It’s no surprise that cloud computing has made a vivid impression in the computer world. For most of the businesses and enterprises, gone are the days of struggling with complicated on-premise server rooms and complicated networking. Over the past decade, cloud computing has proved itself more cost-efficient, reliable and secure.
Generally, when we think about cloud computing providers our mind struck with three giants in the industry: Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. In this article, we are going to be primarily looking at Google Cloud.
What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Google Cloud Platform is a distributed system of computing with a blend of Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a service, and Serverless computing environments. It offers application development and integration services. In short, on-demand services for computing, storage, Machine Learning, networking, Bigdata, etc which runs on Google’s physical hardware.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is online services that provide high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc. Physical hosts such as Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, LXD runs the virtual machines as guests. It has an ability to hosts many virtual machines as well as comes with the flexibility to scale services up or down as per customer’s requirement.
Platform-based service is a type of cloud computing services that provides a ready platform which enables customers to create, execute and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically related with developing and launching an application.
Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider represent itself as the server, actively handling the allocation of machine resources. In this, developer or operator is completely unaware about the server management and capacity planning decisions.
Products offered by Google Cloud are
Storage
1. Google Cloud Storage
2. Google Cloud SQL
3. Google Cloud Datastore
Compute
1. Google App Engine
2. Google Compute Engine
Big Data
1. BigQuery
Services
1. Cloud Endpoints
What does it mean by storing data on Google Cloud OR Google Cloud Storage?
Google Cloud Storage is an Infrastructure-As-A-Service and more suitable to enterprises where data is remotely maintained, managed and backed up by considering efficiency and security around the globe. Google Cloud Storage facilitates you store, access, compute and protect your data without any difficulty and with most efficient costing. With Google Cloud Storage, you can store and govern access to any amount of data, whether for an individual or a group.
Google has a substantial network of computers optimized for storing data on the Internet. This data can be in any form i.e. images, files, videos, applications, etc. Google handles the scalability, reliability, and durability of the data. So, irrespective of how many numbers of people try to access that data at once, Google will handle it for you. In turn, you pay Google the storage and bandwidth costs for storing that data on their servers and allowing people to access it as per their requirements. An impressive thing about Google Cloud Storage is that it allows you to pay for their CDN. So, for example, if multiple people request data from England, and your data is warehoused in the US, it will be cached in England for faster retrieval times. That’s built-in and you pay nothing extra for the service.
What is Google Cloud SQL?
Google Cloud SQL is hosted on Google Cloud Platform which provides database infrastructure for various applications running on Google Cloud Platform. It is completely managed by Google and offers high performance, convenience and scalability which makes it much easier to set up, maintain, manage, and administer your relational PostgreSQL and MySQL databases in the cloud.
What is Google Cloud Datastore?
Google Cloud Datastore is highly scalable NoSQL database service which is completely managed and offered by Google on Google Cloud platform. Google Cloud Datastore is not a traditional relational database. It works on server-side encryption to automatically encrypts all data before writing it to disk and automatically decrypts the data when available to read by an authorized user.
What is Google Compute Engine?
Google Compute Engine is an Infrastructure-As-A-Service where we can configure our own Virtual Machines as per requirement, which allows its users to run their computation workloads on Google owned hardware. Google Compute Engine allows the client to choose the region and zone where data resources will be stored and used. Currently, Google Compute Engine has three regions: Europe, United States and Asia. Each region has two availability zones. It empowers users to create and launch Virtual Machines on demand. It gives us the flexibility to set up our customized environment on Google’s Infrastructure. This is completely managed and controlled by the user.
What is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine is used as Platform-As-A-Service. Unlike Google Compute Engine we need not configure virtual machines here. It is a web application framework on the cloud which lets us develop and host web applications on Google-managed infrastructure. Security of all applications is highly taken care and runs across multiple virtual machines. Google App Engine is flexible enough to cater automatic scaling up and down of resources for web applications as the number of requests increases or decreases for an application. Google App Engine automatically assigns infrastructure as per requirement for the web application to complete oscillating demand without impacting its performance.
What is Google BigQuery?
Google BigQuery is an Infrastructure-As-A-Service. It is cloud based Restful Web service which has mighty ingestion capabilities to capture and analyze streaming data real time which is very big in size.
