What is GCP?

Before we begin learning about the Google Cloud Platform, we will talk about what is Cloud Computing. Basically, it is using someone else’s computer over the internet. Examples- GCP, AWS, IBM Cloud, etc. Some interesting features of cloud computing are as follows:?

• You get computing resources on-demand and self-service. The customer has to use a simple User Interface and they get the computing power, storage requirements, and network you need, without human intervention.
• You can access these cloud resources over the internet from anywhere on the globe.
• The provider of these resources has a huge collection of these resources and allocates them to customers out of that collection.
• The resources are elastic. If you need more resources you can get more, rapidly. If you need less, you can scale down back.
• The customers pay only for what they use or reserve. If they stop using resources, they stop paying.

What is Google Cloud Platform(GCP)?

Starting from 1998 with the launch of Google Search. google has developed one of the largest and most powerful IT Infrastructures in the world. Today, this infrastructure is used by billions of users to use services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos, and Maps. In 2008, Google decided to open its network and IT infrastructure to business customers, taking an infrastructure that was initially developed for consumers’ applications to public service and launching the Google Cloud platform.

All the services listed above are provided by Google hence the name Google Cloud Platform (GCP) . Apart from these, there are many other services provided by GCP and also many concepts related to it that we are going to discuss in this article.?

Regions and zones

Let’s start at the finest grain level (i.e. the smallest or first step in the hierarchy), the Zone. A zone is an area where Google Cloud Platform Resources like virtual machines or storage are deployed.?

For example, when you launch a virtual machine in GCP using Compute Engine, it runs in a zone you specify (suppose Europe-west2-a). Although people consider a zone as being sort of a GCP Data Center, that’s not strictly accurate because a zone doesn’t always correspond to one physical building. You can still visualize the zone that way, though.?

Zones are grouped into regions which are independent geographic areas and much larger than zones (for example- all zones shown above are grouped into a single region Europe-west2) and you can choose what regions you want your GCP resources to be placed in. All the zones within a neighborhood have fast network connectivity among them. Locations within regions usually have trip network latencies of under five milliseconds.?

As a part of developing a fault-tolerant application, you’ll need to spread your resources across multiple zones in a region. That helps protect against unexpected failures. You can run resources in different regions too. Lots of GCP customers do this, both to bring their applications closer to users around the world, and also to guard against the loss of a whole region, say, due to a natural disaster.?

A few GCP Services supports deploying resources in what we call a Multi-Region. For example, Google Cloud Storage, lets you place data within the Europe Multi-Region. What that means is that it is stored redundantly in a minimum of two different geographic locations, separated by at least 160 kilometers within Europe. Previously, GCP had 15 regions. Visit cloud.google.com to ascertain what the entire is up to today.?

What Are The Benefits Of Using Google Cloud Platform?

Following are some use cases of google cloud platform.

• Scalability and flexibility: You can scale the servers based up on the load if there is high incoming traffic then you can scale up and if the traffic is less then you can scale down which make it flexible and mostly suited for the business use cases.
• Cost-effectiveness: Google Cloud Platform follows the pay-as-you-go model which it will charge only for the how much time you use service and at level you are going to use the services.
• High performance: You can highly reliable on the infrastructure of the google cloud because they are highly available and spread across the multiple regions around the world.
• Security: Google Cloud Platform is more secure you can trust the service offered by the gcp for the security options such as encryption, access control, and data loss prevention.

What are the different types of Google Cloud Platform services?

Overview of Google Cloud offerings

?Following are the some of the services offered by the GCP.

Compute

• Compute Engine: It is used to provision the virtual machine machines to deploy the application with the need of your required ram,rom and security groups.
• Google Kubernetes Engine(GKE): Google cloud provide kubernetes(GKE) as an service where you can deploy the application and restof the things like autoscaling and load balancing will be taken care by the google cloud.
• App Engine: A scalable runtime environment, Google App Engine is mostly used to run Web applications. These dynamic scales as demand change over time because of Google’s vast computing infrastructure. Because it offers a secure execution environment in addition to a number of services, App Engine makes it easier to develop scalable and high-performance Web apps.

Storage

• Cloud Storage : You can store the data which is required to be highly available and which is in large amount.
• Persistent Disk: Presistent disk is an storage disk which can be attached to the virtual machine and can be reused for the another virtual machine.
• Cloud SQL: Cloud SQL is an fully managed service by the google cloud platform and it offers services like MySQL , PostgreSQL and SQL Server.

Networking

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): You can deploy your application in the private network which can be achieved by the google cloud.
• Cloud Load Balancing: This is most important service in the google cloud which is used to distribute the cloud across the multiple replicas of the applications.
• Cloud CDN: This is the service which will cache the content and delivers to the end users with the help of edge locations.

Data analytics

• Bigquery: All organizations look for unlocking business insights from their data. But it can be hard to scalably ingest, store, and analyze that data as it rapidly grows. Google’s enterprise data warehouse called BigQuery , was designed to make large-scale data analysis accessible to everyone.
• Dataflow: It is the analysis of flow of data in control flow graph, i.e., the analysis that determines the information regarding the definition and use of data in program. With the help of this analysis, optimization can be done.
• Pub/Sub: Pub/sub Consider a scenario of synchronous message passing. You have two components in your system that communicate with each other. LeLet’ss call the sender and receiver. The receiver asks for a service from the sender and the sender serves the request and waits for an acknowledgment from the receiver. There is another receiver that requests a service from the sender. The sender is blocked since it hasn’t yet received any acknowledgment from the first receiver. The sender isn’t able to serve the second receiver which can create problems. To solve this drawback, the Pub-Sub model was introduced.