Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

, is a suite of

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

, Gmail, Google Drive, and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing,

data storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are conside ...

, data analytics and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. Registration requires a

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the o ...

or bank account details. Google Cloud Platform provides

infrastructure as a service The first major provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was Amazon in 2008. IaaS is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, net ...

, platform as a service, and

serverless computing Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still ...

environments. In April 2008, Google announced App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

s, which was the first cloud computing service from the company. The service became generally available in November 2011. Since the announcement of App Engine, Google added multiple cloud services to the platform. Google Cloud Platform is a part of Google Cloud, which includes the Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructure, as well as Google Workspace (G Suite), enterprise versions of

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

and ChromeOS, and application programming interfaces (APIs) for

and enterprise mapping services.

Products

Google lists over 100 products under the Google Cloud brand. Some of the key services are listed below.

Compute

* App Engine - Platform as a Service to deploy

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code ou ...

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

, C#, .Net,

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sa ...

and Go applications. * Compute Engine -

Infrastructure as a Service The first major provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was Amazon in 2008. IaaS is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, net ...

to run

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

virtual machines. * Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or GKE on-prem offered as part of Anthos platform - Containers as a Service based on Kubernetes. * Cloud Functions - Functions as a Service to run event-driven code written in Node.js, Java, Python, or Go. * Cloud Run - Compute execution environment based on Knative. Offered as Cloud Run (fully managed) or as Cloud Run for Anthos. Currently supports GCP, AWS and VMware management.

Storage & Databases

Cloud Storage Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on "the cloud". The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is t ...

- Object storage with integrated edge caching to store unstructured data. *Cloud SQL -

Database as a Service A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machin ...

based on

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

and

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ma ...

. * Cloud Bigtable - Managed

NoSQL A NoSQL (originally referring to "non- SQL" or "non-relational") database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed ...

database service. * Cloud Spanner - Horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, relational database service. * Cloud Datastore - NoSQL database for web and mobile applications. *Persistent Disk -

Block storage In computing (specifically data transmission and data storage), a block, sometimes called a physical record, is a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a maximum length; a ''block size''. Data thu ...

for Compute Engine virtual machines. *Cloud Memorystore - Managed in-memory data store based on

Redis Redis (; Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, su ...

and

Memcached Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of t ...

. *Local

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...

: High-performance, transient, local block storage. *Filestore: High-performance file storage for Google Cloud users. *AlloyDB: Fully managed PostgreSQL database service.

Networking

Google Cloud Network Topology - External Load Balancer Architecture

* VPC -

Virtual Private Cloud A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as ''users'' hereafter) using th ...

for managing the

software defined network Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing ...

of cloud resources. * Cloud Load Balancing - Software-defined, managed service for load balancing the traffic. * Cloud Armor -

Web application firewall A web application firewall (WAF) is a specific form of application firewall that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web service. By inspecting HTTP traffic, it can prevent attacks exploiting a web application's known vul ...

to protect workloads from

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host A ...

attacks. * Cloud CDN - Content Delivery Network based on Google's globally distributed edge points of presence. * Cloud Interconnect - Service to connect a data center with Google Cloud Platform * Cloud DNS - Managed, authoritative

DNS hosting A DNS hosting service is a service that runs Domain Name System (DNS) servers. Most, but not all, domain name registrars include DNS hosting service with registration. Free DNS hosting services also exist. Many third-party DNS hosting services p ...

service running on the same infrastructure as Google. * Network Service Tiers - Option to choose Premium vs Standard network tier for higher-performing network.

Big Data

* BigQuery - Scalable, managed enterprise data warehouse for analytics. * Cloud Dataflow - Managed service based on Apache Beam for stream and batch data processing. * Cloud Data Fusion - A managed ETL service based on the Open Source Cask Data Application Platform. * Dataproc -

Big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

platform for running

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

and

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californi ...

jobs. * Cloud Composer - Managed workflow orchestration service built on

Apache Airflow Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management platform for data engineering pipelines. It started at Airbnb in October 2014 as a solution to manage the company's increasingly complex workflows. Creating Airflow allowed Airbnb to programma ...

. * Cloud Datalab - Tool for

data exploration Data exploration is an approach similar to initial data analysis, whereby a data analyst uses visual exploration to understand what is in a dataset and the characteristics of the data, rather than through traditional data management systems.

analysis Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (38 ...

, visualization and machine learning. This is a fully managed Jupyter Notebook service. * Cloud Dataprep - Data service based on

Trifacta Trifacta is a privately owned software company headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Bengaluru, Boston, Berlin and London. The company was founded in October 2012 and primarily develops data wrangling software for data exploration and sel ...

to visually explore, clean, and prepare data for analysis. * Cloud Pub/Sub - Scalable event ingestion service based on message queues. * Cloud Data Studio -

Business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical pr ...

tool to visualize data through dashboards and reports.

Cloud AI

* Cloud AutoML - Service to train and deploy custom machine learning models. As of September 2018, the service is in Beta. * Cloud TPU - Accelerators used by Google to train machine learning models. * Cloud Machine Learning Engine - Managed service for training and building machine learning models based on mainstream frameworks. * Cloud Talent Solution (formerly Cloud Job Discovery) - Service based on Google's search and machine learning capabilities for the recruiting ecosystem. * Dialogflow Enterprise - Development environment based on Google's machine learning for building

conversational interfaces A conversational user interface (CUI) is a user interface for computers that emulates a conversation with a real human. Historically, computers have relied on text-based user interfaces and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) (such as the user pressin ...

. * Cloud Natural Language -

Text analysis Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video. Social scientists use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic ...

service based on Google

Deep Learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

models. * Cloud Speech-to-Text -

Speech to text Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the mai ...

conversion service based on machine learning. * Cloud Text-to-Speech - Text to speech conversion service based on machine learning. * Cloud Translation API - Service to dynamically translate between thousands of available language pairs. * Cloud Vision API -

Image analysis Image analysis or imagery analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophi ...

service based on machine learning. * Cloud Video Intelligence -

Video analysis Video content analysis or video content analytics (VCA), also known as video analysis or video analytics (VA), is the capability of automatically analyzing video to detect and determine temporal and spatial events. This technical capability is used ...

service based on machine learning.

Management Tools

* Operations suite (formerly

Stackdriver Google Stackdriver was a cloud computing systems management service offered by Google. It provided performance and diagnostics data (in the form of monitoring, logging, tracing, error reporting, and alerting) to public cloud users. Stackdriver ...

) - Monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS. * Cloud Deployment Manager - Tool to deploy Google Cloud Platform resources defined in templates created in

YAML YAML ( and ) (''see '') is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. YAML targets many of the same communications applications as Exte ...

Jinja2 Jinja is a web template engine for the Python programming language. It was created by Armin Ronacher and is licensed under a BSD License. Jinja is similar to the Django template engine but provides Python-like expressions while ensuring that t ...

. * Cloud Console - Web interface to manage Google Cloud Platform resources. * Cloud Shell - Browser-based shell command-line access to manage Google Cloud Platform resources. * Cloud Console Mobile App -

and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

application to manage Google Cloud Platform resources. * Cloud APIs -

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

s to programmatically access Google Cloud Platform resources

Identity & Security

* Cloud Identity - Single sign-on (SSO) service based on

SAML 2.0 Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0) is a version of the Security Assertion Markup Language, SAML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization identities between security domains. SAML 2.0 is an XML-based commu ...

and OpenID. * Cloud IAM - Identity & Access Management (IAM) service for defining policies based on role-based access control. * Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy - Service to control access to cloud applications running on Google Cloud Platform without using a VPN. * Cloud Data Loss Prevention API - Service to automatically discover, classify, and redact sensitive data. * Security Key Enforcement -

Two-step verification Multi-factor authentication (MFA; encompassing two-factor authentication, or 2FA, along with similar terms) is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or application only after successfully presenting ...

service based on a security key. * Cloud Key Management Service - Cloud-hosted key management service integrated with IAM and audit logging. * Cloud Resource Manager - Service to manage resources by project, folder, and organization based on the hierarchy. * Cloud Security Command Center - Security and data risk platform for data and services running in Google Cloud Platform. * Cloud Security Scanner - Automated vulnerability scanning service for applications deployed in App Engine. * Access Transparency - Near real-time audit logs providing visibility to Google Cloud Platform administrators. * VPC Service Controls - Service to manage security perimeters for sensitive data in Google Cloud Platform services.

IoT

* Cloud IoT Core - Secure device connection and management service for

Internet of Things The Internet of things (IoT) describes physical objects (or groups of such objects) with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other comm ...

. *Edge TPU - Purpose-built ASIC designed to run inference at the edge. As of September 2018, this product is in private beta. *Cloud IoT Edge - Brings AI to the edge computing layer.

API Platform

* Maps Platform - APIs for maps, routes, and places based on Google Maps. * Apigee API Platform - Lifecycle management platform to design, secure, deploy, monitor, and scale APIs. * API Monetization - Tool for API providers to create revenue models, reports, payment gateways, and developer portal integrations. * Developer Portal - Self-service platform for developers to publish and manage APIs. * API Analytics - Service to analyse API-driven programs through monitoring, measuring, and managing APIs. * Apigee Sense - Enables API security by identifying and alerting administrators to suspicious API behaviours. * Cloud Endpoints - An

NGINX Nginx (pronounced "engine x" ) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 2004. Nginx is free and open-source software ...

-based proxy to deploy and manage APIs. * Service Infrastructure - A set of foundational services for building Google Cloud products.

Regions and zones

As of Q3 2022, Google Cloud Platform is available in 34 regions and 103 zones. A region is a specific geographical location where users can deploy cloud resources. Each region is an independent geographic area that consists of zones. A zone is a deployment area for Google Cloud Platform resources within a region. Zones should be considered a single failure domain within a region. Most of the regions have three or more zones. As of Q3 2022, Google Cloud Platform is available in the following regions and zones:

Similarity to services by other cloud service providers

For those familiar with other notable cloud service providers, a comparison of similar services may be helpful in understanding Google Cloud Platform's offerings.

Timeline

* April 2008 - Google App Engine announced in preview * May 2010 - Google Cloud Storage launched * May 2010 - Google BigQuery and Prediction API announced in preview * October 2011 - Google Cloud SQL is announced in preview * June 2012 - Google Compute Engine is launched in preview * May 2013 - Google Compute Engine is released to GA * August 2013 - Cloud Storage begins automatically encrypting each Storage object's data and

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

under the 128-bit

Advanced Encryption Standard The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

(AES-128), and each encryption key is itself encrypted with a regularly rotated set of master keys * February 2014 - Google Cloud SQL becomes GA * May 2014 - Stackdriver is acquired by Google * June 2014 - Kubernetes is announced as an open source container manager * June 2014 - Cloud Dataflow is announced in preview * October 2014 - Google acquires Firebase * November 2014 - Alpha release Google Kubernetes Engine (formerly Container Engine) is announced * January 2015 - Google Cloud Monitoring based on Stackdriver goes into Beta * March 2015 - Google Cloud Pub/Sub becomes available in Beta * April 2015 - Google Cloud DNS becomes generally available * April 2015 - Google Dataflow launched in beta * July 2015 - Google releases v1 of Kubernetes; Hands it over to The Cloud Native Computing Foundation * August 2015 - Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Deployment Manager graduate to GA * November 2015 - Bebop is acquired, and Diane Greene joins Google * February 2016 - Google Cloud Functions becomes available in Alpha * September 2016 - Apigee, a provider of application programming interface (API) management company, is acquired by Google * September 2016 - Stackdriver becomes generally available * November 2016 - Qwiklabs, an EdTech company is acquired by Google * February 2017 - Cloud Spanner, highly available, globally-distributed database is released into Beta * March 2017 - Google acquires Kaggle, world's largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts * April 2017 - MIT professor Andrew Sutherland breaks the record for the largest ever Compute Engine cluster with 220,000 cores on Preemptible VMs. * May 2017 - Google Cloud IoT Core is launched in Beta * November 2017 - Google Kubernetes Engine gets certified by the CNCF * February 2018 - Google Cloud IoT Core becomes generally available * February 2018 - Google announces its intent to acquire Xively * February 2018 - Cloud TPUs, ML accelerators for Tensorflow, become available in Beta * May 2018 - Gartner names Google as a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Infrastructure as a Service Magic Quadrant * May 2018 - Google Cloud Memorystore becomes available in Beta * April 2019 - Google Cloud Run (fully managed) Beta release * April 2019 - Google Anthos announced * November 2019 - Google Cloud Run (fully managed) General availability release * March 2020 - Due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, Google Cloud postponed the online streaming version of its Google Cloud Next mega-conference, two weeks after it cancelled the in-person version. * October 2020 - Google Cloud announced that it will become a block producer candidate for the EOS network and

EOS.IO EOS.IO is a blockchain protocol based on the cryptocurrency EOS. The smart contract platform claims to eliminate transaction fees and also conduct millions of transactions per second. It was developed by the private company Block.one and lau ...

protocol. Currently the top block producers are

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It i ...

exchanges like OKEx and Binance. * February 2021 Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot introduced. * April 2022 - MobiledgeX acquired and joins Google Cloud.

References

External links

*
Google Cloud Latest Release Notes
{{Google LLC Cloud Platform Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Cloud platforms Web services Computer-related introductions in 2011