GCP Connect 101: Introduction

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8 min readJun 1, 2021

Have you ever wondered what does the Cloud mean? P.S — I am not talking about the visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere outside your window. Let me get straight to the point. Recently I got into Google Cloud Readiness Program in which I was prepared for the Associate Cloud Engineer Exam (ACE). So, I thought of sharing my knowledge in the form of blog series to help you kickstart your career in the field of the Cloud.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY CLOUD COMPUTING?

First, let me introduce you to the term Cloud Computing. Back in the 1950s in the age of the mainframe, the computers were enormous, expensive, and had low computing power. In around 1961, John MacCharty in his speech at MIT suggested that computing can be sold as a utility, just like water or electricity. But that was far ahead of its time, as technology was not ready for it. Today’s cloud services wouldn’t be possible without the virtualization that permits us to run many virtual servers on one physical server. As time progressed the technology evolved with SaaS applications, IaaS applications, PaaS applications, public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Cloud computing allows companies to avoid or minimize up-front IT infrastructure costs to stay their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and lesser maintenance, and that it enables IT teams, to regulate resources rapidly to fulfill fluctuating and unpredictable demand. With the evolved technology some companies emerged as cloud service providers.

Cloud Computing is defined as a way of using I.T that has five equally important traits:

1. First, you get computing resources on-demand and self-service.

2. Second, you access these resources over the net from anywhere you want.

3. Third, the provider of these resources features a big pool of them and allocates them to customers out of that pool.

4. Fourth, the resources are elastic. If you would like more resources, you’ll get more, rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back.

5. And last, the customers pay only for what they use or reserve as they go.

Let’s understand it better with an example, suppose you are watching a YouTube video that is hosted elsewhere. So, you fetched that video on demand and accessed it over the internet from anywhere you want.

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM (GCP)

Google jumped into the cloud bandwagon in 2008. Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google is a suite of cloud computing services provided by Google. It is a public cloud computing platform consisting of 4 major kinds of services: Compute, Storage, Big Data, and Machine Learning which runs on the same cloud infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products like Gmail, Google Search, etc. Apart from these services GCP also provides Networking, Security and Management

Now you must be thinking about why to choose GCP. What makes GCP different from others? GCP is one of the top cloud service providers. Following are the major reasons to opt for GCP:

1. Security: — Security is always on top of Google’s priority. Google’s infrastructure provides cryptographic privacy and integrity for remote procedures called data-on-the-network, which is how Google services communicate with each other. Google also designs custom chips, including a hardware security chip called Titan that’s currently being deployed on both servers and peripherals. Google server machines use cryptographic signatures to form sure they’re booting the right software. This gives assurance to the users that their data is completely safe and secure from unauthorized sources.

2. Scalable: — The ability to go from serving 1 client in one minute to serving 1000 next or even more. It doesn’t matter whether you serve static pages or dynamic ones, scale is what matters. Google is always working to scale its network with the help of fiber optic cables to extend its network range. It also can have an operation so that it can scale based on certain metrics, and at the same time specify some bounds. Did you know that Pokémon Go was scaled up to 50x times more than expected with the help of containerized applications on GKE!

3. Network: — Google provides its network to every customer so that they have more control and scalability over the network. It is designed to provide customers the highest possible throughput while providing the lowest possible latency. To provide such amazing throughput and latency Google uses the so-called “Edge Network system” which connects more than 90 internet exchanges and more than 100 points of presence worldwide to cite content near the end-users to minimize latency. That means that the user can use GCP from different devices across anywhere in the world.

4. Eco-friendly: — Google has a long track record on clean energy: in 2007, Google became the first major company to become carbon neutral. It became the first major company to match its energy use with 100 percent renewable energy in 2017. By 2030, they aimed to run their data centers and campuses carbon-free at all times. They operate one of the cleanest global clouds and are the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy (solar and wind energy). Google’s data centers were the first ones to achieve ISO 14001 certification. They have also introduced new initiatives to help partner organizations reduce their carbon usage and remove carbon from the atmosphere. With the use of AI and ML, they have reduced the energy used for cooling its data centers by 30 percent, and now Google Cloud and DeepMind are making this cloud technology solution available globally for use by airports, shopping malls, hospitals, data centers, and other commercial buildings and industrial facilities.

5. Pricing: — Google Cloud is known to be the cheapest amongst other cloud service providers. With a pay-as-you-go pricing structure, you only pay for the services you use. It helps you to control your spending with quota limits, alerts and helps you to estimate costs with the help of a free pricing calculator provided by it. It also helps you save your money over other providers through automatic savings based on monthly usage and pre-paying for the resources at discounted rates. It also provides discounts on committed use of compute engine resources like machine types or GPUs.

GCP ARCHITECTURES

There are several GCP computing architectures. You can use any of them as per your application requirement.

· IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) — Provides raw compute, storage, and network facilities and you have to pay what you allocate.

· PaaS (Platform as a Service) — This binds the application code to libraries that allow you to access the resources that your application needs, pay what you use.

· SaaS (Software as a Service) — Many applications like Gmail, Google Drive, and other GSuite applications based on this architecture

· Hybrid — Anthos which is built on the top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

REGIONS AND ZONES

Google Cloud Platform Services are available in various locations across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. These various locations are divided into regions and zones. We can choose any of the regions as per our needs to meet the required latency, availability, and durability.

https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#regions

As of 01–06–2021, there are 25 regions, 76 zones, 144 edge locations that are available in 200+ countries to deliver high-performance, low latency cloud services to its customers no matter where they are around the globe.

A zone could be a deployment area for GCP resources. Zones are grouped into regions; independent geographic areas and you’ll be able to choose what regions your GCP resources are in. Locations within regions usually have round trip network latencies of under 5ms. Think of a zone as a single failure domain within a region. As part of building fault-tolerant applications, you can deploy resources across multiple zones in a region. This reduces the risk of an infrastructure outage affecting all resources simultaneously. You can deploy resources in different regions too. Some GCP services support placing resources in multi-region. That means it stores resources redundantly in at least two geographic locations, separated by at least 160 km.

GETTING STARTED

Let me introduce you to Qwiklabs, your friend who will help you get familiar with the GCP environment. It provides temporary credentials to GCP, as an online learning environment alongside a set of instructions to run you thru a live, real-world, and scenario-based use case. It has individual courses to multi-day courses, from basics to advanced, instructor-led or self-paced on topics such as ML, Infrastructure, App Dev, and many more. Coursera provides courses based on Google Cloud, from introductory to advanced. It can help you to start your career in the cloud.

CONCLUSION

Google Cloud Platform is the product of decades-long experience running a number of the largest and most successful web services in history. Extreme reliability and security are established norms at Google, and these qualities are deeply rooted in GCP’s underlying infrastructure. With fierce competition among the most important public cloud providers, Google is looking to determine itself as a market leader. Today, the Google Cloud Platform catalog includes several products and services that cover enormous cases and industries. Google is making waves and building a reputation as the Open Cloud. Building on the core belief that developers want to use GCP, Google consistently adopts and drives open standards and open-source tools and frameworks. By open-sourcing projects such as Kubernetes and TensorFlow, these projects can grow rapidly and organically. In addition to driving open sourcing and open standards, Google Cloud continuously innovates ways to form more feasible solutions for organizations of all sizes.