Hello, cloud gurus. My name is Karlos Knox. And I have a question for you.
Have you ever heard of YouTube? How about Gmail or Google maps?
Most likely the answer is yes,
but you may not have heard of Google cloud platform. And in this episode,
you find out the products that make up Google cloud along the way I talk you
through the history, infrastructure, strengths, weaknesses,
and ideal use cases for the Google cloud platform. If you're ready,
let's get started.
Google cloud is made up of a combination of multiple services available over the
internet.
And these services work towards accelerating an organization's ability to go
digital. Google cloud includes the Google cloud platform,
which provides public cloud infrastructure for hosting web based applications.
Second is Google workspaces, formerly known as G suite.
This product provides identity management for organizations,
Gmail and collaboration tools.
Third are the enterprise versions of Android and chrome OS.
Phone and laptop operating systems are ways for users to connect to web based
applications.
And the final component of Google cloud are the application programming
interfaces for machine learning and enterprise mapping services.
These provides software to software communication.
We're going to focus on the Google cloud platform known as GCP.
Backing up a bit, let's start with the history.
GCP first came online in 2008 with the launch of a product called app engine
and app engine helped customers launch web applications online. From there,
Google built and acquired products to enhance the user experience of its
cloud platform.
The Google global infrastructure currently has 24 locations around the world
where Google cloud platform resources are offered. Locations,
start with a region and within a region, our availability zones,
these zones are isolated from a single point of failure.
Some resources such as the HTTP global load balancer are global
and can receive requests from any of the Google edge locations and regions.
Other resources like storage can be regional.
The storage is distributed across multiple zones within a region for
redundancy, and finally zonal resources,
including compute instances are only available in one specific zone within
one specific region. When deploying applications on GCP,
you must select the locations depending on the performance, reliability,
scalability, and security needs of your organization.
Each region offers a category of services.
Some services are limited to specific regions.
Here's a list of the major services of the Google cloud platform,
computing and hosting services, storage services, database services,
networking services, big data services, and machine learning services.
As you just heard, Google has services comparable AWS and Azure.
AWS is in the clear lead with Microsoft gaining ground and Google platform
is growing.
Just not as fast as the other two more on this in the next section on strengths,
weaknesses. Speaking of strengths,
Google cloud platform documentation is second to none.
I honestly enjoy how Google incorporates the actions into GCP's documents.
They are divided into an overview section, followed by a hands-on section,
walking the reader through an implementation of the feature or service.
Another strength for GCP is the global backbone network that uses
advanced software defined networking and edge caching services to deliver
fast, consistent, and scalable performance. And yes,
the premium tier global network costs a little more, but in my opinion,
designing architectures using a virtual private cloud that automatically routes
traffic on a global network is worth it.
And if I had to say GCP had a weakness,
it would be that the Google cloud platform has far fewer services than those
offered by AWS and Azure. In addition to that,
GCP has an opinionated model of how their cloud services should be used
and that's geared towards software developers.
My thoughts are that Google has a hard time prioritizing GCP
over the bigger revenue drivers of search, ads and YouTube.
The main takeaway we get is that Google is investing in GCP rather than seeking
market dominance or growth. Don't get me wrong.
Google is my cloud of choice. In my experience,
it feels like using Legos to build architectures.
Each service has its own use case and was designed to work with the next service
and their well-defined rules of engagement.
Here's a few of the ideal GCP scenarios.
If you're a large organization that needs to set a lot of permissions while
working on projects,
Google has an excellent organizational hierarchy that allows you to set policy
at the top level and forget it.
This enables departments to move fast yet remain bound to organizational
constraint. In GCP,
all resources belong to a specific GCP project.
And when that project is deleted,
all the resources are removed from the platform preventing left behind resources
that lead to increased costs. In addition,
there's an excellent feature that allows projects to be assigned to different
billing accounts over time.
Another ideal use case for using GCP is for organizations that need the
benefits of advanced big data, machine learning and analytics.
Businesses can ingest the data into GCP and then data mine,
the key performance indicators for their products,
or gather customer data to recommend additional purchase suggestions
based on buying history. What's next? Well,
if you're interested in honing your Google cloud skillset and leading your
organization's goals for the future,
I highly recommend getting started with the Google cloud ACE preparation
course. I used this ACG course to pass my first Google cloud certification.
It doesn't excellent job of introducing the main infrastructure components of
the Google cloud platform while providing you with a solid foundation for
working directly with Google cloud resources.
Post the associate cloud engineer exam,
the next step would be to move on to the Google professional cloud architect
certification.
If this video has piqued your interest for the Google cloud platform,
then you can keep up to date with all the GCP news and updates using GCP
this month on ACG. That's a wrap cloud gurus.
I hope you're ready to get started with your Google cloud platform journey.
And if you like this video click like,
and leave a note with the next Google cloud video, you want to see take care,
see you soon and KBA keep being awesome.