Computing Resources in Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud service that offers Software, Hardware, and Networking infrastructure to the users so that Business, Organisation, and individuals can store data and access it from anywhere in the world. More than 90 products and services are provided under the google cloud platform.

Google Cloud Platform services are majorly divided into the  following categories:

• Compute 
• Storage 
• Networking 
• Specialized services

In this article, we will be focusing on the resources which are provided under Compute section of Google Cloud Platform:

Compute Resources:

Compute Engine:

Compute Engine is an Infrastructure-As-A-Service(IAAS) offering of GCP, where end users can create Virtual Machines.VMs are the physical servers on cloud which provide CPU, memory, Storage, required Operating System. These VMs can be attached with persistent storage either HDD or SSD, and also make use of other GCP services such as Cloud Storage. VMs run on Hypervisor which is a low-level service, GCP security works on Kernel Virtual Machine(KVM) hypervisor. Hypervisor runs on the Host operating system. Each Instance of an executing Guest operating System known as VM Instance.

The following figure shows how VM instances running within a Hypervisor

Physical Server

VM instance can be created with the following parameters:

• Type of Operating System
• Size of persistent Disk
• Region and Zone
• GPU
• VM preemitable

Kubernetes Engine

Kubernetes Engine allows users to describe the compute, storage, and memory resources they would like to run their services then provisions the underlying resources. It’s easy to add and remove resources from a cluster using a command-line interface or a graphical user interface.

Kubernetes Engine runs containerized applications on a cluster of services. Containers are used to isolate compute processes and resources.

In the compute engine, VM runs on Guest operating systems and hypervisors whereas, In Kubernetes Engine Compute resources are isolated in containers, which are managed by the container manager and Host operating system. Please refer the following diagram for the references:

Physical Server

Kubernetes also monitors the health of servers in the cluster and automatically repairs problems, such as failed servers. Kubernetes Engine also supports autoscaling, so if the load on your applications increases, Kubernetes Engine will allocate additional resources.

App Engine

App Engine is a Platform-As-A-Services (PAAS) offering of GCP. It is a serverless computing which allows users to run their code in a computing environment that does not require setting up VMs or Kubernetes clusters. Users can create applications in a programming language such as Java, phyton, Node.js or Go. This code can be deployed in a serverless application environment.

There are two types of App Engine:

• Standard App Engine
• Flexible App Engine

Standard App Engine:

The standard environment, Application is isolated from the server’s operating system as well as from other applications running on that server.  The standard environment does not need operating system packages or other compiled software that would have to be installed along with the application code.

Flexible App Engine:

In the flexible environment, Users run Docker containers in the App Engine environment. The flexible environment needs libraries or other third-party software installed to run an application code.

App Engine offers several benefits.

Cloud Function

Google Cloud Functions is a lightweight serverless computing used for event-driven processing. Cloud Functions runs code in response to an event.  The Cloud Functions environment must be short-running code They are not designed to execute long-running code. 

Cloud Functions are used to call other services, such as third-party application programming interfaces (APIs) or other GCP services, like a natural language translation service.

The Compute resources enable you to calculate faster, run large in-memory databases, and build cloud‐native apps through cost-effective, scalable virtual machines running on Google infrastructure.