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Should Your Business Use Google Cloud Platform?

2018-07-05by Lisa Froelings

Typing away on a worn keyboard, face illuminated by the screen of an extra-large monitor, you and your team hold your breath as they thing you’ve created, strung together at its core of simply zeroes and ones, takes form.

 

Your first app, hangs in the ether, waiting for the outside world to find and love it. The prototyped is typed up, the software working perfectly on your local machine. But what does the app need as it grows and finds an audience outside of your company?

 

When users flock to your app, you’ll need to scale. On your local machine, everything was easy to manage, but when you’re app is deployed you’ll need a little more firepower. Instead of burning through your capital and buying server rooms to run your app effectively, you can rent some space. This is the idea of the cloud, and slowly but surely, most companies are moving to it.

 

Amazon and Microsoft have provided their own cloud services for sometime. It seems that Amazon Web Services have been a favorite for quite some time. Google has begun to challenge AWS’s uncontested superiority, however.

 

Put simply, the Google Cloud Platform is a full suite of cloud computer services offered by the Internet search giant. The platform, which is available for general use by any and all companies, is the same exact infrastructure Google uses for its own products including Google Search and YouTube.

 

Bringing your business to the cloud

 

It’s more accurate to describe the Google Cloud Platform as a suite of services than simply one service. It offers platforms as a service, databases as a service, infrastructures as a service, and even functions as a service.

 

Almost every facet of an application can be built, managed, stored, scaled, and deployed with all the products Google offers. Just like Amazon Web Services, there are a full suite of solutions for every technical problem.

 

With the Google Cloud Platform you can use Google’s core infrastructure, data analytics and proprietary machine learning software. Building, managing, and scaling Google Cloud Platform is much simpler than managing a complex underlying infrastructure yourself. In addition, the GCP allows for vendoring of 3rd party libraries, making applications much easier to build, modify, and test.

 

The Google Cloud Platform is being used by large companies like Philips, Salesforce, and Spotify. But, the platform can be used by anyone with a team with some development experience, a credit card at the ready, and a willingness to put in dozens of hours to ultimately scale their business.

 

Small businesses can build, test, and deploy, then scale with the GCP’s suite of services.

 

A few of the popular products:

 

  • App Engine -- Application hosting. A platform as a service (PaaS). It allows for customers to develop, run, and manage web applications without building or maintaining the infrastructure required.
  • BigQuery -- Database analytics. An Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), tech that involves cloud orchestration; services that provide APIs for underlying network infrastructure.
  • Bigtable -- Scalable NoSQL database. Another IaaS that provides high-level APIs for managing resources.
  • Cloud Datastore -- Database as a service.
  • Storage -- IaaS that allows for RESTful file and object storage.
  • Cloud AutoML -- A machine learning suite recently released for general use.
  • Cloud Machine Learning Engine -- Machine learning software as a service for using TensorFlow models.
  • Kubernetes Engine -- A management system for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts.
  • Cloud Pub/Sub -- Publishing and subscribing to transmitted data, or data streams, and messages.
  • Cloud Functions -- Function as a Service (Faas). “Serverless” architecture for microservices applications.
  • Cloud IoT Core -- A fully-managed IoT platform for businesses
  • Cloud Virtual Network -- Managed networking functionality for Cloud Platform resources.

 

Out with the costly servers

 

The Google Cloud Platform lets you rent the hardware and software Google’s using on their own products. While managing products on the Google Cloud Platform is a complex task in and of itself, it’s nowhere near as complex or costly as building, running, and maintaining your own in-house software teams and server rooms.

 

As the cloud becomes a more popular option for organizations large and small, we are sure to see changes in cloud technology and platforms. At present, the Google Cloud Platform is a major contender for your consideration.

 

The GCP is certainly not without a host of flaws. Like any platform, there are drawbacks to adopting it. At present, however, it’s another great solution for organizations looking to build and deploy applications in a speedy manner.

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Author

Lisa Froelings

Lisa Froelings is a business and productivity consultant with over 4 years of experience in human resources working for a major retailer in the country before she decided to build her own business. Her interests include technology, mindfulness as well as time management.

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