Table of Contents
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
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Cloud-based cloud service and cloud infrastructure]] from Google:
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 Google App Engine | 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 (operating system) | Android and Chrome OS, and Application programming interface | 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
- Google App Engine | App Engine - Platform as a service | Platform as a Service to deploy Java (programming language) | Java, PHP, Node.js, Python (programming language) | Python, C Sharp (programming language) | C, .NET Framework | .Net, Ruby (programming language) | Ruby and Go (programming language) | Go applications.
- Google Compute Engine | Compute Engine - Infrastructure as a service | Infrastructure as a Service to run Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines.
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or GKE On-premises software | on-prem offered as part of Anthos platform<ref name=“auto2”>
</ref><ref>
</ref> - Containers as a Service based on Kubernetes.
- Cloud Functions - Function as a service | Functions as a Service to run event-driven code written in Node.js, Java, Python, or Go.
- Cloud Run - Compute execution environment based on Knative.<ref>
</ref> Offered as Cloud Run (fully managed)<ref name=“auto1”>
</ref> or as Cloud Run for Anthos.<ref name=“auto1”/> Currently supports GCP, AWS and VMware management.<ref>
</ref>
Storage & Databases
GCP Storage and GCP Databases:
- Google Storage - Google Cloud Storage - Object storage with integrated edge caching to store unstructured data.
- Cloud SQL - Cloud database / Database as a Service based on MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server.
- Spanner (database) / Cloud Spanner - Horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, Relational database management system | relational database service.
- Google Cloud Datastore / Cloud Datastore - NoSQL database for web and mobile applications.
- Filestore: High-performance file storage for Google Cloud users.
Networking

- GCP VPC - Virtual private cloud | Virtual Private Cloud for managing the Software-defined networking | software defined network of cloud resources.
- Cloud Armor - Web application firewall to protect workloads from Denial-of-service attack | DDoS attacks.
- Google Cloud CDN - Content delivery network | Content Delivery Network based on Google's globally distributed edge points of presence.
- Google Cloud Interconnect - Service to connect a data center with Google Cloud Platform
- Google Cloud DNS - Managed, authoritative Domain Name System | DNS service running on the same infrastructure as Google.
- Google Cloud Network Service Tiers - Option to choose Premium vs Standard network tier for higher-performing network.
Big Data
Google Cloud Big Data - Google Big Date - Google Data Science - GCP Big Data - GCP Data Science
- BigQuery - Scalable, managed enterprise data warehouse for analytics.
- Google Cloud Dataflow | Cloud Dataflow - Managed service based on Apache Beam for stream and batch data processing.
- Google Cloud Dataproc | Cloud Dataproc - Big data platform for running Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark jobs.
- Cloud Composer - Managed workflow orchestration service built on Apache Airflow.
- Cloud Datalab - Tool for data exploration, analysis, visualization and machine learning. This is a fully managed Jupyter Notebook service.
- Cloud Dataprep - Data service based on Trifacta to visually explore, clean, and prepare data for analysis.
- Cloud Pub/Sub - Scalable event ingestion service based on message queues.
- Cloud Data Studio - Business intelligence tool to visualize data through dashboards and reports.
Cloud AI
- Cloud AutoML - Service to train and deploy custom machine learning models. As of September 2018, the service is in Beta.
- Cloud Tensor processing unit | TPU - Accelerators used by Google to train machine learning models.
- Cloud Machine Learning Engine - Managed service for training and building machine learning models based on mainstream frameworks.
- Cloud Job Discovery - Service based on Google's search and machine learning capabilities for the recruiting ecosystem.
- Dialogflow Enterprise - Development environment based on Google's machine learning for building Natural-language user interface | conversational interfaces.
- Cloud Natural Language - Content analysis | Text analysis service based on Google Deep learning | Deep Learning models.
- Cloud Speech-to-Text - Speech recognition | Speech to text conversion service based on machine learning.
- Cloud Text-to-Speech - Speech synthesis | Text to speech conversion service based on machine learning.
- Cloud Translation API - Service to dynamically translate between thousands of available language pairs
- Cloud Vision API - Image analysis service based on machine learning
- Cloud Video Intelligence - Video content analysis | Video analysis service based on machine learning
Management Tools
- Operations suite (formerly Stackdriver ) - Monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS.
- Cloud Deployment Manager - Tool to deploy Google Cloud Platform resources defined in templates created in YAML, Python (programming language) | Python or Jinja (template engine) | Jinja2.
- Cloud Console - Web interface to manage Google Cloud Platform resources.
- Google cloud shell | Cloud Shell - Browser-based shell command-line access to manage Google Cloud Platform resources.
- Cloud Console Mobile App - Android (operating system) | Android and iOS application to manage Google Cloud Platform resources.
- Cloud APIs - APIs to programmatically access Google Cloud Platform resources
Identity & Security
- Cloud IAM - Identity management | Identity & Access Management (IAM) service for defining policies based on role-based access control.
- Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy - Service to control access to cloud applications running on Google Cloud Platform without using a Virtual private network | VPN.
- Cloud Data Loss Prevention API - Service to automatically discover, classify, and redact sensitive data.
- Security Key Enforcement - Multi-factor authentication | Two-step verification service based on a security key.
- Cloud Key Management Service - Cloud-hosted key management service integrated with IAM and audit logging.
- Cloud Resource Manager - Service to manage resources by project, folder, and organization based on the hierarchy.
- Cloud Security Command Center - Security and data risk platform for data and services running in Google Cloud Platform.
- Cloud Security Scanner - Automated Vulnerability (computing) | vulnerability scanning service for applications deployed in App Engine.
- Access Transparency - Near real-time audit logs providing visibility to Google Cloud Platform administrators.
- VPC Service Controls - Service to manage security perimeters for sensitive data in Google Cloud Platform services.
IoT
- Cloud IoT Core - Secure device connection and management service for Internet of things | Internet of Things.
- Edge TPU - Purpose-built ASIC designed to run inference at the edge. As of September 2018, this product is in private beta.
- Cloud IoT Edge - Brings AI to the edge computing layer.
API Platform
- Maps Platform - APIs for maps, routes, and places based on Google Maps.
- Apigee API Platform - Lifecycle management platform to design, secure, deploy, monitor, and scale APIs.
- API Monetization - Tool for API providers to create revenue models, reports, payment gateways, and developer portal integrations.
- Developer Portal - Self-service platform for developers to publish and manage APIs.
- API Analytics - Service to analyse API-driven programs through monitoring, measuring, and managing APIs.
- Apigee Sense - Enables API security by identifying and alerting administrators to suspicious API behaviours.
- Service Infrastructure - A set of foundational services for building Google Cloud products.
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:
{]] | class="wikitable mw-collapsible" | +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 | google_cloud_platform_gcp | 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 | google_cloud_platform_gcp | 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 | google_cloud_platform_gcp | 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. { | class="wikitable" | - ! 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 ]] | Compute | 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 Web conferencing | 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 (mathematician) | 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>{{Cite web | //www.gartner.com/doc/3875999/magic-quadrant-cloud-infrastructure-service | title=Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide | website=www.gartner.com | access-date=2018-09-08}}</ref> * '''May 2018''' - Google Cloud Memorystore becomes available in Beta<ref>{{Cite news | //cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Introducing-Cloud-Memorystore-A-fully-managed-in-memory-data-store-service-for-Redis.html | A fully managed in-memory data store service for Redis | work=Google Cloud Platform Blog | access-date=2018-09-08 | language=en}}</ref> * '''April 2019''' - Google Cloud Run (fully managed) Beta release<ref>{{Cite web | //cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/announcing-cloud-run-the-newest-member-of-our-serverless-compute-stack/ | title=Announcing Cloud Run, the newest member of our serverless compute stack | website=Google Cloud Blog}}</ref> * '''April 2019''' - Google Anthos announced<ref name="auto2"/><ref>{{Cite web | //www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2019/04/14/everything-you-want-to-know-about-anthos-googles-hybrid-and-multi-cloud-platform/ | title=Everything You Want To Know About Anthos - Google's Hybrid And Multi-Cloud Platform | first=Janakiram | last=MSV | website=Forbes}}</ref> * '''November 2019''' - Google Cloud Run (fully managed) General availability release<ref>{{Cite web | //cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/knative-based-cloud-run-services-are-ga/ | title=Knative-based Cloud Run services are GA | website=Google Cloud Blog}}</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>
- Feb 2021 Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot introduced. <ref>https://www.wikieduonline.com/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform_timeline</ref><ref>https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/introducing-gke-autopilot</ref>
See also
External links
Kubernetes Engine API
GCP Kubernetes Engine API - Google Enterprise API - Builds and manages container-based applications, powered by the open source Kubernetes technology.
Service name: container.googleapis.com
APIs
- Google Cloud Build API - Google Enterprise API - Continuously build, test, and deploy.
- Google Container Registry API - Google Enterprise API - Google Container Registry provides secure, private Docker image storage on Google Cloud Platform.
- Google Cloud Pub-Sub API - Google Enterprise API - Provides reliable, many-to-many, asynchronous messaging between applications.
- Google Cloud SQL Admin API - Google Enterprise API - API for Google Cloud SQL database instance management
- GCP Directions API - Google Enterprise API - Directions between multiple locations.
- GCP Distance Matrix API - Google Enterprise API - Travel time and distance for multiple destinations.
- GCP Geocoding API - Google Enterprise API - Convert between addresses and geographic coordinates.
- GCP Geolocation API - Google Enterprise API - Location data from cell towers and WiFi nodes.
- GCP Maps Elevation API - Google Enterprise API - Elevation data for any point in the world.
- GCP Maps Embed API - Google Enterprise API - Make places easily discoverable with interactive Google Maps.
- GCP Maps JavaScript API - Google Maps for your website
- Google Maps SDK for Android - Google Maps for your native Android app.
- Google Maps SDK for iOS - Google Maps for your native iOS app.
- GCP Maps Static API - Google Enterprise API - Simple, embeddable map image with minimal code.
- GCP Places API - Google Enterprise API - Get detailed information about 100 million places
- GCP Playable Locations API - Google Candidate locations for real-world games built with Maps
- GCP Roads API - Google Enterprise API - Snap-to-road functionality to accurately trace GPS breadcrumbs.
- GCP Semantic Tile API - Google - Google Maps geospatial data for Maps SDK for Unity
- GCP Street View Publish API - Google - Publishes 360 photos to Google Maps, along with position, orientation, and connectivity metadata.…
- GCP Street View Static API - Google Enterprise API - Real-world imagery and panoramas.
- GCP Time Zone API - Google Enterprise API - Time zone data for anywhere in the world.
https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/dashboard
https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/library
https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace