ARMAN HEZARKHANI: Hi, my name is Arman Hezarkhani.
And this is an introduction to Google Cloud.
This video is intended for use by anyone
interested in preparing for their future careers.
In the next few minutes, we're going
to discuss what Google Cloud is and what
some student developers have been able to create with it.
Ready?
We're going to start by going back in time.
Let's pretend for a moment that we're
in the time before cloud computing,
and we want to start a company to create a social networking
site.
You'd start by buying a server, lugging it all the way
home from the store, and spending hours
preparing it with all the correct hardware and software
so it can run your company's web app.
Fast forward a few months, and things are looking up
for your company's site.
The users are flooding in.
As your organization's user base grows,
you have to buy and install more and more servers.
This is called scaling.
Eventually, you're doing so well that the company opens up
a data center.
Next thing you know, you're international
and spending billions of dollars opening data
centers all around the world.
Sounds like a lot of work, right?
Here's the good news.
You don't have to do any of that.
Luckily, some companies have spent years
building some of the world's most advanced networks
of data centers.
Cloud computing is when these companies
allow developers to store data and run code on their computing
infrastructure.
Google is one of these companies.
Google has data centers all around the world
that have allowed it to scale to billions of users.
These data centers house the computing infrastructure
that powers the Google products you may be familiar with,
such as Search, Gmail, and Google Photos.
Google Cloud gives you the access
to the same technology and infrastructure
that powers Google.
This means that Google Cloud has over 100 products and tools
in categories like compute, storage, and machine learning
and artificial intelligence that seamlessly integrate together
all a click away.
One category is compute.
These products help you deploy code to the cloud.
For example, we may use a compute product like App Engine
to deploy a social networking site.
Another category is storage and databases.
These products help us store data, retrieve, and query data
in the cloud.
For example, we may want to store data for our dog walking
app, the dogs' names and locations,
in a Cloud Firestore database.
We also have machine learning and artificial intelligence.
These products allow us to leverage Google's AI
technologies for our own applications.
We can build and deploy our machine
learning models to AI Platform or take advantage of one
of the easy-to-use pre-trained machine learning
APIs like Vision or Natural Language.
So what is Google Cloud?
In a sentence, Google Cloud lets developers build and host
applications and websites, store data, and analyze data,
all on Google's scalable and reliable computing
infrastructure.
Now, let's see what some student developers
have done with Google Cloud.
A team of student developers called Guardian worked together
to help Alzheimer's patients with a GPS-enabled smartwatch.
The Guardian team leveraged a lot of the Firebase platform
for their application.
Firebase is Google Cloud's comprehensive mobile
development platform.
The team used Firebase authentication
to easily verify App users, Firebase Cloud Messaging
to send push notifications to different platforms,
and Cloud Functions for Firebase to execute back
end code without having to manage a server.
They also used Cloud Firestore, a Google Cloud database,
to store and sync user data.
A team of student developers created
a service called Nagish to help people
who are deaf or hard of hearing talk on the phone.
They leveraged Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech
and Speech-to-Text APIs to convert back and forth
between voice and text.
And that's it.
Let's review.
We started by talking about what Google Cloud is,
a platform that lets developers build and host applications
and websites, store data, and analyze data,
all on Google's scalable and reliable computing
infrastructure.
Then we discussed some of the incredible projects
that student developers were able to build with these tools
when working to learn skills for their future careers.
My name is Arman Hezarkhani.
And I can't wait to see what you build with Google Cloud.
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