Power your technology with Google cloud infrastructure! Dive deeper into the Google Cloud Platform, its services, and how it is reshaping business with scalable solutions.
Google has become synonymous with the cloud. Case in point, Google Cloud offers more than 90 products that companies can leverage to expand their offerings, gain more flexibility, and leverage strategic advantages over other companies.
To get an idea of how big Google Cloud is, consider its 2021 global revenue . At over 145 billion dollars, it can't get much bigger than that – and that's just for its software-as-a-service platform. You can also take into account this 80 billion for public cloud as a service and 92 billion for public cloud infrastructure as a service. The total so far for 2021 comes to $317 billion.
In 2020, the largest companies using Google Cloud (and their spending) were:
- Verizon: $79.9 million
- Twitch Interactive: $63.8 million
- CenturyLink: $61.8 million
- LinkedIn Corp: $41.1 million
- NewsCorp: $40.9 million
- SAP: US$40.1 million
- Facebook, Inc: $39.4 million
- Intel: US$39.2 million
- Yahoo: $46.6 million
- Marriott International: US$35.9 million
There's no denying that Google Cloud has become the biggest fish in an already big pond. And given that its competitors, Amazon AWS and Azure, are also doing very well, the cloud native picture becomes quite clear.
It is the present and the future of technology.
What is Google Cloud?
When most people think of Google Cloud, services like Google Drive, Gmail and Google Calendar come to mind. This is a completely different product. What we are talking about is the Google Cloud Platform which is a set of cloud-based computing services running on the same infrastructure as these end-user projects.
Google Cloud Platform was launched on April 7, 2008 and was developed using Python, Java, Go, C++ and Ruby languages. Google Cloud is made up of physical assets (like computers and hard drives) and virtual resources (like virtual machines and networks). All of this is housed in Google's own data centers around the world. Each data center is located in a region, such as Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. Each region is separated into isolated zones. Each zone is identified by a letter.
Here is a summary of how Zones and Regions are mapped:
|
we-west1-c
|
The Dalles, Oregon, North America
|
|---|---|
|
we-west2-a
|
Los Angeles, California, North America
|
|
us-west2-b
|
Los Angeles, California, North America
|
|
us-west2-c
|
Los Angeles, California, North America
|
When a user deploys a new project, they must associate it with a zone. These projects will also include the following:
- A project name (supplied by the user).
- A project ID (provided by the user or Google Cloud).
- A project number (provided by Google Cloud).
Google Cloud Platform offers everything you need to build and scale your projects, including:
- Compute Engine: virtual machines running in the Google Cloud data center
- Cloud storage
- Cloud SDK: The command-line tools you need to work with Google Cloud
- Cloud SQL: MySQL and PostgreSQL database services
- Google Kubernetes Engine: Container management and orchestration
- BigQuery: for data warehouses
- Cloud CDN: content distribution network for web and video delivery
- DataFlow: streaming analytics
- Vision AI: custom, pre-trained AI modules
- Cloud Run: Environment for running stateless containers
- Cloud Functions: Event-driven computing platform for running services and applications
- Anthos: A platform for modernizing existing applications
What makes Google Cloud Platform such a viable platform for so many businesses is that it offers a best-in-class dashboard to help make managing all of these resources and services incredibly simple. This removes a major hurdle from the process, so your developers can focus more on software engineering and less on platform and environment management.
What can you do with Google Cloud Platform?
With Google Cloud Platform, the sky is the limit. You can do things like:
- Application development
- Big Data Analysis
- Containers
- DevOps
- Databases
- High performance computing
- Hybrid and multi-cloud
- IoT
- Logging and monitoring
- ML/AI
- Serverless
- Store
What services does Google Cloud Platform offer
There are three main services offered by Google Cloud. The first is IaaS, which is Infrastructure as a Service. This allows your company to run virtual machines on Google Cloud Platform without having to invest in hardware for deployment in an on-premises data center.
The next service is PaaS, which is Platform as a Service, which builds on IaaS and adds operating systems and middleware (such as databases).
Finally, there is SaaS, which is the software installed on the operating system.
These three services come together to create a complete environment for your business to run almost everything you need to function. And considering this all runs on Google's exceptionally robust and reliable infrastructure, you can be confident it's reliable and capable of delivering the scale and power you need.
How much does Google Cloud Platform cost?
As with all services of this nature, Google Cloud Platform is a pay-as-you-go service. Calculating how much you would spend on Google Cloud Platform can be a little tricky. However, Google offers a useful pricing calculator tool that can help you get a rough idea of how much your business would spend.
New users also receive $300 in free credits, so you can “try before you buy.” But given the reputation of Google Cloud Platform, once you sign up for an account, there's a good chance you'll stick with it.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why the Google Cloud Platform is one of the most popular of its kind. Its vast, reliable, scalable and easy-to-use nature allows businesses of all types to leverage the platform to help with digital transformation and growth beyond their imagination.
