available object storage system at low costs.
- Persistent Disk is a high-performance block storage system suitable for VMs and Containers. It offers an unmatched price-to-performance ratio.
- Cloud SQL is a fully managed database service that easily lets you set up, maintain, manage, and administer relational MySQL and PostgreSQL databases in the cloud.
- Cloud Bigtable is a scalable NoSQL database service suitable for low-latency, high-reliability, and high-throughput workloads.
- Google has built Cloud Memorystore, a fully-managed in-memory data store service for Redis, on scalable, more secure, and highly available infrastructure.
- Cloud Datastore gives you an elastic, highly available document-oriented database service.
Security and Identity Services
It is one of the most important Google Cloud Services, where your data is highly secured and encrypted.
- Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) lets administrators decide who can access and manage specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage cloud resources centrally.
- Cloud Security Scanner is a web security automatic scanner for common vulnerabilities in App Engine applications.
- Binary Authorization deploys only trusted containers on Kubernetes Engine.
- The Resource Manager manages resources on GCP in a hierarchical manner.
Management and Developer Tools
It is used to monitor the services, find errors, debug, and trace the services.
- Stackdriver offers real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and logging across GCP, including various diagnostic tools.
- Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to specify all the resources needed for your application.
- Stackdriver Debugger is a feature of GCP that gives detailed performance insights and analytics.
- Cloud Platform Marketplace offers ready-to-go solutions that launch quickly to GCP and other environments with Anthos.
Benefits of Google Cloud Platform
Given below are the benefits of the google cloud platform:
- Delivering updates efficiently and quickly functionality delivery gains high productivity through quick access to innovation.
- Less Disruption when users adopt new functionality by delivering manageable improvements in a continuous stream.
- Quick Collaboration, GCP allows quick collaboration for all users. Multiple users can access and edit the projects at the same time.
- Best Pricing Plans are available for stable customers.
- Live Migration benefits allow users to migrate their machines.
- Private networks, maximum time, and efficiency are available to customers due to private networks.
- A redundant backup facility is available for unused data.
- With data stored in the cloud, employees can work from anywhere and simultaneously access information across devices.
- Google’s investments in security protect customers and provide them with benefits through process-based and physical security investments.
- Availability of complete control and flexibility over technologies and data for users.
Conclusion – Google Cloud Platform
When we combine services, we build a solution to get work done. The possibilities for solutions on the Cloud Platform are endless. You can look for ideas and guidance in Google’s library of solutions. So far, we have had a detailed walkthrough of GCP and all its major products and services.
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