In the last few years the market for Cloud Computing has grown rapidly. There are many Cloud providers in the market today such as Amazon Web Services,Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud,Google Cloud Platform and many more.
In this post we will be discussing about the Google Cloud Platform.
What is GCP ?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of public cloud computing services offered by Google.It is hosted on the same underlying infrastructure that Google uses internally for end-user products(eg. Google Search and YouTube). In simple term, Google's computing resources are made available to the users as a public cloud offerings via services.
These services includes Compute, Storage & Databases, Networking, Big Data, Machine Learning, Identity & Security, and Management & Developer tools. These services can be access by an administrators/developers over the public internet or through dedicated network connection.
In 2008, Google launched Google App Engine, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud tool that allowed developers to build and host their apps on Google’s infrastructure. It was the first cloud computing service from the company.
Overview of the GCP Services
Compute,Storage and Networking are the important building blocks in the GCP. On top of these core foundational building block, we have additional services like Databases(NoSQL,Relational, etc), Data & Analytics services, Services that delivers AI and machine learning based services.
For enterprises there are set of services that make it possible to deploy Hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities, API management, and migration services to migrate workload from on prem to cloud infrastructure.
Security and DevOps Tools which are important to all the services and application deployed in GCP.
We will discuss these services in more details in next few sections
Compute -
Compute is one of the foundational aspects and the most critical building block of the cloud infrastructure.
There are multiple services when it comes to Compute.
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivered by Compute Engine(VM hosted on Google Infrastructure),
2. PaaS offered through App Engine(building web applications and mobile back-ends using container instances preconfigured with one of several available runtimes, each of which include a set of standard App Engine libraries),
3.Containers as a Service delivered via Kubernetes Engine,
4. Functions as a Service delivered via Cloud functions. Cloud functions allows us to create micro-services (small, single-purpose functions) that respond to cloud events without requiring an explicitly managed server or a runtime environment.
5. Container registry manage private docker and container images.
Storage & Database -
Storage provides persistence to the applications.
It includes
1. Cloud Storage - A unified object storage service, offering a spectrum of storage options including
- geo-redundant - low-latency, high QPS content serving to users distributed across geographic regions)
- regional - for workloads in a particular region
- nearline - for data accessed less than once a month
- coldline - for data accessed less than once a year.
2. Bigtable - It is a high performance NoSQL Big Data database service which supports very large workloads at consistent low latency and high throughput rates. Bigtable is used by Google internally to power services including Search and Gmail.
3. Cloud Datastore - It is a NoSQL schemaless database which stores the non-relational data. It is an alternative to Bigtable when ACID transactions are required, or the data stored is highly structured.
4. Cloud SQL - It is a MySQL database service for hosting relational MySQL databases on Google’s infrastructure.
5. Cloud Spanner- It is globally distributed relational database with ACID transactions, strong consistency, SQL semantics, horizontal scaling, and high availability.
6.Persistent Disk - It is a service which provides SSD and HDD storage that can be attached to instances running in either Compute Engine or Container Engine.
Network -
Network enables communication across multiple applications and services offered by Google.
Network Services provides security and connectivity to all services/applications deployed in GCP.
1. Cloud Virtual Network - It is a set of Google-managed networking capabilities, including IP address range selection, routes, firewalls, Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Cloud Router for provisioning your GCP resources, connecting them to each other and isolating them from one another in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
2. Cloud Load Balancing - It load-balances and auto-scales GCP compute resources in single or multiple regions behind a single anycast IP.
3. Cloud CDN - It uses Google’s globally distributed edge points of presence to cache HTTP(S) load-balanced content close to users.
4. Cloud Interconnect - It allows GCP customers to connect to Google via higher availability and/or lower latency connections than their existing Internet connections.
5. Cloud DNS - It is a managed authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google. Cloud DNS translates requests for domain names into IP addresses and offers a UI, command-line interface, and API for publishing and managing millions of DNS zones and resource records.
Security and Identity -
Security is critical and there are set of services which enable customer to use best practices of deploying secured environment.
1. Cloud IAM - It allows administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, along with built-in auditing.
2. Cloud Resource Manager - It is a service for managing the resource containers (such as Organizations and Projects) used to group and hierarchically organize GCP resources.
3. Cloud Security Scanner- It is a web security scanner for common vulnerabilities in App Engine applications, including cross-site-scripting (XSS), Flash injection, mixed content (HTTP in HTTPS), and outdated / insecure libraries.
AI & Machine Learning - AI and ML provides set of tools to built intelligent applications using ML engine.
1. Cloud Machine Learning - It is a service for building machine learning models using the TensorFlow framework.
2. Cloud Vision API - A REST API that can be used to understand the content of an image into categories, detect individual objects and faces within images, and find and read printed words contained within images.
3. Cloud Speech API - A REST API that can be used to convert audio to text. The API recognizes over 80 languages and variants.
4. Natural Language API - A REST API that can be used to parse the structure and meaning of text. It can extract information including the people, places, events, and sentiment within a provided text.
5. Translate API - A REST API that can be used to translate an arbitrary language string into any supported language. Language identification is available for cases where the source language is unknown.
DevOps Tools -
DevOps tools provides automation capabilities to the customer.
Management Tools -
Management tools delivers services to users using which they can interact and manage their cloud infra services.
1. Stackdriver - It provides monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications built on cloud infrastructure. It also provides metrics, dashboards, alerting, log management, reporting, and tracing capabilities.
2. Deployment Manager - It is an infrastructure automation and management service that allows us to define templates to deploy a variety of GCP services, including Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Cloud SQL.
3. Cloud Shell - Command-line access to cloud resources from within a browser, without having to install the Google Cloud SDK or other tools on your system.
4. Cloud Billing API - It allows programmatically managed billing for GCP projects.
In the next post we will see how to Create a Free account in GCP to create different projects.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article.
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