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Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

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Cloud-based cloud service and cloud infrastructure]] from Google:

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Revenue =
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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:

App Engine - Platform as a Service to deploy Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, C#, .Net, Ruby and Go applications.

Compute Engine - Infrastructure as a Service to run Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or GKE on-prem offered as part of Anthos platform<ref name=“auto2”>
</ref><ref>

</ref> - Containers as a Service based on Kubernetes.

Cloud Functions - 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.

Bigtable / Cloud Bigtable - Managed service for NoSQL database service.

Spanner (database) / Cloud Spanner - Horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, relational database service.

Google Cloud Datastore / Cloud Datastore - NoSQL database for web and mobile applications.

Persistent Disk - Block (data storage) / Block storage for Compute Engine virtual machines.

Cloud Memorystore - Managed in-memory data store based on Redis and Memcached.

Local Solid-state drive SSD: High-performance, transient, local block storage.

Filestore: High-performance file storage for Google Cloud users.

Networking

GCP Networking:

GCP VPC - Virtual Private Cloud for managing the software defined network of cloud resources.

GCP Cloud Load Balancing - Software-defined, managed service for Cloud load balancing / load balancing the cloud traffic / network traffic.

Cloud Armor - Web application firewall to protect workloads from DDoS attacks.

Google Cloud CDN - 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 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.

Cloud Dataflow - Managed service based on Apache Beam for stream and batch data processing.

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 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 conversational interfaces.
Cloud Natural Language - Text analysis service based on Google Deep Learning models.
Cloud Speech-to-Text - Speech to text conversion service based on machine learning.
Cloud Text-to-Speech - 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 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 or Jinja2.
Cloud Console - Web interface to manage Google Cloud Platform resources.
Cloud Shell - Browser-based shell command-line access to manage Google Cloud Platform resources.
Cloud Console Mobile App - Android and iOS application to manage Google Cloud Platform resources.
Cloud APIs - APIs to programmatically access Google Cloud Platform resources

Identity & Security

Cloud Identity - Single sign-on (SSO) service based on SAML 2.0 and OpenID.
Cloud IAM - 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 VPN.
Cloud Data Loss Prevention API - Service to automatically discover, classify, and redact sensitive data.
Security Key Enforcement - 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 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.
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.
Cloud Endpoints - An NGINX-based proxy to deploy and manage APIs.
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:

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>
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>