Google grew rapidly since 1998 when it was officially born. Today, with over 60,000 employees in 50 different countries, Google has become the world’s undisputed leader in internet searches. Knowing its popularity and the capabilities, Google has also set its foot in cloud services after Amazon launched its own cloud computing in 2006. Soon after entering the cloud computing, it has become one of the “big three” public cloud vendors after AWS and Microsoft. Although AWS is still the global leader in the cloud market, Google Cloud is constantly growing having its own unique features and low pricing.
Google Cloud Platform allows you to rapidly respond to change and scale up in a more secure, stable and cost-effective computing environment. Thanks to its capabilities of handling big data, it has built a solid reputation for analytics, AI and ML.
Google Cloud Platform
Going by its common definition, it is a suite of integrated cloud services offered by Google for public use. It can be used by individuals and companies to build, deploy and manage applications through the global network of data centers. Commonly, it is used by the software developers, cloud administrators and other IT professionals.
This platform provides services such as compute, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, internet of things, security and others which runs on Google hardware. Customers can access the hardware in the form of virtualized resources like virtual machines. In terms of services, GCP offers over 50 services in the form of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). All the services can be used in combination or independently depending upon the need of a developer or IT professionals.
Google Cloud Platform Services
This platform boasts the portfolio of cloud services which offers some specialized tools which developers can’t find anywhere else. All of its services are segregated into 9 different categories which are:
1. Compute
Different services like compute engine (IaaS service), App Engine (PaaS service for building web apps or mobile back-ends), container engine (cluster management and orchestration system) and cloud function (serverless microservices) are included. Some other services like container registry, cloud pub/sub and cloud endpoints frameworks for app engine are also there to meet the developer requirements.
2. Storage & Databases
It includes services like cloud storage, cloud SQL (fully managed MySQL database), Big table (HBase Compatible NoSQL), Cloud Datastore (a NoSQL schemaless database for non-relational data), Cloud Spanner, Persistent Disk and Cloud Source Repositories (private Git repositories).
3. Networking
Google Cloud Virtual Network, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN, Google Cloud Interconnect and Cloud DNS are the networking related services which Google Cloud Platform is currently offering.
4. Big Data
Services like BigQuery (Serverless Data Warehousing & Analytics), Dataproc (services like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pig & Apache Hive are used for processing large datasets), Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Datalab (for data visualization & exploration), Google Genomics and others are there.
5. Cloud AI or Machine Learning
It constitutes of services like Cloud AutoML, Cloud TPU, Cloud ML Engine, Cloud Job Discovery, Cloud Natural Language, Cloud Speech-to-Text, Cloud Text-to-Speech, Cloud Translation API, Cloud Vision API (for image recognition and classification), Cloud Video Intelligence and Dialogflow Enterprise.
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6. Management Tools
This category boasts a set of services which includes Stackdriver for monitoring, logging and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform. Other app optimizations and deployment tools like Cloud Deployment Manager, Cloud Console, Cloud Shell, Cloud Console Mobile App and other cloud APIs are also present.
7. Identity & Security
From its inception, one thing which Google was always serious was security. For the same purpose, it provides some of the best services for identity and security among all the cloud providers. The services are Cloud Identity, Cloud IAM, Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy, Cloud Data Loss Prevention API, Security Key Enforcement, Cloud Key Management Service, Cloud Resource Manager, Cloud Security Scanner and some other.
8. IoT
IoT-based services are Cloud IoT Core, Edge TPU, Cloud IoT Edge, API Platform, Maps Platform, Apigee API Platform, API Monetization, Developer Portal, API Analytics, Apigee Sense and Cloud Endpoints.
9. Developer Tools
Among numerous developer tools, some of the common ones are container tools, cloud source repositories, cloud tools for Android Studio or IntelliJ or Visual Studio or Eclipse or Powershell, Gradle App Engine Plugin, Maven Engine Plugin and the Cloud Test Lab for On-Demand Testing.
Google Cloud Platform Pricing Structure
Google has also ticked their pricing box by providing services up to 50% lesser amount than other competitors. Their pricing model is based on a per-minute billing and a (reverse) Moore’s Law pricing philosophy. There are several tools which will let you calculate your pricing like general pricing, free tier, pricing calculator, the total cost of ownership and others. Google cloud platform also offers discounts for long-term usage (which starts after the first month), Education grants and a start-up program. Moreover, at the beginning, it offers a free trial during which you can access all the Google Cloud Platform along with $300 free credit. After all the efforts and strategies, it is clear that Google is serious about Cloud market domination & is putting pressure on the competitors to keep prices lower.
Read More: Why Should You Choose Google Cloud Hosting?
How Google Cloud Platform is Better than other Cloud Platforms?
Thanks to the Google domination in Internet search, this company has learned to design and manage Web-scale data centers which help Google to be more reliable and fast along with low pricing.
Being a renown company throughout the world, it offers a variety of discount programs and offers to individuals. This company also works with a vast number of developers which ultimately gives them insights into the requirements of developers. Because of this, they can tailor the developer’s requirement more precisely especially in case of cloud-native apps.
Some of the top advantages of using Google Google Cloud Platform are as follows:
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Worldwide Presence of Data Centers
Due to the availability of data centers throughout the world, it has become what you may call as a multi-regional deployment mode. This helps you in deploying your site in multiple regions for the fastest response times and offers a considerable scale and load balancing.
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Number 1 choice for containers
Since Google-developed Kubernetes, it has a strong offering in containers than AWS or Azure. This platform specializes in high compute offerings like analytics or big data or ML. Even Microsoft, one of Google’s competitor in Cloud computing supports Kubernetes on its platform i.e. Azure.
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Security
With over 500 employees who are completely dedicated to security protection, Google Cloud Platform provides a totally different level of security. It is one of the sectors where Google has a clear edge over other Cloud providers like AWS or Azure. This platform provides data encryption, multiple layers of authentication and third party validations.
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Pricing
Well, we have already discussed it earlier, but yes, Google Cloud Platform is one of the most reliable for choosing a pocket-friendly option with quality services. With pay as you go pricing model along with several discounts, Google Cloud is one of the most preferred options for the developers who are working on both smaller as well as bigger projects.
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Commitment towards AI & ML
Google shows a strong commitment towards AI & ML by investing heavily on its own AI chip called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). It is specially designed for Machine Learning and is used by several Google services like Google Translate, Google Search & Gmail. Currently, this chip offers about 180 teraflops of performance and version 3 of this chip is in the development process which is expected to provide up to 420 teraflops of performance.
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Google Support
You can trace the presence of Google’s community throughout the world. These communities boast all its users, partner ecosystems and premium support packages which is sufficient for you to get started.
Read More: Comparing Google Cloud, AWS and Azure
Who All Are Using Google Cloud Platform?
Why You Should Learn Google Cloud?
When you’ll type Google Cloud Jobs in the search bar and hit enter, you’ll literally get gazillions of results. Myriads of companies are offering numerous positions related to security analysts, cloud consultants, cloud engineering managers, cloud software engineers, cloud specialist, DevOps and others with salaries up to $150,000 depending upon the positions and geographical locations.
Wrapping Up!
Contrary to Amazon and Microsoft, who began their cloud journey with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Google started with the platform as a service (PaaS) named App Engine in 2008. Since then, Google has continued to increase its services and lower its prices regularly. Today, it boasts itself as the least expensive public cloud provider among others with some of the most quality services. With incorporating big data, ML and container management tools, clearly, Google Cloud Platform has taken the lead in some of the services.
As of now, going by all the progress, announcement and conferences, it is clear that Google is set to dominate the Cloud Computing in the forthcoming years. However, with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, the competition will not be easy but certain features like security definitely give it an extra edge. Going by the career perspective, as Google Services will rise, its job will also explode significantly.
