What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP): All in One Guide to Cloud Solution

Do you know? Google Cloud Platform is one of the top cloud providers, holding a massive market share of 85.47% in the PaaS category, as per 6sense. With over 487,605 companies, including innovative startups to industry giants, it is clearly a popular choice among businesses of all sizes and industries. 

But what exactly makes it a go-to solution, and how it can benefit your business?  

We’ll find out in this blog!  

What is GCP? (Google Cloud Platform)

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a public cloud vendor that offers you all types of cloud computing services, including Iaas, Paas, and Saas.  

You can build, deploy, and scale your applications and websites on the same infrastructure that powers Google’s other products, like Gmail, Drive, Photos, and YouTube. From computing services to storage, network, security, database, and AI/ML capabilities, it comprises everything you need in a cloud platform.

Well-known for its reliability and scalability, it allows you to build and deploy applications capable of handling millions of users while ensuring optimal security and high performance. 

How GCP Evolved Over Time? 

The Google Cloud Platform has come a long way since its initial launch of App Engine in 2008 to becoming a top cloud provider now. It has expanded across 40 regions and 121 zones across the globe. There has been tremendous growth and innovation in all those years, where GCP expanded its offerings to 150+ products and services, helping businesses thrive in the digital era. 

The Start

It all started in April 2008 with a preview of App Engine, a platform for developers to build and host web applications in the Python programming language. Looking at its success and allowing a wide range of developers to leverage it, Google introduced Java as a supporting language. However, the storage offering was limited to 500 MB, which restricted businesses from migrating to the cloud completely. As a solution, GCP introduced cloud storage with scalable storage capacity. 

Focus Over Data Processing 

In 2010, Google launched BigQuery, a data warehouse, and Cloud SQL, a managed relational database. It eliminated the need for manual data management and simplified the process. With all the features and capabilities that developers require, App Engine became a fully supported Google product in 2011. 

Focus on Virtuality 

Between 2012 and 2013, GCP saw significant growth with the launch of Compute Engine, offering virtual machines over Google’s infrastructure. It made it easy for businesses to migrate to the cloud completely. 

Focus on Innovations  

The years 2014 and 2015 were the years of innovation where GCP came up with new and innovative services. These included Cloud Pub/Sub, a messaging service; BigTable, a no-SQL database service; and Kubernetes, a containerized application deployment service. All these innovations enhanced GCP’s infrastructure for advanced capabilities to be leveraged by developers. 

Expansions and Innovations 

Moving further with the years of expansion and acquisitions—2016 and 2017. GCP introduced Natural Language and Speech Support to simplify language processing and meaning derivation. 

During this tenure, it made major acquisitions, including Apigee for simplifying API management and Kaggle supporting collaboration through machine learning capabilities. Continuing the focus on ML technology, Cloud AutoML was launched to build ML models with minimal expertise. 

The Era of AI and ML Technology 

In 2018, when AI technology was booming, GCP entered the market. It launched AI Hub, a collection of resources for developers to build AI solutions. To accelerate machine learning and ensure its compatibility with AI solutions, Cloud TPU (Tensor Processing Units) was launched. It enhanced coding and media content generation, recommendation engines, speech, and more. 

Focus on Multi-Cloud Environments 

The innovation further became centric to support multi-cloud environments in the year 2019, with the launch of Anthos, a multi-cloud management platform.   

Realizing the need for a solution that securely transfers data between multiple cloud environments, Confidential VMs for memory encryption were launched. 

In order to support enhanced hybrid cloud solutions, GCP partnered with major cloud providers such as SAP and VMware that encouraged seamless integration with built-on Google applications. 

The Future 

Google Cloud Platform’s innovation and growth are not to stop yet; it will continue to serve the dynamic needs and requirements of its users. 

The future mainly seems to connect more with workspace and generative AI capabilities across the Google Platform. 

The Google Cloud Next 2024 event summarized the launch of their new products as well as partner products powered by AI. Some of the new innovations you can look forward to are: 

• Gemini 1.5 Pro supports code, math, reasoning, multilingual, image, audio, and video capabilities across Google products. 
• Google AI Hypercomputer that offers AI-optimized hardware, software, and consumption capabilities to improve efficiency and productivity. 
• Vids in Google Workspace for AI-powered video creation and editing.  
• AI-powered threat intelligence capabilities in Google Drive. 

Updates Apart From AI Dominance:

• Google Cloud Platform will bring upgrades in Google Distributed Cloud regarding compliance certifications.  
• Innovations in cross-cloud networks that simplify workload connections. 
• Improvements to Private Service Connect (PSC) to allow services in one spoke VPC to be accessed from another. 

What is GCP used for?

The platform offers a diverse range of cloud services, including computing, storage, networking, and more. These services bring a multitude of benefits to your business. Let’s explore some of the core services: 

1. Compute 

GCP computing services offer you an infrastructure and resources that help in running your applications over the Google platform. 

Simply put, computing services eliminate the need to invest in physical infrastructure and allow you to develop applications and websites over a virtual platform, i.e., Google Cloud. 

These services include infrastructure as a service (Iaas), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (Saas). 

2. Storage

The services include cloud-based storage solutions for efficiently storing and managing objects, blocks, and files. You can easily back up your data and retrieve it whenever required.

It offers free and scalable storage capacity that can be expanded as per your business requirements. 

3. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

These services offer you multiple cloud-based solutions that are powered with AI and ML capabilities. 

You get pre-trained models that work as pre-built templates, which you can pick and use in your application development. Also, you can train AI models to cater to your specific business needs. 

Using these services, you can create AI applications that are centric to:

• Documentation management
• Customer service
• Task-specific
• Search and recommendations 
• Augmented reality  

4. Networking

GCP’s networking services provide you with secure, reliable, and scalable connectivity across the platform and the application you built. 

It includes a variety of cloud-based solutions that enable you to maintain seamless connectivity and data sharing with both internal and external resources of your app or website. 

These services continuously monitor and troubleshoot network errors while also blocking unauthorized access to the system.  

5. Database

GCP’s database services offer you scalable solutions where you can store, write, alter, manage, and retrieve data. 

All your data is stored systematically in relational and non-relational formats, so you can retrieve it promptly when required. 

6. Security

These services help keep your data and cloud environment secure while ensuring compliance with industry regulations. 

GCP’s security services are efficient in detecting vulnerabilities, threats, and misconfigurations, helping you to minimize disruption and data risk. You can audit and monitor your system logs with effective cloud governance. Moreover, with these services, you can manage security keys, disks, and other sensitive business data.   

7. Data Analytics

GCP’s data analytics services offer cloud-based solutions for loading, transforming, and analyzing business data in order to derive intelligent business insights from it. 

It allows you to simplify complex data, visualize it using AI and ML, and optimize data through orchestration to get the most out of it. 

8. Developer Tools 

These services offer developers the tools that enhance their productivity, streamline the development process, and ensure on-time project delivery. 

You get tools that are powered by AI and ML capabilities, simplifying your coding process while assisting and offering suggestions.

Google Cloud Platform Products

The platform offers a range of products under its service offerings. Here is an explanation of some of the core products that come under GCP’s services: 

Computing Products  

App Engine

It is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows developers to create and host applications over the cloud, ensuring high performance. You can develop applications in different programming languages, including Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, or PHP. 

You do not have to worry about managing servers and configurations; it does that for you, enabling your focus on the code.

Compute Engine

It is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution that enables you to create custom virtual machines or select from a pool of pre-designed VMs to align with your business workloads. It’s similar to renting a computer from Google. 

You can scale these VMs up or down as per your requirements to match the efficiency of your business.

Suppose your application is unable to handle the load; you can add more VMs to boost it. 

Cloud Run 

It offers you a platform where you can code and create applications while incorporating different frameworks and libraries. These are then packaged as a container and can be used as a part of other applications. 

Suppose you want to incorporate this container package into the main application, you can call it via different events and requests. This way, you do not have to build a new application from scratch to use functionality that is already available to you.   

Other offerings:

• Bare Metal Solution
• Batch 
• Cloud GPUs
• Cloud Run 
• Deep Learning VM image 
• Migrate to Virtual Machines 
• Recommender 
• Shielded VMs
• Sole-Tenant Nodes 
• Spot VMs
• SQL Server on Google Cloud 
• Tau VM
• VMware Engine 

Storage Products  

Cloud Storage

It is like a big, safe space where you can store unstructured data and retrieve it as many times as you want. It is scalable as per your requirements and stores various types of data, be it website content, backed-up data, data objects, blocks, or files.    

Block Storage

It is a cloud storage service for your virtual machines that breaks your large data into small blocks and stores them in separate pieces wherever possible. It optimizes your storage efficiency, enabling you to store more data in the cloud. 

For easy retrieval, it assigns a unique identifier number to each block. 

Filestore

It is a fully managed network file system (NFS) that allows you to use shared files across the cloud platform. You get a systematic view of all your files and can retrieve them through Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine. 

Simply put, you can retrieve stored files from multiple places. 

Other offerings:

• Cloud storage for Firebase
• Storage Transfer Service 
• Local SSD 
• Persistent Disk 
• NetApp Volumes 
• Parallel Store 

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Products  

Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech

It allows you to integrate speech recognition and text recognition capabilities into your applications through APIs. With over 125 languages and variants, you can convert natural language to text and text to natural-sounding speech. 

You can leverage this capability in your digital agents to offer versatile customer services and train them as per your business specifications. 

Gemini

It is your AI-powered next-generation personal assistant across all of Google’s products and services. Be it coding, designing, advice, or data analysis, Gemini uses ML and AI models to help you with every kind of work.  

You can use it for simplifying search queries, interpreting cases, conducting research, structuring and analyzing data, generating reports and responses, and more. 

Vertex AI: 

It is a PaaS, where developers can choose from 150+ predefined ML models or can create them along with AI-powered capabilities. You can train ML models as per your business specifications to support your applications, deploy them, and monitor their performance through the same platform. 

Other offerings:

• Vertex AI Studio, Agent Builder, Notebooks, Explainable AI, Search for Retail
• Vision AI 
• Auto ML
• Dialog Flow 
• Media Transition 
• Recommendation AI 
• Cloud GPUs, TPUs
• Deep Learning Containers 
• Tensorflow Enterprise 
• Contact Center AI
• Video, Document, and Translation AI

Networking Products 

Cloud Firewall

It is the first ‘Cloud Next-Generation Firewall’ with advanced threat protection capabilities. 

This security tool protects your cloud infrastructure from unauthorized access and alterations to your network and data. It manages your incoming and outgoing traffic, and you can set rules to allow or deny traffic to ensure optimal security. 

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

VPC is a global virtual network spread across 30 regions and 115 zones among 200+ countries. It is scalable and flexible, as you can scale it up or down as per your requirements.  

With this, you can manage your network topology and infrastructure, ensuring optimal security from unwanted threats.  

Cloud Armor

It works as a shield and offers an advanced layer of protection that identifies and mitigates web attacks such as denial of service and more. You can create rules to control traffic, optimally manage large floods of requests, and block illegitimate users from gaining access to your cloud system. 

Other offerings: 

• Cloud CDN, Connectivity, Domains, DNS, Load Balancing, NAT
• Network Connectivity Center, Intelligence Center, Service Tiers
• Private Service Connect
• Service Directory
• Cloud Intrusion Detection System (IDS)

Database Products 

Cloud SQL

It is a fully managed database service that takes care of overall management, setting up, and maintenance of relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases in the cloud.

Cloud SQL takes care of backing up your data, encrypting it, and expanding storage capacity as per your needs, eliminating the hassle of managing it manually.  

Database Migration Services

It is a serverless service that simplifies your database migration process through automation. It seamlessly converts your schema to support cloud infrastructure, eliminating manual work and errors. Plus, it minimizes migration downtime from on-premise to the cloud or across other cloud platforms.

Datastream

It is a data capture and replication service that reads your data, analyzes any change over it, and updates it in real-time. Whether you insert, update, or delete data across your cloud databases, this service keeps it updated with the latest form. 

This way, you get up-to-date data with the latest information, eliminating manual updations and errors. 

Other offerings: 

• AlloyDB for PostgreSQL
• Bigtable 
• Firestore 
• Memory Store 
• Firebase Realtime Database 
• Spanner 

Security and Identity Products 

Google Security Operations (SecOps)

It is an AI-powered platform that ensures the protection of your cloud platform against existing as well as future security threats. 

SecOps automate your routine security tasks and frees up your security teams to focus on critical issues and case responses. You get simplified visibility of your security landscape and suggestions on better risk management.  

Google Threat Intelligence

It proactively identifies security threats for your business and notifies your security teams to ensure protection. You get a warning for a major threat before it causes any harm to your cloud environment or data. 

In case a breach occurs, Google Threat Intelligence helps you understand the nature of it and offers suggestions to contain it. 

Secret Manager

It is your secure folder to store all sensitive information, passwords, API keys, certificates, and more. With this, you gain full control over your sensitive information and prevent it from getting exposed to the unauthorized user. 

Other offerings:

• Confidential Computing
• Access Transparency 
• Assured Workload
• Cloud Asset Inventory, Key Management, Firewall, and Identity
• Sensitive Data Protection
• Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory
• Policy Intelligence 
• Assured Open-Source Software 
• Certificate Authority Service 
• ReCAPTCHA Enterprise 
• Web Risk
• Security Command Center
• Virus Total 
• Identity-Aware Proxy
• Mandiant Managed Detection and Response, Incident Response Services, Consulting Services, Academy
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Data Analytics Products 

Looker

It is a business intelligence platform that has integrated AI capabilities that analyze and understand your business data. With this, you can create custom reports and dashboards and visualize your data to gain valuable insights from it. Moreover, it helps you make data-driven decisions and understand customers better. 

Cloud Data Fusion

It is a data integration platform that offers you an automated, intuitive drag-and-drop interface with pre-built connectors. Using them, you can create scalable data integration solutions, without manual interference. 

You get access to different resources, such as databases, files, and APIs, all in one place, to incorporate them in your solution.

BigQuery

It is an AI-powered data warehouse platform where you can store and analyze large datasets in a simplified manner. You can query these high-volume datasets and find relevant information within seconds, ensuring high speed along with accurate results.  

It offers 1 TB of query and 10 GB of data storage.   

Other offerings 

• Apache Kafka for BigQuery 
• Dataproc
• Dataflow
• Dataform
• Pub/Sub
• Cloud Catalog and Composer
• Dataplex
• Earth Engine
• Big Lake 
• Analytics Hub

Developer Tools 

Cloud Build 

It is a CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) platform that automates applications’ building, testing, and deployment across various platforms, be it VMs, Kubernetes, Firebase, or more. 

Using this, development teams can collaborate over ‘builds’ and share information promptly. 

Google Cloud SDK

It offers you a package of tools and libraries that you can leverage to interact with various Google services. These libraries are available for multiple programming languages, allowing you to choose your preferred one. 

You get a Google Cloud Command Line Interface that automates repetitive tasks and creates scripts to manage your cloud infrastructure. Therefore, enabling easy management of virtual machines, storage, databases, and other cloud resources. 

Cloud Scheduler

As the name suggests, it allows you to schedule any virtual task or job on future dates or preferred times. These jobs could be anything, be it batch jobs, cloud operations, big data jobs, or more; it automates the scheduling process, eliminating manual interference. 

Other offerings: 

• Gemini Code Assist
• Artifact Registry 
• Assured Open Source Software 
• Cloud Code, Deployment Manager, Functions for Firebase, Identity, Tasks.
• Cloud Source Repositories, Tasks, and Workstations
• Firebase Authentication, Test Lab 
• Gradle App Engine Plugin 
• Infrastructure Manager 
• Maven App Engine Plugin 
• Skaffold
• Tekton
• Tools for Eclipse and PowerShell 
• Firebase Crashlytic

Google Cloud Platform Pricing 

It offers a free trial for 90 days to new users. They get $300 in free credits, including more than 20 free products. You must note that accessing these free products will not exhaust your credits.

GCP follows a pay-as-you-go model, i.e., you only have to pay for the services and products you are using, encouraging cloud cost optimization. 

The pricing of its offerings varies according to regions and the frequency of utilizing a service. Therefore, to gain an estimated idea, you can use the Google Pricing Calculator. 

Google Cloud Platform Pros and Cons

The GCP environment offers a multitude of benefits to your business; however, there are always two sides of a coin. Along with the Google Cloud Platform advantages, also there will be some disadvantages. 

Here is a brief comparison of the pros and cons:

Pros

• Clear and Crisp Documentation: GCP provides users with clear documentation for every product or service, helping with its implementation, integration, assemblement, and pricing. 

• Strong Security Solutions: The platform offers robust cloud security solutions, including IAM (Identity and Access Management) to manage user identities and assign roles, KMS (Key Management Service) to manage the storage and access of encryption keys, SCC (Security Command Center) to respond to security incidents proactively, and more, combining various physical and process-based security solutions. 

• Ranging Data Backup Offerings: It allows varied automatic data backups, including nearline storage for 30 days, coldline storage for 90 days, archive storage for 365 days, and other multi-regional storage.

• Adjusts to Your Requirements: The service offerings can be adjusted according to your business requirements. You can upscale the functionalities during the peak season and can downscale when not required, helping you cut costs wherever possible.      

Cons 

• Fewer Data Centers Than Other Competitors: GCP has a lesser number of data centers, totaling approximately 40, situated only in Europe, Asia, and the US. Therefore, reaching out for its maintenance and fault tolerance is a task for users outside these regions. 

• Limited Customizing: The platform allows its products and services to be used as they are offered with minimal customization. It restricts the users to mold the products as per their requirements. 

• Requires Thorough Training: In order to start with the Google Cloud Platform or its offerings, users need to undergo training, without which they might not be able to work over the platform.    

How to Get Started With GCP?

Starting with GCP technology is no rocket science. You just need to gain a clear idea of what service you want to leverage and why. 

Start by logging in with your authorized credentials into Google. 

Create a new project, enter the name, and configure relevant settings as per your requirements. 

In the GCP cloud console, you get a list of offerings and their sub-products and services. For instance, in this case, we have selected Compute Engine.  

Further, opt for a sub-product or service. By clicking on each solution, you get a description along with its pricing. Here, we opted for VM instances. For each service, you have to configure the console as per your requirements. 

You must seek cloud computing consulting to choose the right GCP technology that perfectly aligns with your business. Gain expert advice to eliminate your tech burden and ensure a successful cloud computing experience.

Big Brands Using Google Cloud Platform and Their Growth

Here is a region-wise categorization of top companies using the GCP environment: 

Asia Pacific and Japan: 

• Sunway Group: Saw 10 times increased growth by leveraging AI and ML solutions. 
• Honor: Enhanced ad conversion rates by 33.5% 
• Suraasa: Improved employee efficiency and reduced evaluation time using Vertex AI. 
• Kapiche: Saved AUD$50,000 by migrating to the Google Cloud Platform

Europe, the Middle East and Africa 

• BCX: Saves $9.1M yearly through Google Cloud Platform  
• Emarsys: Saw 70% cost reduction by using Google Kubernetes Engine
• Trendyol: Could handle bulk queries up to 260,000+ during peak hours
• Indigitall: Saved $300K per year by moving to the cloud

Latin America 

• Auteco Mobility: Utilizes IoT architecture by cutting 90% of the cost 
• Leroy Merlin: Approximate R$1.6 M cost savings per year 
• The Brazil DNA Project: Reduced infrastructure cost by 90% for data processing 
• PowerOfData: 94% reduced processing time 

U.S. and Canada 

• Faire: Uses Looker for personalized and competitive insights 
• MLB (Major League Baseball): Complex queries run 50% faster
• GitLab: Saw 61% improvement in availability  
• CME Group: Utilizes market data at only 10% cost when compared to traditional means 

Source

Conclusion 

Google Cloud Platform is a versatile tool in the cloud computing multiverse. Along with its diverse compute, networking, database, and security offerings, it has expanded its customer base into the most popular technology—AI/ML, with nearly 90% of generative AI unicorns and more than 60% of funded gen-AI startups (source: Google).

Many of the leading enterprises, such as Chiba Bank, Mercedes, McLaren, Neopost Canada, and more, are using the platform to digitally transform their businesses.  

Want similar benefits in your business? Seek assistance from a leading cloud computing service provider like Cyntexa. Our team of experts works closely with you to understand your requirements and help you with a solution that best fits your business.