Table of Contents

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

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Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a cloud suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same cloud infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube.1)

Alongside a set of cloud management tools, Google provides a series of modular cloud services including cloud compute, computer data storage (cloud data storage), data analysis / data analytics and cloud machine learning2)

Cloud registration requires a credit card or bank account details.3)

Google's Cloud Platform provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and serverless computing cloud environments.

In April 2008, Google announced App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers, which was the first cloud computing service from the company. The service became generally available in November 2011. Since the announcement of App Engine, Google added multiple cloud services to the platform.

Google Cloud Platform is a part<ref>

</ref> of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as Google Workspace (G Suite), enterprise versions of Android and Chrome OS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for machine learning and enterprise mapping services.

Products

Google lists over 100 products under the Google Cloud brand. Some of the key cloud services are listed below.

Compute

GCP Compute:

Storage & Databases

GCP Storage and GCP Databases:

Networking

GCP Networking:

Big Data

Google Cloud Big Data - Google Big Date - Google Data Science - GCP Big Data - GCP Data Science

Cloud AI

Management Tools

Identity & Security

IoT

API Platform

Regions and zones

As of Q1 2020, Google Cloud Platform is available in 25 regions and 77 zones

. A region is a specific geographical location where users can deploy cloud resources.

Each region is an independent geographic area that consists of zones.

A zone is a deployment area for Google Cloud Platform resources within a region. Zones should be considered a single failure domain within a region.

Most of the regions have three or more zones. As of Q1 2020, Google Cloud Platform is available in the following regions and zones:

GCP Regions & Zones
Region Name Launch Date Location Zones
us-west1 Q3, 2016 The Dalles, Oregon, USA

  • us-west1-a
  • us-west1-b
  • us-west1-c

|-

us-west2 Q3, 2018 Los Angeles, California, USA

  • us-west2-a
  • us-west2-b
  • us-west2-c

|-

us-west3 Q1, 2020 Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

  • us-west3-a
  • us-west3-b
  • us-west3-c

|-

us-west4 Q2, 2020 Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

  • us-west4-a
  • us-west4-b
  • us-west4-c

|-

us-central1 Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA

  • us-central1-a
  • us-central1-b
  • us-central1-c
  • us-central1-f

|-

us-east1 Q4, 2015 Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA

  • us-east1-b
  • us-east1-c
  • us-east1-d

|-

us-east4 Q2, 2017 Ashburn, Virginia, USA

  • us-east4-a
  • us-east4-b
  • us-east4-c

|-

northamerica-northeast1 Q1, 2018 Montréal, Canada

  • northamerica-northeast1-a
  • northamerica-northeast1-b
  • northamerica-northeast1-c

|-

southamerica-east1 Q3, 2017 São Paulo, Brazil

  • southamerica-east1-a
  • southamerica-east1-b
  • southamerica-east1-c

|-

europe-west1 St. Ghislain, Belgium

  • europe-west1-b
  • europe-west1-c
  • europe-west1-d

|-

europe-west2 Q2, 2017 London, U.K.

  • europe-west2-a
  • europe-west2-b
  • europe-west2-c

|-

europe-west3 Q3, 2017 Frankfurt, Germany

  • europe-west3-a
  • europe-west3-b
  • europe-west3-c

|-

europe-west4 Q1, 2018 Eemshaven, Netherlands

  • europe-west4-a
  • europe-west4-b
  • europe-west4-c

|-

europe-west6 Q1, 2019 Zurich, Switzerland

  • europe-west6-a
  • europe-west6-b
  • europe-west6-c

|-

europe-central2 Q2, 2021 Warsaw, Poland

  • europe-central2-a
  • europe-central2-b
  • europe-central2-c

|-

europe-north1 Q2, 2018 Hamina, Finland

  • europe-north1-a
  • europe-north1-b
  • europe-north1-c

|-

asia-south1 Q4, 2017 Mumbai, India

  • asia-south1-a
  • asia-south1-b
  • asia-south1-c

|-

asia-southeast1 Q2, 2017 Jurong West, Singapore

  • asia-southeast1-a
  • asia-southeast1-b
  • asia-southeast1-c

|-

asia-southeast2 Q2, 2020 Jakarta, Indonesia

  • asia-southeast2-a
  • asia-southeast2-b
  • asia-southeast2-c
  • asia-southeast2-d

|-

asia-east2 Q3, 2018 Hong Kong

  • asia-east2-a
  • asia-east2-b
  • asia-east2-c

|-

asia-east1 Changhua County, Taiwan

  • asia-east1-a
  • asia-east1-b
  • asia-east1-c

|-

asia-northeast1 Q4, 2016 Tokyo, Japan

  • asia-northeast1-a
  • asia-northeast1-b
  • asia-northeast1-c

|-

asia-northeast2 Q2, 2019 Osaka, Japan

  • asia-northeast2-a
  • asia-northeast2-b
  • asia-northeast2-c

|-

asia-northeast3 Q1, 2020 Seoul, Korea

  • asia-northeast3-a
  • asia-northeast3-b
  • asia-northeast3-c

|-

australia-southeast1 Q3, 2017 Sydney, Australia

  • australia-southeast1-a
  • australia-southeast1-b
  • australia-southeast1-c

|}

== Similarity to services by other cloud service providers == <!– Probably this section should be moved to a new page –>

For those familiar with other notable cloud service providers, a comparison of similar services may be helpful in understanding Google Cloud Platform's offerings.

Google Cloud Platform Amazon Web Services<ref name=“aws-comparison”>

</ref>

Microsoft Azure<ref name=“azure-comparison”>

</ref>

Oracle Cloud<ref name=“oracle-and-general-comparison”>

</ref>

Google Compute Engine Amazon EC2 Azure Virtual Machines Oracle Cloud Infra OCI
Google App Engine AWS Elastic Beanstalk Azure App Services Oracle Application Container
Google Kubernetes Engine Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Azure Kubernetes Service Oracle Kubernetes Service
Google Cloud Bigtable Amazon DynamoDB Azure Cosmos DB Oracle NoSQL Database
Google BigQuery Amazon Redshift Azure Synapse Analytics Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Google Cloud Functions AWS Lambda Azure Functions Oracle Cloud Fn
Google Cloud Datastore Amazon DynamoDB Azure Cosmos DB Oracle NoSQL Database
Google Cloud Storage Amazon S3 Azure Blob Storage Oracle Cloud Storage OCI

== Certifications == Similar to offerings by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud, a series of Google Cloud Certified programs are available on the Google Cloud Platform. Participants can choose between online learning programs provided by Coursera, Pluralsight, or Qwiklabs as well as live workshops and webinars. Depending on the program, certifications can be earned online or at various testing centers located globally.

  • Associate Cloud Engineer
  • Professional Data Engineer
  • Professional Machine Learning Engineer
  • Professional Cloud Architect
  • Professional Cloud Developer
  • Professional Cloud Network Engineer
  • Professional Cloud Security Engineer
  • Professional Collaboration Engineer
  • Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
  • Google Workspace

== Timeline ==

  • April 2008 - Google App Engine announced in preview<ref>

    </ref>

  • May 2010 - Google Cloud Storage launched<ref>

    </ref>

  • May 2010 - Google BigQuery and Prediction API announced in preview<ref name=“auto3”>

    </ref>

  • October 2011 - Google Cloud SQL is announced in preview<ref name=“auto3”/>
  • June 2012 - Google Compute Engine is launched in preview<ref>

    </ref>

  • May 2013 - Google Compute Engine is released to GA<ref>

    </ref>

  • August 2013 -  Cloud Storage begins automatically encrypting each Storage object's data and metadata under the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-128), and each encryption key is itself encrypted with a regularly rotated set of master keys<ref>

    </ref>

  • February 2014 - Google Cloud SQL becomes GA<ref>

    </ref>

  • May 2014 - Stackdriver is acquired by Google<ref>

    </ref>

  • June 2014 - Kubernetes is announced as an open source container manager<ref>

    </ref>

  • June 2014 - Cloud Dataflow is announced in preview<ref>

    </ref>

  • October 2014 - Google acquires Firebase<ref>

    </ref>

  • November 2014 - Alpha release Google Kubernetes Engine (formerly Container Engine) is announced<ref>

    </ref>

  • January 2015 - Google Cloud Monitoring based on Stackdriver goes into Beta<ref>

    </ref>

  • March 2015 - Google Cloud Pub/Sub becomes available in Beta<ref>

    </ref>

  • April 2015 - Google Cloud DNS becomes generally available<ref>

    </ref>

  • April 2015 - Google Dataflow launched in beta<ref>

    </ref>

  • July 2015 - Google releases v1 of Kubernetes; Hands it over to The Cloud Native Computing Foundation
  • August 2015 - Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Deployment Manager graduate to GA<ref>

    </ref>

  • November 2015 - Bebop is acquired, and Diane Greene joins Google<ref>

    </ref>

  • February 2016 - Google Cloud Functions becomes available in Alpha<ref>

    </ref>

  • September 2016 - Apigee, a provider of application programming interface (API) management company, is acquired by Google<ref>

    </ref>

  • September 2016 - Stackdriver becomes generally available<ref>

    </ref>

  • November 2016 - Qwiklabs, an EdTech company is acquired by Google<ref>

    </ref>

  • February 2017 - Cloud Spanner, highly available, globally-distributed database is released into Beta<ref>

    </ref>

  • March 2017 - Google acquires Kaggle, world's largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts<ref>

    </ref>

  • April 2017 - MIT professor Andrew Sutherland breaks the record for the largest ever Compute Engine cluster with 220,000 cores on Preemptible VMs.<ref>

    </ref>

  • May 2017 - Google Cloud IoT Core is launched in Beta<ref>

    </ref>

  • November 2017 - Google Kubernetes Engine gets certified by the CNCF<ref>

    </ref>

  • February 2018 - Google Cloud IoT Core becomes generally available<ref>

    </ref>

  • February 2018 - Google announces its intent to acquire Xively<ref>

    </ref>

  • February 2018 - Cloud TPUs, ML accelerators for Tensorflow, become available in Beta<ref>

    ZDNet|last=Gagliordi|first=Natalie|work=ZDNet|access-date=2018-09-08|language=en}}</ref>

  • May 2018 - Gartner names Google as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant<ref>

    </ref>

  • May 2018 - Google Cloud Memorystore becomes available in Beta<ref>

    </ref>

  • April 2019 - Google Cloud Run (fully managed) Beta release<ref>

    </ref>

  • April 2019 - Google Anthos announced<ref name=“auto2”/><ref>

    </ref>

  • November 2019 - Google Cloud Run (fully managed) General availability release<ref>

    </ref>

  • March 2020 - Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google Cloud postponed the online streaming version of its Google Cloud Next mega-conference, two weeks after it cancelled the in-person version.<ref>

    </ref>

  • October 2020 - Google Cloud announced that it will become a block producer candidate for the EOS network and EOS.IO protocol. Currently the top block producers are cryptocurrency exchanges like OKEx and Binance.<ref name=“Google Cloud 2020-10-09”>

    </ref><ref name=“Forbes 2020-10-09”>

    </ref>

== See also ==

== References ==

== External links ==

Cloud Platform Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Cloud platforms Web services Computer-related introductions in 2011