What is Google Cloud?

Introduction

Cloud computing is the buzzword and in many ways is an era in the making, changing the way business is controlled, managed, and expanded. It is automation and orchestration in a business taken to the next level, automation of the entire industry. The first public cloud offering in the industry came out in the year 2006, and since then, there is no looking back. Although Google has been at the forefront of research and innovation in this field among others, Google wasn’t one of the first to offer a complete public cloud package. 

Google started offering its public cloud services portfolio, naming it Google Cloud Platform in the spring of 2008, April 7 to be exact. By the time Google had started offering its cloud services, it had a full-fledged portfolio of services, including Google Mail, Google Search, Google file storage, and Youtube. The technology and infrastructure are used internally by Google, for these wildly popular services were offered as the infrastructure for Google Cloud Platform. Today Google Cloud Platform offers SaaS(Sofware as a Service), Iaas(Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS(Platform as a service), and serverless computing environments. 

1. Featured products on Google Cloud
2. Why should you choose Google Cloud
3. Open Cloud

Google Cloud is the larger suite of services that includes Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, APIs for machine learning, and enterprise versions of Android and Chrome OS.

The most well known  and featured of all its products in the Google Cloud portfolio is its public offering of cloud infrastructure, Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform has over 100 products under its umbrella offering customers a full portfolio that ranges from compute resources on cloud to cloud SDK, to dataflow , workflow and orchestration tools to containerized images and environments.

The products in this bucket are broadly categorized into the various domains

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, 
• API management
• Compute
• Containers
• Data Analysis
• Databases
• Developer Tools
• Healthcare and Life Sciences
• Hybrid and Multi-cloud
• Internet of Things
• Management Tools
• Media and Gaming
• Migration
• Networking
• Security and Identity
• Serverless Computing
• Storage
• Operations

1. Some of the Featured products on Google Cloud are

Compute Engine

Basically virtual machines in various flavours and configurations running on Google Data Centres. You can select from an array of virtual machines like

General Purpose(E2, N1, N2, N2D)- A balanced machine on cost and performance.

Compute Optimized (C2) – High performance vCPU for intensive jobs.

Memory Optimized (M2) – Powered by larger memory configurations for in-memory databases.

Accelerator Optimized (A2) – powered by NVIDIA A100 GPU for unprecedented acceleration at every scale.

Cloud Storage

Provides companies of all sizes to store their data in terms of Objects. Allows any amount of data and can be retrieved as often you need it. Cloud storage also provides low latency, high durability, and Geo-redundancy. Access your objects through the internet.

Cloud SDK

Libraries and APIs, helping you to interact with Google Cloud products and services. Command-line tools that help you provision virtual machine instances, manage to compute engine, networks, disk storage, and firewalls. Support for multiple programming languages to use the APIs and SDKs with, which include popular choices like Java, Python, Node.js, PHP among others.

Cloud SQL

A Relational Database Service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server is fully managed to reduce your cost of maintenance. Assured business continuity supported by a 24/7 Site Reliability Engineering team. Cut down on time-consuming tasks like database provisioning, capacity management using Automation.

Google Kubernetes Engine

A managed and secured Kubernetes service with multi-cluster support and 4-way autoscaling. Preconfigured single click clusters, high availability with multi-region clustering. Auto repair,auto-upgrade, and release channels.

Encrypted containers , and vulnerability scanning of container images. Easy monitoring of Kubernetes related resources.

Big Query

Query petabytes of data with zero operational overhead, at incredible speeds. Achieve reduced TCO as against cloud data warehouse alternatives. Multi-cloud analytics solution enables insights from data across clouds. 

Cloud CDN

A fast and reliable video and web content delivery that can easily scale to global levels. Consistent across locations around the globe.

Dataflow

Fast and cost-effective, serverless unified stream and batch processing. A fully managed data processing service with automated provisioning and management of resources. Auto-scaling of resources to maximize resource utilization.

Operations

Perform all operational activities like monitor, troubleshoot, and improve application performance on Google Cloud. Analyze metrics, logs, and traces across your footprint on Google Cloud. Convenient and out of the box dashboards and views. Setup performance and availability indicators.

Cloud Run

Development and deployment of containerized applications on a fully managed serverless platform. Code using your favorite languages Go, Python, Java, Ruby, Node.js, and more. Port your applications easily with the apps being built on open standard Knative.

Cloud Functions

Run your code with zero server management on scalable pay-as-you-go functions as a service. No worries about provisioning, managing, or upgrading servers. Integrated debugging, monitoring, and logging capabilities.

Google Cloud Marketplace

Launch solutions with free trials from partners using various timeframes of virtual machines, Kubernetes apps and SaaS help you determine if the solution is right for you.

Cloud Natural Language

Using Machine Learning Natural Language reveals the structure and meaning of the text and the sentiment in text and conversations.

2. Why should you choose Google Cloud

• No upfront costs for adopting Google Cloud
• Google Cloud security uses the same security setup that reliable and secure applications for over 15 years, like Google mail and other Google apps, have been using over all these years. 
• Google Cloud’s unique pricing model, is one of the most competitive in the marketplace and is the most significant differentiator from other competitors.
• Compute instances are charged on the billing by the second model in one-second increments with a one-minute minimum, so you pay only for what and how much you use. 
• Googles Big Data innovations like BigTable, MapReduce, and Dremel along with breakthrough cloud data warehousing systems like BigQuery, advanced AI and ML platforms, real-time or batch processing (Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Dataproc), data interpretation (Dataprep) and visual analytics (Google Data Studio) help you transform your business with ease. With serverless big data analytics, Google Cloud removes the complexity of building and maintenance of a high-performance data analytics system.
• Google Cloud data centers are energy efficient using only up to half the energy that other typical data centers run on.

3. Open Cloud

Google Cloud brings the best of open source to Google cloud customers. This strategy stems from Google’s belief in an open-source will lay the foundation of the future IT infrastructure globally and this strong belief has been reflected in its contributions to projects like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and many others.

Google will be partnering with leading open source organizations like Confluent, DataStax, MongoDB, and others bringing in more open source software on Google Cloud.

Dive right in to the cloud , start today on Google Cloud @ https://cloud.google.com/

Conclusion

If you are looking for an extensive course in Cloud Computing, then the 5.5-month online Postgraduate Certificate Program In Cloud Computing offered by Jigsaw Academy can be of help. This program helps interested learners become complete Cloud professionals.

Also Read

• Openstack Cloud: Benefits and Importance in Cloud Computing