Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, 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 mu ...

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 Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP and ...

Google Drive Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In add ...

, and

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and 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 Google, and is the second mo ...

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

data analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

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 Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

, 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 centers, 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 Google Workspace (formerly known as Google Apps and later G Suite) is a collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed and marketed by Google. It consists of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, Meet ...

(G Suite), enterprise versions of Android and

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfa ...

, 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 Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

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 mos ...

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 o ...

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 ...

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 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, w ...

virtual machines. * Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or GKE on-prem offered as part of Anthos platform - Containers as a Service based on

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

. * 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 -

Object storage Object storage (also known as object-based storage) is a computer data storage that manages data as objects, as opposed to other storage architectures like file systems which manages data as a file hierarchy, and block storage which manages data a ...

with integrated edge caching to store

unstructured data Unstructured data (or unstructured information) is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, num ...

. *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 ...

, PostgreSQL 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 ...

. * Cloud Bigtable - Managed NoSQL 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 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 ...

. *Local SSD: 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 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 v ...

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 connec ...

attacks. * Cloud CDN -

Content Delivery Network A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially rel ...

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 ...

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 BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. It is a ''Platform as a Service'' ( PaaS) that supports querying using ANSI SQL. It also has built-in machine learning capabilities. B ...

- Scalable, managed enterprise

data warehouse In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integra ...

for analytics. * Cloud Dataflow - Managed service based on

Apache Beam Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model to define and execute data processing pipelines, including ETL, batch and stream (continuous) processing. Beam Pipelines are defined using one of the provided SDKs and executed in one of ...

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 platform for running Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark 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,

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 (3 ...

, 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 s ...

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

message queue In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components typically used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter- thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the ...

s. * 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 p ...

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. * Cloud Natural Language - Text analysis service based on Google Deep Learning 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 Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

conversion service based on machine learning. * Cloud Translation API - Service to dynamically translate between thousands of available language pairs. * Cloud Vision API - Image analysis service based on machine learning. * Cloud Video Intelligence - Video analysis service based on machine learning.

Management Tools

* Operations suite (formerly 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 Ext ...

or Jinja2. * 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 - Android 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 include ...

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, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

s to programmatically access Google Cloud Platform resources

Identity & Security

* Cloud Identity -

Single sign-on Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication scheme that allows a user to log in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. True single sign-on allows the user to log in once and access services without re-enterin ...

(SSO) service based on

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

and

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...

. * Cloud IAM - Identity & Access Management (IAM) service for defining policies based on

role-based access control In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) or role-based security is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users. It is an approach to implement mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control ...

. * Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy - Service to control access to cloud applications running on Google Cloud Platform without using a

VPN A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...

. * 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. *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 gateway A payment gateway is a merchant service provided by an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes credit card or direct payments processing for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and clicks, or traditional brick and mortar. The ...

s, 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 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 varian ...

(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 identi ...

, 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 exchanges like

OKEx OKX (), formerly known as OKEx, is a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange and derivatives exchange. It was founded by Star Xu (徐明星) in 2017. OKX is owned by OK Group, which also owns crypto exchange Okcoin. It is not currently availab ...

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