Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning.
Google Cloud Platform provides infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and server-less computing environments.
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Google Cloud Platform is a set of Computing, Networking, Storage, Big Data, Machine Learning and Management services provided Google that runs on the same Cloud infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Photos and YouTube.
Features of GCP:
So now look at some of the features of GCP what really gives it an upper hand over other vendors.
What are Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Services?
Google offers a wide range of Services. Following are the major Google Cloud Services:
1. Compute
2. Networking
3. Storage and
Databases
4. Big Data
5. Machine Learning
6. Identity & Security
7. Management and
8. Developer Tools
1. Compute: GCP provides a scalable range of computing options you can tailor to match your needs. It provides highly customizable virtual machines. and the option to deploy your code directly or via containers.
1. Google Compute Engine
2. Google App Engine
3. Google Kubernetes Engine
Kubernetes Engine (GKE):-Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications. It brings our latest innovations in developer productivity, resource efficiency, automated operations, and open source flexibility to accelerate your time to market.
Launched in 2015, Kubernetes Engine builds on Google’s experience of running services like Gmail and YouTube in containers for over 12 years. Kubernetes Engine allows you to get up and running with Kubernetes in no time, by completely eliminating the need to install, manage, and operate your own Kubernetes clusters.
4. Google Cloud Container Registry:- Container Registry is a single place for your team to manage Dockers images, perform vulnerability analysis, and decide who can access what with fine-grained access control.
A Docker image is a file, comprised of multiple layers, used to execute code in a Docker container. … When the Docker user runs an image, it becomes one or multiple instances of that container. Docker is an open source OS-level virtualization software platform primarily designed for Linux and Windows.
5. Cloud Functions: – Google Cloud Functions is a server less execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. With Cloud Functions you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services.
2. Networking: The Storage domain includes services related to networking, it includes the following services
1. Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
2. Google Cloud Load Balancing
3. Content Delivery Network
4. Google Cloud Interconnect
5. Google Cloud DNS
1. Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC):-A virtual private cloud is an on-demand configurable pool of shared computing resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations using the resources.
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Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) gives you the flexibility to scale and control how workloads connect regionally and globally. When you connect your on-premises or remote resources to GCP, you’ll have global access to your VPCs without needing to replicate connectivity or administrative policies in each region.
A VPC network, sometimes just called a “network,” is a virtual version of a physical network, like a data center network. It provides connectivity for your Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances, Kubernetes Engine clusters, App Engine Flex instances, and other resources in your project.
2. Google Cloud Load Balancing:-Cloud Load Balancing includes support for the latest application delivery protocols. It supports HTTP/2 with gRPC when connecting to backends and also is the control traffic related issues.
- There are two types of load balancers in Google Cloud Platform:
- Network Load Balancer and
- HTTP(s) Load Balancer.
Note: – gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC (Remote Procedure call) framework that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers.
3. Content Delivery Network:-A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.
Why Use a Content Delivery Network?-
CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) have changed the web hosting during the recent years. Rather than hosting your website on one server, the load is distributed across multiple systems. You can host static content such as videos, images, audio clips, CSS and JavaScript files.
Not every website needs a CDN but once you start getting more traffic, you should consider using a CDN that suit your needs. Google’s ranking factor also includes website loading time. Using a CDN not only reduces user waiting time but also increases your search engine rankings.
4. Google Cloud Interconnect:-Cloud Interconnect extends your on-premises network to Google’s network through a highly available, low latency connection. You can use Google Cloud Interconnect – Dedicated (Dedicated Interconnect) to connect directly to Google or use Google Cloud Interconnect – Partner (Partner Interconnect) to connect to Google through a supported service provider.
5. Google Cloud DNS: – Publish your domain names using Google’s infrastructure for production-quality, high-volume DNS services. Google’s global network of any cast name servers provide reliable, low-latency authoritative name lookups for your domains from anywhere in the world.
Notes:-Low latency describes a computer network that is optimized to process a very high volume of data messages with minimal delay (latency). These networks are designed to support operations that require near real-time access to rapidly changing data.
3. Big Data: – Big data is a term that describes the large volume of data – both structured and unstructured. Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.
Big Data is also data but with a huge size of data. Big Data is a term used to describe a collection of data that is huge in size and yet growing exponentially with time. In short such data is so large and complex that none of the traditional data management tools are able to store it or process it efficiently.
The Storage domain includes services related to big data, it includes the following services
1. Google Big Query:–
Storing and querying massive datasets can be time consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure.
Big Query is an enterprise data warehouse that solves this problem by enabling super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. Simply move your data into Big Query and let us handle the hard work. You can control access to both the project and your data based on your business needs, such as giving others the ability to view or query your data.
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Big Query is a RESTful web service that enables interactive analysis of massive datasets working in conjunction with Google Storage. It is a serverless Platform as a Service that may be used complementarily with MapReduce.
Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, called RESTful Web services (RWS), provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet.
2. Google Cloud Dataproc:–Google Cloud Dataproc is a cloud-based managed Apache Spark and Hadoop service offered on Google Cloud Platform.
3. Google Cloud Datalab:-Cloud Datalab is a powerful interactive tool created to explore, analyze, transform and visualize data and build machine learning models on Google Cloud .
4. Google Cloud Pub/Sub:-Cloud Pub/Sub brings the flexibility and reliability of enterprise message-oriented middleware to the cloud. At the same time, Cloud Pub/Sub is a scalable, durable event ingestion and delivery system that serves as a foundation for modern stream analytics pipelines.
5. Cloud AI:- The Storage domain includes services related to machine learning, it includes the following services-
1. Cloud Machine Learning:-Cloud Machine Learning Engine is a managed service that lets developers and data scientists build and run superior machine learning models in production. Cloud ML Engine offers training and prediction services, which can be used together or individually.
2. Vision API:-Cloud Vision API allows developers to easily integrate vision detection features within applications, including image labeling, face and landmark detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and tagging of explicit content. Cloud Auto ML Vision enables you to create a custom machine learning model for image labeling.
3. Speech API:–Google Cloud Speech-to-Text enables developers to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy-to-use API. The API recognizes 120 languages and variants to support your global user base. … It can process real-time streaming or prerecorded audio, using Google’s machine learning technology.
4. Natural Language API:–The Cloud Natural Language API provides natural language understanding technologies to developers, including sentiment analysis, entity analysis, entity sentiment analysis, content classification, and syntax analysis. … For information on which languages are supported by the Natural Language API.
5. Translation API:-Google Translate is a free multilingual machine translation service developed by Google, to translate text. It offers a website interface, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and an API that helps developers build browser extensions and software applications.
6. Jobs API:–Transform your job search and candidate matching capabilities with Cloud Talent Solution. …Talent Solution can interpret the vagueness of any job description, jobsearch query, or profile search query. … As Talent Solution learns what job seekers and employers are …
5. Machine Learning Identity & Security:- The Storage domain includes services related to security, it includes the following services-
1. Cloud Resource Manager:-Google Cloud Platform provides resource containers such as organizations, folders, and projects that allow you to group and hierarchically organize other GCP resources. This hierarchical organization lets you easily manage common aspects of your resources such as access control and configuration settings. Resource Manager enables you to programmatically manage these resource containers.
2. Cloud IAM (Identity and Access Management):-Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) enables you to create and manage permissions for Google Cloud Platform resources. Cloud IAM unifies access control for Cloud Platform services into a single system and presents a consistent set of operations.
A crucial part of cloud security involves managing user identities, their permissions, and resources they have access to. This can be an extremely challenging task for organizations who may have users accessing public cloud resources from a number of different devices and networks.
Cloud IAM (Cloud Identity and Access Management) is a key part of an organization’s overall cyber security strategy when it comes to securing resources in the public cloud. Cloud IAM helps organizations manage access control by helping to define “who” has “what” access for “which” resource. The who are members, what are role and the resources are anything we want to grant permissions on in the public cloud.
3. Cloud Security Scanner:-
Cloud Security Scanner is a web security scanner for common vulnerabilities in App Engine, Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine applications. It can automatically scan and detect four common vulnerabilities, including cross-site-scripting (XSS), Flash injection, mixed content (HTTP in HTTPS), and outdated/insecure libraries. It enables early identification and delivers very low false-positive rates. You can easily set up, run, schedule, and manage security scans, and it is available at no additional charge for Google Cloud Platform users.
6. Management Tools: The Storage domain includes services related to monitoring and management, it includes the following services
1. Stack driver (Monitoring Tool):-Google Stack driver is a monitoring service that provides IT teams with performance data about applications and virtual machines running on the Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services public cloud. … It is based on collected, an open source daemon that collects system and application performance metrics.
2. Logging: – Stack driver Logging allows you to store, search, analyze, monitor, and alert on log data and events from Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our API also allows ingestion of any custom log data from any source. Stack driver Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and system log data from thousands of VMs. Even better, you can analyze all that log data in real time.
3. Error Reporting:–Error Reporting is a Beta feature for Google App Engine flexible environment, Google Compute Engine, and AWS EC2. You can report errors from your application by sending them directly to Stack driver Logging with proper formatting or by calling an Error Reporting API endpoint that sends them for you.
4. Trace Cloud Console:-Stack driver Trace is a distributed tracing system that collects latency data from your applications and displays it in the Google Cloud Platform Console. You can track how requests propagate through your application and receive detailed near real-time performance insights. Stack driver Trace automatically analyzes all of your application’s traces to generate in-depth latency reports to surface performance degradations, and can capture traces from all of your VMs, containers, or App Engine projects.
7. Developer Tools: The Storage domain includes services related to development, it includes the following services
- 1. Cloud SDK
- 2. Deployment Manager
- 3. Cloud Test Lab
1. Cloud SDK:-The Cloud SDK is a set of tools for Google Cloud Platform. It contains gcloud, gsutil, and bq command-line tools, which you can use to access Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Big Query, and other products and services from the command-line. You can run these tools interactively or in your automated scripts.
2. Deployment Manager:-Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service that automates the creation and management of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources.
3. Cloud Test Lab:- Google Cloud Test lab basically runs an automated tests in accordance with your app’s targeting criteria on several devices. Cloud Test Lab can run instrumentation tests that you write using Espresso or Robotium. You can also use the Cloud Test Lab Robo Test to simulate user actions and find crashes in your app
