What's Google Cloud? - How It Is Different From Others?

All the Key Points...

In this article, we are going to discuss what’s Google cloud and How it is Different From other cloud platform.

When most people think about computers and cloud computing, the first thing to pop into their heads are images of servers arrays of rectangular boxes with blinking lights, making up data centers.

As we step through the Google Cloud Platform, you’ll notice that there are some key areas where Google has excelled.

These include data storage and management with services like BigTable and Spanner, which operate on larger scales than other cloud offerings.

Cloud Platform offers a variety of services that can be used independently or in conjunction to create an overall solution.

Whether you’re deploying big data, storage, or application servers; or connecting the backend with the frontend, Cloud Platform has your needs covered.

How is Google changing the game of Cloud Services?

Google has long been known as a search leader and in recent years has also established itself as a major player in the domain of internet-based applications –Google Search, Gmail, and Android being the prime examples.

Not to be outdone by Microsoft and its Azure platform, Google has launched its answer to the ever-expanding hybrid cloud – Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Google’s entry into the Cloud game has been a game-changer. I know Amazon and Microsoft are probably scared to death of Google Cloud entering their space.

So far, they’ve had a lot more success than other Cloud players, who have struggled to break in.

There are quite a few google cloud platform tutorials already available, but they all share the same problem: they’re written in a very technical way that’s not easy to understand.

Key Functions of a Computer

What's Google Cloud? - How It Is Different From Others?

The Google Cloud Platform provides several options for each of the key functions of a computer, and we’ll dive into them in more detail.

Google’s cloud platform offers several options for each of the key functions of a computer: storage, networking, computing, and so forth. Each one gives different levels of abstraction and control in building your back end.

Computers can help automate or streamline, or perform, a variety of tasks. Google Cloud Platform gives you various options for each of the key functions of a computer.

Google cloud and Computer Functioning

As you can see from the illustration here, Google Cloud Platform provides several options for each of the key functions of a computer, and we’ll dive into them in more detail.

There’s no need to know what each one of these icons means right here or right now. But you might be scratching your head wondering why there need to be so many options within each one of these categories.

And there are two primary reasons.

1. The first is that each service differs in functionality
2. The second is that each one of these services differs in its level of abstraction
This giving you the choice when putting together the different components of your system for whether you want to optimize for control on the one side or ease of development and ease of operations on the other.

I mentioned earlier that when you break apart a computer into its key functional elements, then you can put them back together in new combinations to take on new types of computing challenges.

Now as you can see in this illustration, albeit overly simplified, you can see that Google has excelled at this in two particular areas.

One is large-scale data processing or big data, and the other is in machine learning.

They’ve also created a consistent and intuitive management experience on top of the entire platform.

This means that even though Google Cloud Platform is made up of lots and lots of different services, you can develop against them and operate them as if they were one single product.

Google Cloud Global infrastructure

At the time of this course, Google Cloud Platform is distributed in 18 regions, and there are 55 availability zones, or fault domains, that are spread across those regions. There are also over 100 points of presence.

To explore more about Google’s infrastructure, check out the interactive learning resource at this link.

Now, depending on when you’re reading this, you might notice that Google Cloud Platform may have fewer zones and regions than some of its competitors like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

However, Google continues to add new infrastructure at a rapid pace, I think we will see that the technology underlying Google’s network is a key differentiator making it a very compelling public cloud service provider.

How Google Cloud Platform is Different?

On that theme of differentiation, let’s take a quick look at how Google Cloud Platform stands out from some of its competitors.

Because if you line them up, all of the major cloud service providers, you’ll see a lot of the same services and a lot of the same features.

But there are three ways where Google Cloud Platform really stands out, and those are networking, pricing, and then overall technology and innovation.

1. Technology and Innovation

Or in the case of Google Cloud Platform, maybe a better word for that is technology invention.

Earlier in this module, I mentioned that a strong, reliable, and fast network was key to enabling properties of the cloud, like scale-out.

And this is an area where Google Cloud Platform really does stand out among the different cloud service providers.

2. Networking

The blue lines on the map show Google’s private fiber-optic backbone, and this is really important because while many of the cloud service providers will lease bandwidth from internet and telecommunications companies, Google has spent the time and effort to lay its own physical cables across continents and below oceans.

And for you, this means that systems built for Google Cloud Platform run on a network optimized for distributed software systems and not general telecommunications workloads.

3. Pricing

It also means that because it’s a private network and private infrastructure, Google can do a better job controlling for things like cost.

And while we’re on the subject of cost, while the core pricing models for Google Cloud Platform, as well as its competitors, are somewhat similar and constantly changing, Google Cloud Platform provides several unique cost management benefits to you.

A few that I’ll just quickly walk through here are sustained use discounts, committed use discounts, preemptible virtual machines, and flexible machine configurations.

Key features of Google Cloud Platform

1. Sustained use discounts

These are unique to Google’s compute service and say that the longer you run a workload on a virtual machine, the more discount you get for keeping the workload running.

In other cloud service providers, this capability would be provided through a feature like AWS’s reserved instances.

2. Committed use discounts

The difference in the case of Google Cloud is that you don’t have to plan for and commit to a specific instance type and availability zone in order to secure a more favorable price.

You get the discount just by running your service on the platform for a period of time, and you can save up to 30% as a result.

If your workloads are well understood and you want to reduce costs beyond what you might gain by a sustained use discount, you can purchase a specific amount of computing power for a period of time using committed use discounts.

This discount is divided into two types that would be memory-optimized types up to 70% and normal machine types 57%.

3. Preemptible virtual machines

This is a cost optimization tool that can be helpful when running large data processing, typically batch-oriented workflows.

Preemptible VMs represent excess platform capacity and areas such priced lower than normal instances.

However, as that excess capacity is taken up by normal VMs, preemptible machines can be terminated or preempted by other workloads and then restarted when capacity becomes available again.

Assuming that your application is designed to tolerate this kind of fluctuation in VM availability, preemptible VMs can enable you to avoid paying the full price of standard images.

4. Flexible Machine configurations

When you’re configuring a virtual machine, you typically have a pretty good idea of what that machine is going to be doing, and sometimes that doesn’t necessarily line up with the set of standard virtual machine images that are offered by the cloud service provider.

Google enables you to go a level deeper and actually configure details like the number of CPU cores and memory that you need so that you can really fine-tune the virtual machine to the type of work that you want for it to be able to do.

Conclusion

This is just a small sampling of some of the cost optimizations that Google Cloud Platform provides. Each service can then go further in offering its own cost optimizations.

For example, storage offers an object lifecycle management feature whereby objects can automatically be moved from hot storage into colder storage options and thereby save you more money.

For details about individual service cost options, go to that service’s products page on the Google Cloud Platform documentation site.