Google Cloud & Workspace Ecosystem
In my experience, both from a user and partner point of view, the suite of tools provided by Google manages to provide a package of solutions ranging from the simplest as a spreadsheet to more complex issues, such as being able to use the power of the cloud to rear my own AI models.
That is why in this article I describe, from my point of view, Google’s strengths with its Workspace and Cloud products.
Disclaimer, I complement for a matter of tastes and needs with other solutions such as Notion, but in principle only with GCP and GWS I have everything I need to work.
Google Cloud Platform
Among the different Cloud providers, Google is in the Top 3. In a few years it managed to position itself in the Top, providing a great quality of service and with some features that make me choose it not only for work, but also for personal use.
Features
- Open Source mentality
- Great capacity of integration with Workspace (office automation tools).
- Extensive documentation
- Easy to use interface
- Easy to prepare cost estimates
- Free and paid online courses
- Free and low-cost test labs
In this link you can find all the solutions, separated by categories. From tools for data processing and storage, hosting servers, microservices, APIs, to the possibility of using pre-trained AI models.
Something to note is that many of the solutions are designed to be used with a low level of knowledge in cloud (not at a product level for large-scale customers, since in these cases the infrastructure must be robust, so more knowledge is needed).
The clearest example is the Vertex Vision solution, where we can train our own AI model to detect objects in an image, among other things. The only thing we have to do is to give it a set of images and tell it where the objects we want it to learn to detect are.
With the arrival of GenAI this explodes even more, since it gives us the possibility to tune already existing models, pass them to production, and in a short time to have our own chatbot, image generator, pass audio to text, text to audio and much more, thanks to GenAI Studio.
Google Workspace
On the office side we have workspace. Where we can manage any administrative task thanks to the complete pack of available services.
Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meets, Docs, Spreadsheets, Slides, Chat, Keep, Forms.
In the sum of possibilities, we can summarize the following.
Our own domain for the mailboxes, acquiring a payment plan ranging from USD 8 per month, obtaining benefits such as storage space, dedicated security tools and the ability to manage all users in case of being a company.
The calendar along with meet is an excellent solution, even more so nowadays, when teleworking is so present. It is not only a video call solution that Google gives us, but also the possibility of having real-time subtitles, recording sessions automatically and much more.
To this we add the linking of the box with Drive, a place to store all files, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, even colab sheets, for those who want to test code in the cloud.
And as the AI could not be missing, DuetAI is added to this, which will allow us with its launch among other things, to ask through promts images to add to our presentations, to complete sheets with tables, and even generate texts within our docs.
