Google Cloud Platform: Everything you need to know about Google’s suite of cloud computing services – Android Police

Every tech giant seems to have a cloud platform. Still, if you asked someone what the Google Cloud was, they would probably have no idea. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) isn't a collection of Google's most popular apps and software. They call that Google Workspace, which used to be G Suite.

Google Workspace includes things like Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive cloud storage. Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud computing services that run on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its end-user products. Unlike Google Workspace, which primarily caters to individual productivity and collaboration for everyday use, GCP provides tools and services that allow developers and enterprises to build, deploy, and scale applications, websites, and online services using Google's robust and reliable infrastructure.

Google Cloud Platform includes services for serverless and scalable computing, offsite cloud-based data storage, data analytics, machine learning, networking, the Internet of Things (IoT), security tools, and developer tools. These services are highly flexible, can grow as a company grows, and are designed to meet the needs of small-scale developers, all the way up to big data giants running queries against data sets in the terabytes.

While Google Workspace focuses on providing productivity tools for users, Google Cloud Platform is a comprehensive platform offering a ton of services, cloud resources, and the cloud infrastructure needed for DevOps teams. A handful of competitors offer public cloud services at this scale, and you'll recognize many of them. Some of GCP's largest competitors are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and IBM's cloud platform.

Amazon beat Google to the market with its cloud computing service in 2006. Google launched a preview release of App Engine in 2008, a tool that lets customers run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. At first, it was released to a limited number of developers. It didn't see its full release until 2011.

Since then, Google Cloud Platform has developed or acquired numerous services and products that allow companies to use all facets of its vast infrastructure resources. Google Cloud Platform quickly became one of the top international cloud vendors, alongside other cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM.

Have you ever wondered how companies can offer their services and online products on such a huge scale? It's because most of them are built on cloud services like Google's. Some of Google Cloud Platform's most well-known customers include Snapchat, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, Nintendo, and eBay.

Google Cloud Platform offers several "engines" or frameworks designed for computing, hosting, and application development needs. It has many useful APIs that use machine learning and its AI platform to develop AI models. It also has services for database work and can handle large datasets.

This is a short list of what's available through Google Cloud Platform. GCP also has Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Load Balancing, and a web-based GUI called Cloud Console to manage it all. The Google Cloud Platform is huge, and this is not a complete list.

GCP includes many managed services, meaning that Google takes care of the underlying infrastructure, maintenance, and operational tasks needed to run the service and the hardware that the service uses. If you've ever run a small home server on a Synology DiskStation NAS, you probably know how much can go wrong with server hardware. This allows customers to focus on developing and running things rather than managing the infrastructure. It also means that a company can take advantage of automatic scaling that adjusts resources based on their workload demand as their business grows.

With so many large companies moving their analytics, data processing, and machine learning workloads offsite and into cloud vendors like Google Cloud Platform, securing this data has become a top priority. GCP offers tools for monitoring, logging, and diagnosing security performance.

Google Cloud Platform doesn't only offer the tools and services that allow companies to use its infrastructure. It also provides security and management tools that protect everything a company puts on its platform.

Google Cloud Platform and Google Cloud may sound like the same thing, but they are very different. Google Cloud is a set of user-end tools and services, like Google Drive and Google Workspace. On the other hand, GCP is the backbone of many large-scale digital platforms, including Google Cloud. It may seem like a lot with all it has to offer, but there are plenty of tutorials and a flexible pricing model for smaller-scale uses.

To put it simply, Google Cloud Platform is Google's suite of cloud computing services that enable developers and businesses of all sizes to build, launch, and manage their applications and online services. Some of the biggest companies in the world use GCP to access Google's powerful infrastructure, the same infrastructure that Google uses for its services and products. GCP provides computational engines, an AI platform, machine learning APIs, a stable and reliable DNS service, and database services that can handle any size and type of dataset.

Google Cloud Platform offers all the security and management tools needed to safeguard a company's data and the sensitive user data they may have collected. Its set of security and monitoring tools helps companies automate many security tasks, monitor system performance, and manage access privileges.

The Google Cloud Platform is more than Google's version of a cloud computing suite. It's a comprehensive ecosystem of reliable and powerful services, from advanced computing capabilities to strong and dependable security measures.

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Google Cloud Platform: Everything you need to know about Google's suite of cloud computing services - Android Police