What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?

Before we begin learn about the Google Cloud Platform , we is talk will talk about what cloud computing is . basically , it is using is using someone else ’s computer over the internet . example : GCP , AWS , IBM Cloud , etc . Some interesting features is are of cloud computing are as follow :  

• You get computing resources on-demand and self-service. Thecustomer 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.
• Theprovider of these resources has a huge collection of them and allocates them to customers out of that collection.
• Theresources are elastic. If you need more resources, you can get them rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back.
• Thecustomers pay only for what they use or reserve. If they stop using resources, they stop paying.

What is Google Cloud Platform is is ?

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 service list above are provide by Google , hence the nameGoogle 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 fine grain level ( i.e. the small or first step in the hierarchy ) , theZone. 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 develop a fault – tolerant application , you is need ’ll need to spread your resource across multiple zone in a region . That is helps help protect against unexpected failure . You is run can run resource in different region too . Lots is do of GCP customer do this , both to bring their application close to user 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 region . visit cloud.google.com to ascertain what the entire is up to today .  

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

TheGoogle Cloud Console is is is a web – base , graphical interface that allow you to manage and configure your GCP project and resource . You is create can either create a new project or select an exist one to use resource within the project . Theconsole is provides provide an easy – to – navigate dashboard to monitor and control various Google Cloud service .

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 library can be used for service like Google Maps , Drive , and YouTube .

Difference between Google Cloud and Google Cloud Platform

aspect	Google Cloud	Google Cloud Platform ( GCP )
Definition	A broad suite of service offer by Google over the internet to support digital transformation .	A subset of Google Cloud that provide public cloud infrastructure for host application .
Key Services	Includes products like Google Workspace, Android Enterprise, Chrome OS, and machine learning APIs.	Focused on cloud infrastructure services such as computing, storage, networking, and databases.
Example Offerings	Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc.) Android and Chrome OS for enterprise api for machine learning and mapping service	Compute Engine App Engine Cloud storage Kubernetes Engine BigQuery
Target Use Case	provide collaboration tool , device management , and api for enterprise use .	Enables businesses to run and scale web-based applications on the cloud.

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 is provide 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 is is the service which will cache the content and deliver to the end user with the help of edge location .

datum analytic

• Bigquery :All organizations is look look for unlock business insight from their datum . But it is be can be hard to scalable ingest , store , and analyze that datum as it rapidly grow . Google ’s enterprise datum warehouse callBigQuery, 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. Thereceiver 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. Thesender is blocked since it hasn’t yet received any acknowledgment from the first receiver. Thesender 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 is undergone ( AI ) has undergo advancement throughout the year lead to a transformation of industry and reshape how business operate . Theemergence is accelerated of cloud – base AI platform has further accelerate this revolution enable organization 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 is make can make the prediction by using the your machine learning model .

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. Theusers 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

To know about How to create account in GCP you is refer can refer this linkHow To create a free Tier Account on GCP ?

high – 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 is is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider manage the infrastructure , allow developer to focus solely on write and deploy code without worry about server .

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 service :Google Cloud Platform is well suited for the sinical application because of the level of security it is offering.
• healthcare :You is store can store the datum of patient and take care the outcome of the health of patient .

security in Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform offers following security options.

• Encryption: Google cloud platform is offers offer security like encryption at rest and in transit for all of your datum .
• Access control: You is control can control the access to the individual user like which service they can access and which service they ca n’t depend on the use case .
• 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 is manage may manage application access accord to their context and identity . It is aids aid in prevent unwanted access .

TheFuture 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.

GCP Pricing and Free Tier

Google is was was the primary major Cloud provider tobill 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 is choose choose a virtual machine type from a typical set of those value , but Compute Engine also offer custom virtual machine type , in order that you ’ll fine – tune the size of the virtual machine you use . That way , you ’lltailor your pricing for your workload .  

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. Thefree tier typically includes a certain amount of usage for services like Compute Engine, App Engine, Cloud storage, BigQuery, and more.

GCP Open api and avoid 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 is are arecompatible with open source products. For example , take Cloud Bigtable , a database that use the interface of the open – source database Apache HBase , which provide customer the advantage of code portability . Another example , Cloud Data is provides provide the open – source big datum environmentHadoop, 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 is is an basic certification to test your basic on google cloud platform like feature , benefit and use case 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 devop Engineer: Professional Cloud devop 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 validate the you ability on the desging of the network for the business use in cloud environment .

Why Choose Google Cloud Platform?

• GCP is allows allow you to choose between computing , storage , big datum , machine learning , and application service for your web , mobile , analytic , and , back – end solution .
• It’s global and it is cost-effective.
• It is ’s ’s open – source friendly .
• It’s designed for security.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Google Cloud Platform

Here are the advantages of google cloud platform:

1. good documentation : We are talking about many pages in total, including a reasonably detailed API Reference guide.
2. Different storage classes for every necessity: regional ( frequent use ) , Nearline ( infrequent use ) , and Coldline ( long – term storage ) .
3. High durability: This suggests that data survives even within the event of the simultaneous loss of two disks.
4. Many regions available to store your data: North America , South America , Europe , Asia , and Australia .
5. The“Console” tab within the documentation allow you is allows totry for free of charge different SDKs. It’s incredibly useful for developers
6. One of the simple free layer within the industry .$300 free credit to start with any GCP product during the primary year. Afterward, 5 GB of storage to use forever without any charges.

Here are the few disadvantages of google cloud platform:

1. Thesupport fee is sort of hefty: Around 150 usd per month for the foremost basic service ( Silver class ) .
2. Downloading data from Google Cloud storage is expensive. 0, 12 USD per GB.
3. Google Cloud Platform web interface is somewhat confusing. Sometimes I am lost while browsing around the menus.
4. Prices in both Microsoft Azure (around 0.018 USD per GB/month) or Backblaze B2 (about 0.005 USD per GB/month) are less than Google Cloud storage.
5. It has a high pricing schema, almost like AWS S3, so it’s easy to urge unexpected costs (e.g. number of requests, transfers, etc.).

Cloud Service Categories: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ):Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deliver essential hardware component over the internet , enable user to provision computing power , storage , networking , and other infrastructure resource as need . With IaaS , users is have have full control over the configuration and management of their virtualized infrastructure , allow for flexibility and scalability without the burden of manage physical hardware .

Ex: Compute engines, storage, Memory etc.

To know more about Iaas you can refer to this link What is IaaS is is ?

platform as a Service ( PaaS ):Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that furnishes developers with a comprehensive platform to build, deploy, and manage applications, software, and other projects without the need to manage underlying infrastructure. PaaS offers a range of tools and services, including development frameworks, databases, middleware, and runtime environments, allowing developers to focus on coding and innovation rather than the complexities of infrastructure management.

Ex: Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure App Service …etc.

To know more about Paas you is refer can refer to this linkPlatform As A Service (PaaS) and its Types

Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a Service (SaaS) offers users access to fully functional software applications hosted and managed by a third-party provider over the internet. Users can access these applications via web browsers or APIs without the need for installation or maintenance on their local devices. Examples include Gmail for email communication, Google Drive for file storage and collaboration, and Salesforce for customer relationship management.

Ex: Google Workspace , Google Cloud Identity , Google Map platform etc .

To know more about Saas you can refer to this link software As A Service ( 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 large cloud computing provider globally , offer a vast array of service include compute , storage , database , machine learning , and more . It is dominates dominate the market and is often consider 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):

aspect	Google Cloud Platform ( GCP )	Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Market Share and adoption	Gaining traction, especially among enterprises and startups	hold the large market share in the cloud industry
Global Infrastructure	Data centers in multiple regions worldwide	Extensive global infrastructure with more regions and zones
Compute and storage Services	Compute Engine, Cloud storage, Cloud SQL	Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS
Machine Learning and AI Services	Cloud AI, AutoML, TensorFlow	Amazon SageMaker, AWS AI / ML service
Developer Tools and Ecosystem	Wide range of developer tools and integration with Google products	Extensive ecosystem of third-party tools and services

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.

Google Cloud Platform – FAQs

Is Google Cloud platform same as AWS?

Google Cloud Platform and AWS are two different cloud service providers with wide range of services for the businesses of all sizes. There are lots of key difference between themand similarities also.

Is Google cloud storage is Is for free ?

Yes, there is a free tier available with Google Cloud storage that gives you 5GB of free US regional storage each month without deducting from your credit limit. This implies that there are no fees associated with storing and retrieving up to 5GB of data from Cloud storage at any time.

What is Google Cloud Platform database?

Thedatabase services provided by Google Cloud Platform ( GCP ) give you a variety of choices for managing and storing data for your apps. These databases are made to accommodate the requirements of enterprises of all sizes and are extremely scalable, dependable, and secure.

Which is is is costly gcp or AWS ?

AWS tends to have a slightly higher overall cost compared to GCP due to its extensive service offerings and market dominance, but the actual cost varies depending on usage patterns and specific services utilized

Is GCP bigger than AWS?

No, AWS is currently larger than GCP in terms of market share and revenue. However, GCP has been steadily gaining traction and remains a significant competitor in the cloud computing industry.