GCP Course Introduction

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) operates like other public cloud providers. It provides virtual machines and hardware, housing them in a regional data center. The regions are then divided into separate zones where data is stored. This allows resources to be housed near your physical location. It also prevents failures and latency. In addition, there are global, regional and zonal resources.

What you would commonly think of as software and hardware products are known in GCP as services. Services provide access to resources.

In GCP, everything starts with a project. This is a centralized hub for all that you create. According to Google, “a project is made up of the settings, permissions, and other metadata that describe your applications.”

Google Cloud Platform Console

Command-line interface

Client libraries

GCP differentiates itself from the other public cloud providers in a variety of ways. Google provides a comprehensive security model, a unique billing model — and a strong reliance on data analytics to ensure optimal performance.

The Google security model is built from more than 15 years of experience focused on keeping customers safe on Google products. Google Cloud Platform allows your applications and data to operate on the same trusted security model that Google built for its own network.

Like most cloud providers, GCP offers a pay-as-you-go monthly plan. This means your bill is based on the usage of its compute engine instances. However, Google takes things a step further by charging per second with a one-minute minimum. This allows you to save even more money when your business isn’t using Compute Engine, especially if you are running short-term workloads, or you’re running a dynamic web application.

business strategyGoogle also stands out because of its data analytics provided by BigQuery. With big data services, you can process data in the cloud to get answers to your most complex questions. You can also create schemas, load data, generate queries — and export data.

There are several factors that influence why you would choose GCP as your public cloud provider. One of the major reasons is its services and distributed applications model.

This is geared toward businesses interested in building new applications in the cloud, or replacing some of their existing data center applications with cloud-based apps. In other words, moving to the cloud and a services model is not a destination, but rather a transition.

With a focus on services and applications, GCP gives you the power to build applications and blend assets also known as app modernization. By creating a hybridized model with components, you can stage your workloads in a more efficient way using Google's own experience as a pioneer in technology.