What is Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services provided by Google. It offers a wide range of services, including computing power, storage, databases, machine learning, networking, and more, all delivered over the internet. GCP enables businesses to build, deploy, and scale applications and services quickly and efficiently without the need to invest in or manage physical infrastructure.
Starting from 1998 with the launch of Google Search. google has developed one of the largest and most powerful IT Infrastructures in the world. Today, this infrastructure is used by billions of users to use services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos, and Maps. In 2008, Google decided to open its network and IT infrastructure to business customers, taking an infrastructure that was initially developed for consumers’ applications to public service and launching the Google Cloud platform.
All the services listed above are provided by Google, hence the name Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Apart from these, there are many other services provided by GCP and many concepts related to them that we are going to discuss in this article.
Regions and zones
Let’s start at the finest grain level (i.e. the smallest or first step in the hierarchy), the Zone. A zone is an area where Google Cloud Platform Resources like virtual machines or storage are deployed.
For example, when you launch a virtual machine in GCP using Compute Engine, it runs in a zone you specify (suppose Europe-west2-a). Although people consider a zone as being sort of a GCP Data Center, that’s not strictly accurate because a zone doesn’t always correspond to one physical building. You can still visualize the zone that way, though.
Zones are grouped into regions which are independent geographic areas and much larger than zones (for example- all zones shown above are grouped into a single region Europe-west2) and you can choose what regions you want your GCP resources to be placed in. All the zones within a neighborhood have fast network connectivity among them. Locations within regions usually have trip network latencies of under five milliseconds.
As a part of developing a fault-tolerant application, you’ll need to spread your resources across multiple zones in a region. That helps protect against unexpected failures. You can run resources in different regions too. Lots of GCP customers do this, both to bring their applications closer to users around the world, and also to guard against the loss of a whole region, say, due to a natural disaster.
A few GCP Services supports deploying resources in what we call a Multi-Region. For example, Google Cloud Storage, lets you place data within the Europe Multi-Region. What that means is that it is stored redundantly in a minimum of two different geographic locations, separated by at least 160 kilometers within Europe. Previously, GCP had 15 regions. Visit cloud.google.com to ascertain what the entire is up to today.
What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
Before we begin learning about the Google Cloud Platform, we will talk about what cloud computing is. Basically, it is using someone else’s computer over the internet. Examples: GCP, AWS, IBM Cloud, etc. Some interesting features of cloud computing are as follows:
- You get computing resources on-demand and self-service. The customer has to use a simple User Interface and they get the computing power, storage requirements, and network you need without human intervention.
- You can access these cloud resources over the internet from anywhere on the globe.
- The provider of these resources has a huge collection of them and allocates them to customers out of that collection.
- The resources are elastic. If you need more resources, you can get them rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back.
- The customers pay only for what they use or reserve. If they stop using resources, they stop paying.