The Google Cloud Platform (GCP): An Introduction to the Leading Cloud Service

There’s no question that the cloud has taken the business world by storm in recent years. IT companies from the nook and cranny of the globe are migrating their core and sore to the cloud, in a bid to realize greater flexibility, more agility, and new opportunities for innovation. And the recent pandemic has further accelerated this migration. The momentum is so significant that it is no wonder to know that over 90 percent of present-day enterprises have their presence in the cloud in some form. Catering to this growing need are the leading cloud service providers, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is undoubtedly leading the pack.

While choosing google cloud services to migrate your workload is the best option available, a rushed migration without clear knowledge and understanding of the cloud environment can end up business in chaos. In order to help you weather this uncertainty, we have explained below the overall landscape of google cloud, such as its offerings, features, advantages, and pricing model, among others. Let’s delve into the details:

So, what is a Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?

As the name indicates, google cloud is a cloud computing platform offered by the tech giant Google. First introduced in October 2011, Google Cloud Platform includes a wide range of hosted services, such as computing, hosting, storage, database, application development, networking, big data, AI & machine learning, and management services.

Google cloud resources are broadly categorized into physical resources, such as computers and hard disk drives, and virtual resources, such as Virtual Machines (VMs). These virtual machines are present in the tech giant’s data centers spread across the globe. These data centers are in regions available in North America, South America, Australia, Asia, and Europe. Each region is further divided into zones, which are isolated from each other and are identified by a unique name.

This distribution of resources into zones brings significant benefits. The prime advantage is redundancy. As data is stored at multiple locations, businesses can easily back up their data in case of system failure. Moreover, as creating zones helps locate resources closer to the clients, the latency is reduced significantly.

Google Cloud Platform Services

Whether your business is starting its journey or already on its way to digital transformation, GCP offers a wide variety of cloud services to help you choose the solutions that best suit your business needs. Whatever may be your industry’s challenge or use case, Google Cloud has a solution for it. Let’s discuss the most sought-after google cloud platform services:

• Compute Engine

Compute Engine is one of the featured solutions offered by Google Cloud. This is a computing and hosting service that enables businesses to develop, deploy, run, and manage virtual machines on Google’s infrastructure. Google cloud compute services are offered as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Compute Engine facilitates the required scale, performance, and value needed to deploy and launch massive compute clusters on Google’s infrastructure. The enticing benefit of google cloud compute services offering is that there is no need for upfront investments, and users can run numerous virtual CPUs on Google’s data center, efficiently and cost-effectively.  

• Cloud Storage 

GCP’s Cloud Storage is a data storage service that enables businesses of all sizes to store their objects in Google Cloud. An object is a fixed piece of the data file of any format. And these objects are stored in containers called buckets. All these buckets form a project, and a group of projects makes an organization.

Once a project is created, the businesses can create a storage bucket and upload objects into those buckets. Users can store any amount of data. Moreover, the stored data can be retrieved anytime and any number of times. Users can implement fine-grained access controls over objects uploaded in Cloud Storage. This aspect enables you to have complete control of how the data is accessed and shared.

Note: Google cloud storage can be bought at different prices as per individual requirements. ts. Google cloud storage price usually depends on the three major components which are data storage, data processing, and network usage.

• Cloud SDK 

Google Cloud Software Development Kit (SDK) is a collection of command in-line tools and libraries to enable users to interact with GCP products and services. Together, these tools help developers and technical teams to be more efficient when interacting with Google Cloud. The SDK includes the Google Cloud CLI, Cloud Client Libraries, developer tools, and documentation.

Google Cloud CLI is a collection of command-line tools that you can install to access and manage your cloud from the command line. It enables users to do a host of operations, such as managing virtual machines, querying Big Query tables, updating Google Cloud Storage buckets, and handling Cloud Console. On the other hand, Cloud Client Libraries enable you to programmatically integrate Google Cloud APIs into your code. With high-level API abstractions, these Libraries handle all the low-level details of communicating with Google Cloud. More importantly, Cloud Client Libraries are available in several programming languages, including Java, Python, Node.js, Ruby, C++, and PHP. Moreover, Cloud SDK is available for free for Google Cloud account holders.

• Cloud SQL 

Google Cloud SQL is a fully-managed relational database service. It allows businesses to host, run, and manage their relational databases on the Google Cloud Services Platform. One can use Cloud SQL with MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Servers. The Cloud SQL can manage a wide range of database operations, including backups, high availability & failover, network connectivity, export & import, maintenance & updates, monitoring, and logging. This aspect of Cloud SQL allows you to pave your attention toward your applications and services.

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) 

Google Kubernetes Engine is a managed environment to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications in Google infrastructure, in a simple and secure manner. In other words, GKE is a managed service for running Kubernetes. In addition to simplifying the process of creating clusters, it facilitates some cutting-edge cluster management features, including load balancing, auto-scaling, auto upgrading, auto repairing, logging, and monitoring.

• BigQuery 

Google Cloud’s BigQuery is a fully managed enterprise data warehouse. It is one essential google cloud platform service that is built to empower businesses to ingest, store, analyze, and visualize data with ease. It is serverless, scalable, cost-effective, and multi-cloud compatible. Users can ingest data into this warehouse by uploading data in batches or by streaming data directly and easily glean valuable insights. As a fully managed data warehouse, Google shoulders the burden of managing the infrastructure, so users can focus on analyzing their data up to the petabyte scale. BigQuery runs on standard SQL dialect, so if businesses know SQL, then they are all set to leverage the data warehouse. Moreover, interacting with BigQuery is easy. Businesses can either use the Cloud Console UI, BigQuery command-line tool, or the API client libraries of their choice. When it comes to data analysis, BigQuery integrates with several business intelligence tools and converts massive unstructured data into valuable insights.

• Cloud CDN 

Google Cloud CDN is a content delivery network that empowers business entities to better their web and video content delivery. Since this service is based on Google’s global edge network, businesses can deliver content on a global scale and reach. With Cloud CDN, you can reduce the latency, cost, and load on your in-house servers and scale to millions of users with ease. Moreover, the service comes with global anycast IP, providing a single global IP address for optimal performance across the world. In addition, Cloud CDN allows users to deliver content over Google’s high-performance distributed edge-catching infrastructure. This helps in preventing DNS propagation delays and ensures availability. It also uses cloud load balancing to ensure detailed routing and configuration capabilities at each edge location.

• Dataflow 

Google’s Dataflow is a fully managed data processing service. The service is used for both stream and batch data. It is serverless, speedy, and economical. It automates infrastructure provisioning, batch processing, and autoscaling as your data grows. This enables businesses to leverage benefits such as low latency, high efficiency, and minimal cost for data processing. Moreover, it is easy to use this service. All you need to do is read the data from the source, transform it, and write it back into a sink. As Dataflow follows a serverless approach, it axes operational overhead from data processing operations. This enables teams to focus on programming rather than managing server clusters.  

• Cloud Operations 

Formerly known as Stackdriver, Google Cloud Operations Suite is an integrated monitoring, logging, and observability platform for applications running on GCP and beyond. The end-to-end operations suite includes capturing signals, visualizing & analyzing systems, managing incidents, troubleshooting issues with built-in telemetry, interactive dashboards, recommendations, and more.  

• Cloud Run 

Google Cloud Run is a fully managed serverless platform used for developing and deploying highly scalable containerized applications. It is yet another Google cloud platform service that businesses can use the programming language of their choice, including Go, Python, Java, Node.js, and .NET. You can also leverage any OS library and any binaries. And because Cloud Run is built with Knative, you can use it with your own Kubernetes engine cluster too. With Cloud Run on GKE, you can build and deploy an application to your own Kubernetes cluster with the same ease and benefits.   

• Anthos 

Google Anthos is a managed platform for all your applications, deployed across disparate locations including on-premises, Google Cloud, and other public clouds. According to a recent study by Forrester, Google Anthos enables businesses to achieve up to 4.8X ROI within three years. Moreover, this platform embeds security into each phase of the application development life cycle and automates security management across all the deployments.  

• Cloud Functions 

Google Cloud Functions is a pay-per-use Functions as a Service (FaaS) product. It is a kind of google cloud platform service that enables businesses to build and connect event-driven services with simple, single-purpose code without any need for managing a server or runtime environment. 

How to Use Google Cloud Services 

The GCP facilitates users with three primary ways to interact with its 100+ services and solutions. Here are some of the essential google cloud services: 

• Google Cloud Console 

With its web-based, graphical user interface, the Google Cloud Console helps businesses to manage their Google Cloud resources and workloads. You can either develop a new project or prefer an existing one. You can also create multiple projects.  

• Command-line interface 

Using Google Cloud’s CLI, users can perform most of the cloud operations. It allows users to easily, yet effectively, manage development workflow and workloads in a terminal window.  

• Client libraries 

Using Google Client Libraries, users can easily create and manage cloud resources. Users can also leverage these libraries to access APIs for services such as Google Drive, Google Maps, and YouTube.  

GCP Pricing Model: How Does GCP Price Its Services  

Google Cloud follows a transparent and innovative approach to pricing its services. Here, we have explained in detail the Google Cloud Server costs and pricing models: 

1. Start for Free: The cost of Google cloud platform is a free pricing model for new customers. You will get USD 300 in free credits, which you can spend on any Google Cloud resources. Also, customers can use 20+ products, including Compute Engine and Cloud Storage, for free with monthly usage limits. Users will also get additional free credits by verifying their business email. Moreover, users won’t be charged until they upgrade.  The google cloud server price for an organization could be requested from the sales team of google cloud. However, users can start running workloads for free initially. 
2. Pay-as-you-go Model: With Google’s pay-as-you-go pricing structure, the business can pay only for services they use. Users can realize automatic savings based on their monthly usage and by pre-paying for resources at discounted rates. There are no up-front fees and termination costs.  
3. Committed Use: The Google Cloud platform service also provides a committed use model for users who are planning to utilize Google Cloud for the long term and are willing to make an extended-period upfront commitment. With a committed use contract, users can purchase Google Cloud resources at a discounted price in return for upfront obligations for 1 year or 3 years.  

In Conclusion 

So far, we have seen the enticing features, USPs, and service offerings of the Google Cloud Platform. After going through the ins and outs of the Google Cloud Platform, there’s no more hesitance to say that moving to GCP helps solve your toughest digital challenges. However, before making any move, it’s imperative that businesses truly understand what’s involved. So, it is wise to rope in a cloud expert to make it a smooth move. And Continuum Innovations helps you navigate from barriers to benefits.  

With a significant industry presence and huge domain expertise, Continuum Innovations provides an evolutionary set of cloud migration services to empower you to migrate to Google Cloud with confidence. We assess your business requirements, unearth opportunities, and draft the optimal cloud migration strategy. So, let’s join forces and leverage the best of the GCP.  

Contact us now!