What are the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Services?

Described without… help from marketing

Reto Meier
Google Cloud - Community
5 min readFeb 10, 2017

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See Also: What is Google’s Cloud Platform (described using on the 1,000 most commonly used words)?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers dozens of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services. Sadly, the Wikipedia entry for GCP is garbage, and while the official docs are pretty good, the marketing-dust sprinkled on them gives me a toothache. For my own reference, I pulled together an objective description for each of the services available on GCP.

Big hat-tip to Greg Wilson, the Google Cloud Developer Relations team, and the Google Cloud Developer Experts for the 4-word descriptions.

Compute

Storage and Databases

  • Cloud Storage [Object & File Storage and Serving] A unified object storage service, offering a spectrum of storage options including geo-redundant (low-latency, high QPS content serving to users distributed across geographic regions), regional (for workloads in a particular region), nearline (for data accessed less than once a month), and coldline (for data accessed less than once a year.) Competitor services include Amazon Simple Storage Service (geo-redundant / regional) and Amazon Glacier (coldline).
  • Cloud SQL [Managed MySQL] A fully-managed MySQL database service for hosting relational MySQL databases on Google’s infrastructure.
  • Bigtable [HBase Compatible NoSQL] A high performance NoSQL Big Data database service, designed to support very large workloads at consistent low latency and high throughput rates. Google uses Bigtable internally to power services including Search and Gmail.
  • Cloud Datastore [Distributed Hierarchical Key/Value Storage] A NoSQL schemaless database for storing non-relational data. It’s an alternative to Bigtable when ACID transactions are required, or the data stored is highly structured.
  • Cloud Spanner A managed globally distributed relational database with ACID transactions, strong consistency, SQL semantics, horizontal scaling, and high availability.
  • Persistent Disk [VM-Attachable Disks] A service that provides SSD and HDD storage that can be attached to instances running in either Compute Engine or Container Engine.
  • Cloud Source Repositories [Hosted Private Git Repositories] Private Git repositories hosted on GCP; they are currently in beta.

Big Data

Machine Learning

  • Cloud Machine Learning [Machine Learning with TensorFlow] A managed service for building machine learning models using the TensorFlow framework.
  • The Cloud Vision API [Image Recognition and Classification] A REST API that can be used to understand the content of an image into categories, detect individual objects and faces within images, and find and read printed words contained within images¹.
  • The Cloud Speech API [Convert Speech to Text] A REST API that can be used to convert audio to text. The API recognizes over 80 languages and variants. The Google Cloud Speech API is currently in open Beta.
  • The Natural Language API [Text Parsing and Analysis] A REST API that can be used to parse the structure and meaning of text. It can extract information including the people, places, events, and sentiment within a provided text. The Google Cloud Natural Language API is currently in open Beta.
  • The Translate API [Language Detection and Translation] A REST API that can be used to translate an arbitrary language string into any supported language. Language identification is available for cases where the source language is unknown.

Networking

Identity and Security

Google Cloud Platform Management Services

  • Stackdriver [Cloud Monitoring, Logging & Diagnostics] Provides monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications built on cloud infrastructure including GCP and AWS. Stackdriver provides metrics, dashboards, alerting, log management, reporting, and tracing capabilities.
  • Deployment Manager [Template-based Infrastructure Deployment] An infrastructure automation and management service that allows you to define templates to deploy a variety of GCP services, including Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, and Cloud SQL.
  • Cloud Shell [Browser-Based Terminal/CLI] Command-line access to cloud resources from within a browser, without having to install the Google Cloud SDK or other tools on your system.
  • The Google Cloud Billing API [Programatic GCP Billing Management] Programmatically managed billing for your GCP projects.

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Reto Meier
Google Cloud - Community

Developer Advocate @ Google, software engineer, and author of “Professional Android” series from Wrox. All opinions are my own.