Making the most of Google Cloud Platform

The Google Cloud Platform is a huge collection of cloud-based business products and services that are available to any organisation, regardless of their size and sector. They obviously cater for Google’s own requirements, such as Google Search, its G Suite business services and YouTube, to name just a few.

Basically, it consists of computing services, storage, networking, databases, analytical services, security, identity, administrative services, IoT, machine learning and tools for developers, aspects in which Google sums up the entire collection.

It is a really comprehensive list of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions, in which each section includes an attractive technological offer with the highest levels of security, performance and profitability.

We have highlighted here the services we believe are the most interesting:

Computing:

• Google Compute Engine: a set of virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure (IaaS) and designed to run workloads on a large scale, benefiting from the performance of Google’s global fibre network.
• Google Container Engine: a powerful cluster management tool and an orchestration system for the implementation of your Docker containers. It plans your containers in the cluster and manages them automatically based on the criteria of your choice: the amount of reserve memory/CPU, number of replicas…
• It is built on the Kubernetes system and, therefore, you can take advantage of on-premise, hybrid or cloud infrastructures.
• Google App Engine: a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that hosts applications, facilitating a rapid development using the most common languages (Python, Java, PHP and Go) providing you with a great degree of scalability. It is transparent to the developer, given that the infrastructure is fully self-managed.

Storage:

• Google Cloud SQL: a fully managed database service that makes it very simple to configure, maintain, manage, and administer MySQL databases. A high performance and high availability system, in which Google is responsible for replicating, patch management, and database management.
• Google Cloud Storage: a cloud-based file storage system that can be accessed from any location. This is a robust and accessible storage system (based on a storage replication strategy) that encrypts all the data.
• Google Cloud Datastore: a NoSQL database that is highly scalable for your website and applications. It automatically handles replication and partitioning to provide a durable database with a high level of availability and is automatically scalable to handle your application loads.

Big Data:

• Google BigQuery: a low-cost and fully scalable storage service, which allows you to host large volumes of information that can be consulted more quickly and efficiently by sending queries in SQL. It combines a “column” structure with MapReduce processing.
• Google Cloud Dataflow: a fully-managed service and a unified programming model for processing large volumes of data in stream and batch modes to develop and execute a wide range of data processing patterns, such as ETL.
• Google Cloud DataProc: serves to easily process large amounts of data at a very low cost. This cost can be controlled by creating administered clusters of any size and deactivating them once you have finished.

Automatic learning:

• Google Machine Learning: a fully-managed platform that allows you to build Machine Learning models easily that work with data of any type and size. Your model can be immediately available for use with Google’s global prediction platform.
• Cloud Natural Language API: You can use this natural language interpretation application to extract data and make sentiment analyses on people, places, events, etc. For example, the number of times text appears in documents, social media, new articles or posts.
• Cloud Vision API: enables developers to understand the content of an image by means of powerful Machine Learning models in a user-friendly REST API. It is capable of detecting individual faces and search for or read printed words.
• Google Speech API: enables developers to convert audio to text by applying powerful neural network models in an easy to use API. It recognizes more than 80 languages and variants and supports any type of device capable of sending a REST or gRPV
• Google Translate API: it provides a simple programmatic interface that facilitates translations in more than 90 different languages. Simply send HTML documents and get the translated text

We shall finish by mentioning that the Google Cloud Platform is based on a low-cost structure that is very easy to understand and based on actual usage (measured per minute). And this collection of services is much more extensive than this summary. If you would like more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.