What Is Google Cloud Platform? Fundamentals, Offerings, and Pricing in 2022

Google Cloud Platform is defined as a collection of cloud services provided by Google that enables infrastructure management, application development, and data storage & analytics. This article describes the Google Cloud Platform in detail, listing its services and pricing.

What Is Google Cloud Platform?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a collection of cloud services provided by Google that enables infrastructure management, application development, and data storage & analytics.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing and storage services that range from hardware to cutting-edge algorithms. Cloud platforms aim to reduce resource management for their users, allowing them to focus on their business goals and bottom line. According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud report, businesses are looking at a 30% increase in spending on the cloud in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure are the top three cloud vendors today. Google Cloud currently has a minor market share, even while reporting a 46.5% revenue growth in 2021.

Google Cloud Platform is a component of Google Cloud. Google Cloud provides a host of services that allow organizations to move several aspects of their business online. This includes infrastructure management through GCP, email, and collaboration tools via Google Workspace, Google Maps Platform, and Google Ads Hub.

Google Cloud Platform solely provides resources at every level of application development, no matter its stage. It provides three main types of cloud services:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Organizations can opt for bare-bones infrastructure. This includes servers, processing units, network cables, load balancers, middleware, and the operating systems that the hardware runs on. Google Compute Engine is the IaaS offering of Google Cloud Platform. 

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is the service layer on top of the basic infrastructure. The cloud vendor takes care of infrastructure details, leaving only high-level configuration to its users. Google App Engine is GCP’s PaaS offering. It handles details such as CPU and memory allotment based on end-user demand.

3. Software as a Service (SaaS): This is the most common service layer. Most web services and applications available in the market today are built on top of cloud PaaS layers. Google Cloud Platform provides SaaS solutions such as Analytics Hub and DocumentAI. These provide broad insights into essential things such as user behavior and data flow.

Google Cloud Platform’s current user base consists of small- and medium-sized enterprises. Many organizations typically have their own developers but do not have the resources and expertise for infrastructure scaling and management. A large percentage of these organizations belong to the healthcare industry.

No matter what type of GCP’s services are consumed, consumers are provided with the Google Console. Google Console is a web admin user interface that allows users to manage resources and applications. 

GCP terms individual services consumed as ‘resources.’ For example, a Compute Engine instance is a resource that may house a machine with 128GB of memory and 8GB of memory per virtual CPU. 

These resources must be part of a ‘project.’ A project is the logical separation of resources based on function and application. Each project is created under a ‘folder’ or an ‘organization.’ These folders specify who has access to the project and the resources used by the project.

Source: Google Cloud Tech YouTube Channel. 

GCP allows customers to access and manage projects and resources using Google Console, Google Cloud CLI, and client libraries. The most intuitive and feature-rich interface belongs to Google Console of these three options. One can also access it through an iOS and Android app. 

Through Google Console, customers can:

• View details of individual projects and resources, along with activity logs.
• Set up identity and access management (IAM) policies. The console also provides a unified view of security policies across the organization. Role-based user management comes as part of the IAM component.
• Deploy, manage, and scale projects. One can also use it to troubleshoot production issues.
• Manage budgets and view detailed billing reports. The console even allows budget alerts for individual projects, alerting admins if extra resources are consumed. 
• Access advanced data management and processing capabilities, especially useful for complex Big Data-based systems.
• Access documentation and support for various features and issues.

Google Cloud Platform provides a long list of resources, each catered toward an individual type of service. Organizations can cherry-pick these services based on their requirements. The console helps maintain the growing needs and eclectic combinations of services.

See More: What Is Middleware? Definition, Architecture, and Best Practices

Google Cloud Platform: List of Services

Google Cloud Platform boasts of 100-plus services that organizations can leverage. The sheer number of modular services may seem overwhelming, though they can be divided into a few broad categories.

Some of the core cloud platform services can be categorized into:

1. Computing

Computing services include the IaaS and PaaS services required to build a system from scratch. Some prominent computing services are:

• Compute Engine

Compute Engine is an IaaS component of GCP. It allows users to create and manage virtual machines in Google’s data centers. It supports different types of storage and CPU cycles. Compute Engine offers pre-configured machines for specific workloads.

• App Engine

App Engine is a PaaS component of GCP. It is a serverless application platform. This means that developers just need to show up with the code and basic server requirements to run the code. App Engine takes care of the hardware and software required to host the code. It supports all major programming languages such as Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, and PHP.

• Kubernetes Engine

Kubernetes is an environment that manages and automates containers. A container is a software package that includes all necessary elements to run a piece of code in any environment. 

The Kubernetes Engine is a Container as a Service (CaaS). It deploys, manages, auto-scales, and secures Kubernetes containers.

• Shielded VMs

Shielded virtual machines are extra-secure VMs with advanced security controls in place. A virtual trusted platform module (vTPM) checks for secure boots and seals secrets as part of integrity monitoring.

• Cloud Run

Cloud Run is a service used to develop and deploy containerized applications, irrespective of the programming language and platform. 

• Cloud Functions

Cloud Functions is a function as a service (FaaS) platform. This is used to run small pieces of code that are triggered by events. The user does not need to create and manage a server or a container as GCP takes care of the same.

• Bare Metal solution

This IaaS solution offers secure pieces of hardware for organizations that want to run specialized workloads.

2. Networking

Storage and processing units are regional resources that other resources can only access in the same project. Networks are global resources that allow different projects to communicate with each other. With appropriate load balancers and content delivery networks in place, a well-configured network can make or break a product’s customer experience.

Keeping this in mind, GCP provides:

• Cloud CDN and Media CDN

Many organizations use content delivery networks (CDN) to reduce data retrieval latency. GCP’s Cloud CDN has a robust global network that is secure and private. It supports caching and route matching, making it a very efficient solution. Media CDN does the same, but with streaming content.

• Cloud Load Balancing

Load balancers are an essential part of any infrastructure. They distribute network traffic across different applications. Cloud Load Balancing supports HTTP(S) load balancing, TCP/SSL load balancing, SSL offload, and Cloud CDN integration.

• Cloud DNS

This is GCP’s domain name system that registers, serves, and manages domains.

• Network Service Tiers

GCP was one of the first cloud services to offer tiered networks. Premium and Standard are two available tiers, differentiated by performance routing and global reach. 

• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

A virtual private cloud serves as an isolated, private cloud hosted within the public cloud. Google Cloud Platform’s VPC is robust because of its global presence. 

3. Data storage and analytics

One of the most prominent use cases for Google Cloud Platform is storage. An unprecedented amount of data is being generated and consumed by businesses. It no longer makes sense to house all this data in-house. Besides, operations such as data mining and warehousing require a sizable investment in computational and storage devices.

GCP provides solutions for data storage and analytics:

• Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage offers low-cost, highly secure storage options, thanks to Object Lifecycle Management (OLM). It promises high availability due to multiple backup options. Its ‘Turbo Replication’ feature allows fast data replication (less than 15 minutes) across regions.

• Persistent Disk, Local SSD, and Filestore

These are two separate services provided by the Google Cloud Platform. Persistent Disks are block storages for VM instances, while Local SSDs are local solid-state drives. Filestore is a fully-managed file storage system.

• Dataflow

Dataflow is a stream and batch data processing service. It promises efficient processing by reducing pipeline latency and dynamic workload rebalancing. It allows customers to use AI patterns for predictive analytics, real-time personalization, etc.

• Pub/Sub

Pub/Sub service offers high-volume data ingestion by consuming analytic events and streaming them into BigQuery and other operational databases with the help of DataFlow.

4. Big Data 

Though technically a part of data storage, Big Data deserves a separate category because of the large amount of data that is handled. GCP provides:

• BigQuery

BigQuery is a highly scalable multi-cloud data warehouse with built-in machine learning. It enables predictive modeling, interactive data analysis, and geospatial analysis.

• Data Catalog

Data Catalog is GCP’s data discovery and metadata management system. It falls under metadata as a service (MetaaS).

• Dataprep

A machine learning algorithm is only as effective as its training data. Dataprep by Trifacta visually explores, cleans, and prepares data for Big Data analysis. 

• Dataproc

Dataproc is a service that runs open-source data analytics in languages such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Presto. It works with the Kubernetes Engine to containerize Spark jobs. It works in conjecture with other GCP products such BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and VertexAI.

5. Artificial Intelligence

Google Cloud Platform extends AI services to data scientists, developers, and infrastructure managers, such as:

• Vertex AI

Vertex AI is a unified UI that allows users to access all machine learning-related Google Cloud Platform tools. It has pre-trained APIs that one can use on vision, video, translation, and natural language. It also integrates with open-source frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.

• Recommendations AI

Recommendations AI is a personalization engine that delivers custom product recommendations at scale. It can connect with existing Google tools such as Google Analytics and Cloud Storage.

• Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech

Two AI use cases that dominate the consumer market today are speech-to-text and text-to-speech. An entire section of the Internet of Things (IoT) market relies on this. These Google Cloud Platform services provide speech recognition and synthesis in more than 100 languages.

• Video AI

Video AI provides precise video analysis, with metadata extracted at the video, shot, or frame level. One can also use it for content discovery.

• Vision AI

Vision AI is for images what Video AI is for videos. Pre-trained vision APIs can detect emotion and understand the text. 

• AI Infrastructure

Google Cloud Platform provides high-performance hardware and efficient ML algorithms to train deep-learning and machine learning models.

• Cloud TPUs

The Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is a proprietary offering based on NVIDIA’s technology. A TPU is an integrated circuit developed explicitly for neural network machine learning. It works with Google’s TensorFlow software. TPUs work faster than GPUs while consuming fewer resources.

GCP promises highly secure and compliance-regulated cloud resources. It also guarantees high availability, with backups and fail-safes in place. It ensures low latency by strategically placing multiple data centers across the globe.

To ensure security and optimal configuration, Google Cloud Platform provides the following services in addition to the core services:

• Security and identity

Cloud security is an essential aspect of cloud computing, especially when data travels across public clouds and networks. GCP offers everything required for an excellent security posture to ensure privacy and security. These services include real-time logs, security information and event management (SIEM) solution, Cloud Key Management, Endpoint Management, Security Command Center, and VirusTotal.

Google Cloud Platform also houses an IAM system to ensure that critical resources and data do not fall into malicious hands. Tools such as Policy Intelligence and Resource Manager enable organized control across applications in the Google Cloud Platform.

• Management tools

A cloud platform is only as good as the management tools it offers. GCP improves on this using multiple tools, ranging from Google Console to Cloud APIs. Service Catalog allows admins to manage internal enterprise applications. Deployment Manager automates the creation and management of GCP resources. The latest management tool put forth by Google Cloud Platform enables users to monitor their resources’ carbon emissions.

• Developer tools

Google Cloud Platform caters to administrators, developers, and DevOps personnel alike. Developers are provided with services such as Cloud SDK, Cloud Build, Cloud Code, and Cloud Tasks. 

Besides these tools, it also extends tools and plug-ins with products such as Maven App Engine Plugin and Tools for Eclipse and PowerShell. Tools such as Firebase Crashlytics and Firebase Test Lab allow easier testing and debugging.

• Google Cloud Operations Suite 

Previously known as Stackdriver, the Google Cloud Operations Suite is a set of tools and services that help DevOps. It allows monitoring, debugging, error reporting, and profiling.

Google Cloud Platform also provides migration services for organizations looking to migrate from an on-premise infrastructure or a different cloud vendor. These services include Migrate for Compute Engine, VMWare Engine, Database Migration Service, and Application Migration.

See More: What Is Cloud Computing? Definition, Benefits, Types, and Trends 

Pricing of GCP in 2022

One of the most significant competitive advantages of the Google Cloud Platform is its flexibility in pricing.

Google Cloud Platform follows the pay-as-you-go model, with each service priced using a set of its parameters. Users do not have to pay an upfront fee, and there is no termination fee either. 

Google Cloud’s free tier credits new users with $300. They can use the resources till they run out of this credit, Besides, they can also use individual services within specified limits. 

Google Cloud Platform calculates the monthly billing by adding up the usage of every service and resource consumed. The billing is done project-wise. 

To give users an idea of how the pricing works, Google Cloud Platform offers a pricing calculatorOpens a new window . A glance at this calculator reveals that businesses need to be very sure of their requirements and how it translates to technological resources. They must also factor in scalability as it would keep costs from skyrocketing. 

For example, a general-purpose compute engine machine with up to 32 vCPUs, 128GB storage, and a maximum of 8GB per vCPU costs $0.002923 / GB hour. 

Similarly, text-to-speech is priced based on the number of characters synthesized into audio every month. It costs $4.00 per one million characters after the first four million characters. 

Google Cloud presents a comprehensive pricing listOpens a new window for each of these services on its website. 

The monthly billing reflects the usage of every single service consumed. GCP calculates it every second, rounding it up to the nearest minute. Use per minute is added up for the monthly billing, including applicable discounts.

Discounts are provided to users in the form of different pricing plans. For example, the Committed Use pricing plan offers substantial discounts to users who commit to a certain level of use one or three years in advance. The Sustained Use discount is applied automatically based on percentage usage across the month. 

GCP provides potential users with several ways of gauging how much their cloud venture will cost. These include the free tier and the pricing calculator. They also have representatives to help customers with pricing estimates if any user is not particularly infrastructure-savvy. Even after onboarding, any issues with billing and payments are addressed by a dedicated 24×7 support team.

See More: Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Provider Companies in 2021

Takeaway

Cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform allow companies to focus on innovation while taking care of infrastructure configuration and maintenance. All of Google’s products, such as Google Drive and Search, run on the Google Cloud Platform. This means that GCP users are kept up to date regarding hardware, software, and algorithms. GCP’s range of services, coupled with its flexible pricing model, makes it the ideal solution for small and medium enterprises looking to grow.

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