Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform is a set of public cloud computing services offered by Google. The platform includes a range of hosted services for compute, storage, and application development that run on Google hardware. Google Cloud Platform services can be accessed by the developers, cloud administrators, and other enterprise IT professionals over the public internet or through a committed network connection. Explore this article and know more about Google cloud platform and its benefits.
GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM OFFERINGS
Google Cloud Platform offers services for compute, storage, networking, big data, machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT), as-well-as cloud management, security, and developer tools. The core cloud computing products in Google Cloud Platform include:
Google Compute Engine: Is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) which offers the users with virtual machine instances for workload hosting.
Google App Engine: It is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that gives the software developers access to Google’s scalable hosting. The developers can also use a software developer kit to develop software products that run on App Engine.
Google Cloud Storage: Is a cloud storage platform designed to store large, unstructured data sets. Google Cloud also offers database storage options, including Cloud Datastore for NoSQL non-relational storage, Cloud SQL for MySQL fully relational storage, and Google’s native Cloud Bigtable database.
Google Container Engine: Is a management and orchestration system for Docker containers that runs within Google’s public cloud. Google Container Engine is based on the Google Kubernetes container orchestration engine.
Google Cloud Platform offers application development and integration services. For instance, Google Cloud Pub/Sub is a managed and real-time messaging service that allows messages to be exchanged between applications. In addition, Google Cloud Endpoints allows the developers to create services based on RESTful APIs, and then make those services accessible to Apple iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients. Other offerings include Anycast DNS servers, direct network interconnections, load balancing, monitoring, and logging services.
HIGHER-LEVEL SERVICES
Google continues to enhance higher-level services, such as those related to big data and machine learning, to its cloud platform. Google big data services include those for data processing and analytics, such as Google BigQuery for SQL-like queries made against multi-terabyte data sets. Adding to that, Google Cloud Dataflow is a data processing service intended for analytics; extract, transform, and load (ETL); and real-time computational projects. The platform also includes Google Cloud Dataproc, which offers Apache Spark and Hadoop services for big data processing.
ADVANTAGES OF GOOGLE CLOUD
BETTER PRICING THAN COMPETITORS
Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so the user can only pay for the compute time they use. And a big advantage is that they give you discounted prices for long-running workloads with no up-front commitment required. Use the VMs for a month and the user gets a discount. This makes it perfect for start-ups and for enterprise IT to cut costs. AWS for instance requires prepays in the form of “reserved instances” to be eligible for the discounts. And Azure only offers a 5% discount on a 12-month prepay.
LIVE MIGRATION OF VIRTUAL MACHINES
Another big advantage for Google Cloud Hosting, especially for how you can use it at live migrations of Virtual Machines. Neither AWS, Azure, or smaller providers such as Digital Ocean offer this functionality. So this is a very important differentiator for Google Cloud compared to other cloud providers. This means the users are basically always up with their VMs, with no noticeable degradation in performance when they are live migrating VMs between host machines.
The benefits of live migrations allow the engineers at Google to better address issues such as patching, repairing, and updating the software and hardware, without the need to worry about machine reboots.
STATE OF THE ART SECURITY
Another big advantage is security. Choosing Google Cloud Platform means the user gets the benefit of a security model that has been built upon over 15 years, and currently secures products and services such as Gmail, Search, and much more. Google currently employs more than 500 full-time security experts. Niels Provos, a security Engineer at Google, gave a great in-depth look at the security of Google Cloud Platform.
Some of Google Cloud Platform security features include:
All data is encrypted in transit between Google, the customers, and the data centres; as well as the data in all of the Cloud Platform services. The data stored on persistent disks which is encrypted under 256-bit AES and each encryption key is also encrypted with a set of regularly changed master keys.
The layers of the Google application and storage stack require that requests coming from other components are authenticated and authorized.
DEDICATION TO CONTINUED EXPANSION
Google has continued to swiftly build out their infrastructure for Google Cloud Platform. On September 29th, 2016 they have announced the locations of new strategically placed Google Cloud Regions. We are very excited to see São Paulo and Sydney included in the list as this will help dramatically decrease latency for Google Cloud Hosting customers across South America and Australia.
THE VERDICT
As you can see, when it comes to Google Cloud Hosting and using Google Cloud Platform, there are a lot of advantages. Not only it is inexpensive, but the user can also benefit from one of the largest networks in the world! This means less latency and more accurate compute prices as data is able to be processed in less time. Live migration of virtual machines is currently a unique and very important differentiator when it comes to comparing other cloud hosting providers. Top of all the state of the art security and performance is able to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections and the user will have a platform that can set their business up for long-term success.
