Why Google Cloud Platform is the best all-in-one cloud platform to date?
We are well familiar with the experiences, services, and tools that Google has been providing us over decades. From search engine, email, and storage service to maps view of a street to video streaming, Google has bestowed us all. Now Google is also offering its cloud expertise to enterprise in the form of its Google Cloud Platform. It is an assortment of cloud computing services that grew around the initial Google App Engine framework for hosting web applications from Google’s data centers. It acts as a stage for running infrastructure tools and services for users to build applications and support services data management, hybrid and multi-cloud, AI, and machine learning. Since its announcement, GCP has evolved into one of the premier cloud computing platforms on the market. Currently, it is the third cloud provider after Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a leading cloud platform and Microsoft Azure as second in terms of market share. Although it provides similar core data storage and virtual machine functionality like AWS and Azure.
Initially, in 2008, only Google App Engine was introduced as a cloud service. Later, the company consequently launched a plethora of complementary tools, like adding its own data storage layer in 2010, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) component known as the Google Compute Engine, which supports the use of virtual machines, and finally, it rolled out additional products including a BigQuery, the Compute Engine, load balancer, DNS, monitoring tools, and data analysis services. These range from Cloud SQL, Anthos, Apigee, Istio, Cloud AutoML, Nearline, Kubernetes, and BigTable.
Google tries to expand its ability to work in association with existing enterprise systems such as SAP, VMware, Windows, and Oracle without compromising security thanks to the detection of malware and other threats. Right now, GCP products are employed for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, API Management (Apigee), data analytics, containerized applications, database tools and storage, developer and managing tools, hybrid and multi-cloud operations, data migration, host media, and networking.
Formerly it was designed to be accessible to handle exabytes of data; now, it weighs in competition due to container support, Artificial Intelligence, data processing, and machine language initiatives. Google’s BigQuery and Dataflow enhance analytics and processing power for data-based enterprises. Its Kubernetes container technology allows for container cluster management and eases container deployment. Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine and various machine learning APIs make it easier for businesses to leverage AI in the cloud. This further allows automating the deployment of AI applications. Since its launch, Google’s data storage solutions have generated zero net carbon emissions.
The benefits of GCP are multifold. These are the provision of the tiered cloud network, redundant backups with automatic checksums, higher performance, state-of-art security with data encryption, and friendlier hand-holding for first-time users. The best advantage is its cost flexibility feature. Google charges only for the time one uses the system, i.e., its pricing is in the form of minute-level increments with a 10-minute minimum charge. It offers lifecycle manager for its object data storage that enables the offloading or deletion of objects which haven’t been used in 30 days or more, along with discounted prices for long-running workloads with no up-front commitment required.
In comparison with its rivals, AWS needs 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. Because of GCP’s worldwide coverage spanning across 23 cloud regions and 70 zones, it also gives an option to store data anywhere in the world with zero additional costs. The consumer base of GCP includes big names like Disney, Coca-Cola, Accenture, Deloitte, Apple, Spotify, Twitter, Toyota, Target, and many more. In addition to that, GCP supports languages and platforms like Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, .NET, and Java for developers.
If ‘The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer’ as said by Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo, GCP is the better example and shall soon advance into a new leader in the computing world.
