What is GCP? Google is a leading cloud platform offering various services and resources to companies in the market. It was predicted that by 2020, more than 83 percent of enterprise workloads would be hosted in the cloud. A majority of these companies are using Google’s platform. The use of cloud computing technology has led to many leaders offering Cloud services, including Google, which offers services via its Google Cloud Platform. It helps in securing the data and provides you with a cost-effective solution for better working.
Google Cloud Platform has a variety of online services that organizations can use to build, host, and deliver applications. A key feature of the Google Cloud Platform is its location in Google’s data centers. This allows you to leverage Google’s vast experience and global network.
In this article, we will learn more about the Google Cloud Platform, its advantages, disadvantages, elements, and services.
What is Google Cloud Platform?
Google launched the Google Cloud Platform in 2011 giving tough competition to Amazon’s AWS platform. Like AWS, Google also offers a variety of services in almost every field like storage, development, networking, etc. Google cloud platform is available for all and any business/corporate can avail of any of its services either paid or free as per their business requirement.
GCP still stands out as one of the best cloud computing services, despite being the biggest rival to Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to management tools, Google also provides various cloud functions like cloud storage, data analytics, etc. The huge range of tools, functionalities, and features of GCP, makes it one of the most popular cloud platforms.
Elements of Google Cloud Platform
Before opting for the Google cloud services, you must understand and learn about various elements of Google cloud that will help the business in many ways. Here, we will be discussing those elements of Google cloud.
- Google Compute Engine: Google introduced this service as an IaaS that helps in providing virtual machines similar to the Amazon EC2.
- Google Cloud App Engine: Google offers this service as a PaaS service, allowing you to host the applications directly. This is one of the most powerful and important platforms allowing you to develop mobile and different web-based applications.
- Google Cloud Container Engine: This element enables the processing of the dockerized containers on the Google Cloud Platform that is effectively triggered by Kubernetes.
- Google Cloud Storage: This element allows the users to store crucial data and resources on the cloud platform. With the Google cloud platform you will get various storage facilities and ensure accurate backup of the data and make sure that the users can access that data from anywhere at any time.
- Google BigQuery Service: This element will analyze the business for Big data requirements. It offers a high-level data storage facility that can store up to terabytes of storage.
- Google Cloud Dataflow: This element helps the users in managing simultaneous data-processing pipelines. This also helps in managing Google Compute servers’ lifecycles.
- Google Cloud Job Discovery: The Google Cloud Platform ensures that the users will be able to leverage a great platform that will allow them to search for a new job and career opportunities etc. as it comes with an advanced search engine and machine learning functionalities. It increases the possibility for finding different ways of job search.
- Google Cloud Test Lab: it enables efficient testing of the apps using physical and virtual devices that are present in the cloud. Such tests will help the users gather detailed insights about the performance of their applications.
Why choose the Google Cloud platform?
Google Cloud Platform works similar to other cloud platforms that helps in providing resources and hosting your websites or applications on the cloud. These services are stored in a regional data center that falls under different availability zones where the data is stored. In such a way, the resources can be housed near your physical location. GCP offers the best platform users for accessing the best cloud-based services and resources.
Since then, the Google cloud platform has gained wide popularity and is used by companies worldwide for a variety of reasons. We have listed below some of the reasons for choosing Google Cloud Platform.
1. Better Pricing and Deals
Once you start looking for the best cloud platforms in the market from the price perspective then Google has the best pricing in the market among other competitors. Like AWS, the Google cloud platform also allows users to pay only for the services and resources that they have used over time. Also, it provides various plans that provide various features as per the different business requirements. The price will increase accordingly if you extend the services as per the changing business demands.
2. You Can Work from Anywhere
Google is a global company, thus providing services that are available everywhere and can be accessed from anywhere and anytime. Using Google cloud servers, you can access your data in any region. For working, you just need to log into your Google account.
3. Increased Service and Performance
Google cloud services have increased the overall productivity and performance of many businesses due to their faster loading times, quick web responses, and various services that make the work easier. This platform works efficiently nearly with every type of hardware configuration thus making a place for itself in the market.
4. Provides Better and Efficient Updates
Among various competitors, GCP is well known for providing faster updates of the cloud server and the security patches to keep the system updated. For many companies, the feature of fast updates is important, so they rely on Google Cloud Platform.ce.
5. Versatile Security Methods
Google has captured the market for more than 15 years thus providing extraordinary security to protect your crucial data in the cloud. Google offers secured servers, cloud platforms, and networks with high-end encryption. It has accommodated the best security team for ensuring the complete security of the data being stored and of running applications.
Limitations and Restrictions of Google Cloud Platform
Apart from having various advantages, there are some limitations to the usage of the Google cloud platform. We have mentioned some of the limitations below that you should know before you opt for GCP for its services.
- Google provides some outdated versions of services and does not provide managed services in all cases. Google currently uses Postgresql and MySQL, which are mostly considered old and have few extensions to add functionality.
- BigQuery, Spanner, and other GCP products are nice, but offer limited customization and observability. There might be a problem if the workflow differs from what was expected and leaves little scope for improving the performance and troubleshooting the issue.
- The documentation for GCP is weak and the SDKs are broken. Many of its products have been in beta testing for many years without any SLA guarantees. As compared to its competitors, such as Azure and AWS, its development of new features is slow.
- With GCP, various products are available globally and can be accessed from anywhere, but the problem arises when everything goes down without recourse. Because of this limitation, you have to manage multiple availability zones, resulting in more costs and investments.
- It does not provide great customer sales and support.
Best practices of Google Cloud Platform
Before you opt for the Google Cloud Platform services, make sure that you implement the best practices that will help you to eliminate the errors that are mostly faced by various customers. Below we have mentioned some of the best practices.
1. Optimize disk space
One of the best practices is to optimize the persistent disks. Considering the scenario, when you launch a virtual machine engine on GCP, a disk is attached to it which will act as local storage. But when we terminate the virtual machine, the disk will still be running and continue to charge full price for the disk usage. So you can remove those unused disks to optimize the unnecessary cost.
2. Ensure continuous delivery
For ensuring continuous delivery, you can follow the below-mentioned four best practices.
- Use the operational integration that will help in taking care of the development flow in both directions.
- Automation will help in bringing consistency to the CI process.
- Make sure to effectively strategize the deployment process for better performance.
- Make sure you create an infrastructure with a clear set of specifications without any changes.
3. Implementing firewall rules
To ensure complete security, any business will not allow complete traffic to their applications or website hosted on the cloud platform. They implement firewall rules to filter out unnecessary traffic and allow only legitimate traffic to the website. For this, you can add the network tags to your instances and these tags will apply the firewall rules. These tags will then help in routing the traffic to the logically related instances.
4. Logging and versioning the cloud storage buckets
Storage buckets hold the most crucial data of the user that need to be secured using the logging and versioning of the cloud storage buckets. The logging system will help you to track for the root cause of any specific errors in the system while the versioning will create multiple variants of the same storage bucket. So make sure to enable both the features for better data retrieval and security of the data.
5. Zombie instances
Zombie instances are the component of the infrastructure that runs on the cloud and is barely used. Suppose you used the compute engine virtual machine but it is no longer available. Compute engine VMs can crash or fail, creating these instances. If these instances are not turned off, then they will be charged as active items on your cloud services. Be sure to terminate these instances. For reference, you can even take a backup of these instances before terminating them.
6. Limiting the use of cloud IAM Primitive roles
Make sure that you grant the predefined roles to users as it provides more granular access compared to primitive roles. You can use the primitive roles in cases like- small teams working on projects, project permission change requirements by a member, if a role does not have the desired permissions, and others.
Conclusion
GCP is one of the leading cloud platform providers and is widely adopted. There is no doubt that it gives stiff competition to other cloud platform providers like Azure and AWS. If you are a small or large company, you can avail any of the Google Cloud platform plans depending on your business requirement. It has captured a wide section of the market in offering services along with high-end security. Make sure to implement the best practices in place that will help you to work efficiently and to provide a better customer experience.