The Benefits and Considerations of the Google Cloud Platform
Google continues to expand its cloud offerings and is positioning itself to compete with other cloud providers. The Google Cloud Platform impacts any business with large data analytics, AI and ML development, remote collaboration, or X-as-a-Service products. The list of businesses it affects is long and varied. It is worth considering which cloud platform is right for your business. If you are considering GCP for your next cloud computing project, here are some important benefits and considerations.
The Google Cloud Platform's pricing tiers allow you to choose the right service level for your needs. You can choose a monthly plan or pay by the minute. GCP is US-based and offers different pricing plans based on how much of the services you're using. You can choose from several different types of virtual machine buildouts to meet your unique business needs. Google no longer guarantees discounts on custom usage, but they do apply sustained use discounts, which are based on how much you use the service per month. For example, if you have an application that's generating millions of service requests per month, you may get a discount of up to 30 percent.
Organizations using Google Cloud Platform typically consist of small and medium-sized businesses. They typically have developers but don't have the expertise to scale and manage their infrastructure. Many of them are in the healthcare industry, where infrastructure is an issue. To administer applications and resources, you can use Google Console, a web-based admin interface. Resources are referred to as services that you consume, such as Compute Engine instances. A Compute Engine instance may have up to 128GB of memory. Each virtual CPU in a container is 8GB, making it an example of a resource.
To determine the costs of using the Google Cloud Platform, you can either use the free tier or opt to pay for additional resources. The free tier offers 300 dollars in credits and offers over 20 pre-defined VM instances. For larger businesses, a year-long commitment can save you hundreds of dollars. Regardless of which plan you choose, make sure you know what you need and factor in scalability, as it is critical to keep costs down.
Google Cloud Platform offers similar core cloud functionality to Azure and AWS, including data storage and virtual machines. Google has also expanded its AI initiatives by adding container support to their services. It's hard to argue with Google on AI, and the platform is also built around big data processing. Google's BigQuery and Dataflow both provide strong analytics and processing capabilities, while Kubernetes eases container deployment and management. A Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine gives developers machine learning APIs.
GCP offers 24 different regions around the world. These regions are known as availability zones and isolate a single point of failure. For example, if you run a website in Europe, you can use the Europe-west2a region. If you're looking for high-performance and global reach, you can use the Europe-west2-a region. GCP offers tiered networks as well. The Premium plan offers performance routing and global reach.