What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud computing service by Google that helps businesses, developers, and enterprises run applications, store data, and manage workloads on a secure, scalable, and high-performance infrastructure. Whether you're building a website, handling large datasets, or running AI models, GCP provides the tools and flexibility to do it efficiently.

What makes GCP stand out is its global network, strong security, and seamless integration with other Google services. It offers everything from virtual machines and Kubernetes for containerized applications to data analytics and machine learning tools like BigQuery and TensorFlow. Companies of all sizes use GCP to cut costs, improve performance, and scale their operations without worrying about server management.

In this guide, we’ll cover what GCP is, its key features, benefits, pricing, and why businesses are choosing it for cloud computing. Whether you're a startup looking for affordable cloud solutions or an enterprise aiming for efficiency and scalability, GCP has something to offer.

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 neighbourhood 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. 

History of Google Cloud Platform

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. Over the next decade, Google expanded its offerings. Key milestones included the launch of BigQuery in 2010 for serverless analytics, Cloud Storage in 2013 and Compute Engine in 2014 offering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The debut of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in the same year revolutionized container management setting GCP apart as a leader in cloud innovation. Today GCP is a powerhouse in cloud computing offering cutting-edge solutions that empower businesses to innovate, scale and succeed in a digital-first world.

How to Interact with Google Cloud Services

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers three primary methods for interacting with its services and resources:

1. Google Cloud Console

The Google Cloud Console is a web-based, graphical interface that allows you to manage and configure your GCP projects and resources. You can either create a new project or select an existing one to use resources within the project. The console provides an easy-to-navigate dashboard to monitor and control various Google Cloud services.

2. Command-Line Interface (CLI)

For those who prefer command-line operations, Google Cloud provides the Cloud SDK, which includes the gcloud CLI. This tool allows you to manage GCP resources directly from a terminal window. For example, to create a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM), you can use the `gcloud compute instances create` command. You can use the gcloud CLI in two ways:

• Install it locally on your computer.
• Use Cloud Shell, a browser-based terminal environment accessible directly from the Google Cloud Console, eliminating the need for local installation. Cloud Shell provides features such as a built-in code editor, 5 GB of persistent storage, and pre-installed tools, including the gcloud CLI. It supports multiple programming languages like Java, Python, Go, Node.js, and more.

To know more about GCP installation in windows & linux you can refer to this link How To Install GCP CLI In Linux, Windows ?

3. Client Libraries

Google Cloud also offers client libraries that simplify resource management and application development. These libraries expose APIs tailored to specific languages such as Python and Node.js, allowing you to interact with GCP services more intuitively. Client libraries are available for:

• App APIs for accessing services with less code and seamless integration with GCP.
• Admin APIs for managing resources, ideal for building automation tools.

Additionally, these libraries can be used for services like Google Maps, Drive, and YouTube.

Google Cloud vs Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform Services

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

Must Read - How To Create a Free Tier Account on 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 and security 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.

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.

GCP Open APIs and Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

Some people are afraid to bring their workloads to the cloud because they're afraid they'll get locked into a specific vendor. But in many ways, Google gives customers the power to run their applications elsewhere, if Google becomes not the simplest provider for his or her needs. Here are some samples of how Google helps its customers avoid feeling locked in. GCP services are compatible with open source products. For example, take Cloud Bigtable, a database that uses the interface of the open-source database Apache HBase, which provides customers the advantage of code portability. Another example, Cloud Data provides the open-source big data environment Hadoop, as a managed service, etc.

Google Cloud Certification Paths

Google Cloud Platform offers wide range of certifications to validate you skills some of the certifications as mentioned follows.

• Foundational: It is an basic certification to test your basics on google cloud platform like features, benefits and use cases of google cloud.
• Associate Cloud Engineer: Associate Cloud Engineer this certification will test your fundamentals on google cloud platform which are like deploying and maintaining the projects.
• Professional Cloud Architect: Professional Cloud Architect will test you depth knowledge on the complete overview of the services implementation of and managing the services of google cloud.
• Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer: Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer will test you knowledge on the services like deployment automation and scaling the application at the sudden loads.
• Professional Cloud Network Engineer: Professional Cloud Network Engineer will validates the you ability on the desging of the networks for the business use in cloud environments.

Why Choose Google Cloud Platform?

• GCP allows you to choose between computing, storage, big data, machine learning, and application services for your web, mobile, analytics, and, back-end solutions.
• It's global and it is cost-effective.
• It's open-source friendly.
• It's designed for security.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Google Cloud Platform

The following are the advantages and disadvantages of Google Cloud Platform:

Cloud Service Categories: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

Google Cloud Competitors

Google Cloud competes with several prominent public cloud providers in a fiercely competitive market.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS is the largest cloud computing provider globally, offering a vast array of services including compute, storage, databases, machine learning, and more. It dominates the market and is often considered the primary competitor to Google Cloud.
• Microsoft Azure: Azure is another major player in the cloud computing industry, offering a comprehensive suite of services similar to AWS and Google Cloud. It benefits from Microsoft's strong enterprise presence and integration with other Microsoft products and services.
• IBM Cloud: IBM Cloud provides a range of cloud computing services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). It is known for its focus on hybrid cloud solutions and enterprise-grade services.

GCP vs AWS

Here's the comparison between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS):

Conclusion

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) stands as a powerful and flexible cloud solution, designed to meet the diverse needs of modern businesses. Its comprehensive offerings in areas such as compute, storage, networking, data analytics, and machine learning enable companies to build and scale applications seamlessly. GCP’s global infrastructure ensures high availability and performance, while advanced security features like encryption and Identity and Access Management (IAM) provide a strong foundation for protecting data. As GCP continues to advance with innovations in AI and sustainability, it remains an essential tool for driving growth and enhancing digital strategies.