What is Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services provided by Google. It offers a wide range of services, including computing power, storage, databases, machine learning, networking, and more, all delivered over the internet. GCP enables businesses to build, deploy, and scale applications and services quickly and efficiently without the need to invest in or manage physical infrastructure.

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 many concepts related to them 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.?

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.

Google Cloud Platform Services

?Here are some of the services offered by Google Cloud Platform categorized by their functionalities:

Cloud Computing

• 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 rest of 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 scalable 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. Let’s 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.

Machine learning

• Vertex AI Platform: As we know Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone advancements throughout the years leading to a transformation of industries and reshaping how businesses operate. The emergence of cloud-based AI platforms has further accelerated this revolution enabling organizations to leverage the potential of AI.
• AI Platform Training: You can train the AI model with the help of AI Platform Training in google cloud.
• AI Platform Prediction: You can make the predictions by using the your machine learning models.

Productivity and collaboration

• Google Workspace: Most of us are familiar with various Google Workspace products(also called G Suite) like Calendar, Drive, and Gmail, etc.
• Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM): Identity Access Management is used by the root user (administrator) of the organization. The users represent one person within the organization, and the users can be grouped in that all the users will have the same privileges to the services.

Getting started with Google Cloud Platform?

Follow the steps mentioned below to get started with the Google Cloud Platform.

Step 1: Create an account in google cloud platform depending on your business need select the plan if you want to learn the service the create free account gcp will provide the $300 free credit to get you started.

Step 2: After creating free account it will validate till 90n days know you can start using by creating the project which means all the resources can be tracked under this project.

Step 3: Know you need to start the billing then only you can start use the service and also the billing will be on pay-as-you-go model you will be charged for the amount of resources you are going to use.

Step 4: You need to be careful while choosing the services. You must select the service according to need of you application.

Step 5: Once you have choosen the service know you can deploy you application into the cloud.

Step 6: After deploying the application know you can monitor you resource usage by using the services available in the gcp.

Higher-level services on Google cloud

Here are some of the higher-level services offered by Google Cloud Platform:

• Big Data and Analytics Services: Big Data and Analytics Services offer insights from large volumes of data to help businesses make informed decisions.
• Machine Learning and AI Services: Machine learning and AI services are technologies that enable computers to learn from data and perform tasks without being explicitly programmed.
• Serverless Computing: Serverless computing is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider manages the infrastructure, allowing developers to focus solely on writing and deploying code without worrying about servers.

Use cases of Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform is well suited for the build and deploy and manage the applications.

• E-commerce: You deploy and manage the e-commerce websites by autoscaling and load balancing you can manage the millions of users and transactions.
• Media and entertainment: You can store the static and dynamic data can deliver it to the across the world with out any latency to the end users.
• Financial services: Google Cloud Platform is well suited for the sinical application because of the level of security it is offering.
• Healthcare: You can store the data of patient and take care the outcomes of the health of patient.

Security in Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform offers following security options.

• Encryption: Google cloud platform offers security like encryption at rest and in transit for all of your data.
• Access control: You can control the access to the individual users like which services they can access and which service they can’t depending on the use cases.
• Network Security: You can create the VPC where you can secure the application by deploying the application in the private network and also you can configure the firewalls andsecurity groups etc.
• Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP): With IAP, users may manage application access according to their context and identity. It aids in preventing unwanted access.

The Future of Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is evolving constantly by expanding its resources and increasing its regions and availability zone across the world which make it mote available for the users to use reduces the latency. GCP is upgrading itself according to the market trends gcp play an major role in the upcoming years it will play major role it will helps for the businesses to thrive in the increasingly data-driven and interconnected world.

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
• Edge computing
• Data analytics and data management
• Cybersecurity
• Sustainability

GCP Pricing and Free Tier

Google was the primary major Cloud provider to bill by the second instead of rounding up to greater units of your time for its virtual machines as a service offering. This may not sound like a big deal, but charges for rounding up can really add up for customers who are creating and running lots of virtual machines. Per second billing is obtainable for a virtual machine use through Compute Engine and for several other services too.?

Compute Engine provides automatically applied use discounts which are discounts that you simply get for running a virtual machine for a big portion of the billing month. When you run an instance for at least 25% of a month, Compute Engine automatically gives you a reduction for each incremental minute you employ it. Here’s one more way Compute Engine saves you money.?

Normally, you choose a virtual machine type from a typical set of those values, but Compute Engine also offers custom virtual machine types, in order that you’ll fine-tune the sizes of the virtual machines you use. That way, you’ll tailor your pricing for your workloads.?

Free Tier: Google Cloud Platform offers a generous free tier with limited usage of various services, allowing users to explore and experiment with GCP without incurring charges. The free tier typically includes a certain amount of usage for services like Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and more.