GCP Evolution since 2008

​

From the humble beginning back in 2008, with Google App Engine, now it has grown into one of the premier cloud computing platform in the market today. Presently competing with its top competitors, AWS and Microsoft Azure, Google has continued making investments into Google Cloud Platform to make attractive products for small, medium and enterprise level industries.

In the year 2008, Google has started with Google App Engine to capture the growing interest in web applications, a platform as a service cloud tool that facilitates web developers to develop and host their web applications on Google’s infrastructure. Google has eventually come up with various Infrastructure-as-a-service components and its storage layers. After adding products to handle DNS, Load balancing, monitoring and data analysis Google Cloud Platform was able to better compete with cloud market globally.

Google has a network of private cloud providers which can allow users to build hybrid cloud solutions, although primarily it is a public cloud provider. Google offers about the same core functionalities of AWS and Azure but where it really shines is in its big data tools, machine learning initiatives, and container support.

Google is a company that is advancing with the collection and leveraging of data. If an enterprise wants to experiment with data and are likely to work heavily with data, Google Cloud Platform may be a good option as Google's BigQuery and Dataflow bring strong analytics and processing capabilities. Google provides Cloud Machine Learning Engine and various other machine learning APIs, these tools make it easy for businesses to leverage artificial intelligence in the cloud.

As mentioned earlier, Google App Engine was the first foray of Google in the cloud services in the year 2008. Two years later, in 2010 Google added storage in its storage services. Further in 2012 the company began its partner program for the platform and then came the BigQuery, the Compute Engine, Cloud SQL and other tools which makes the Google Cloud Platform complete.

Because of its lack of support for some key programming languages, Google Cloud Platform met with criticism but later on  it added new features and support that make it a contender in the space.

Some of the key features of Google Cloud Platform are as follows:

1.Google recently started per-minute billing in which billings start with a minimum of 10-minute and bills per minute for the following time. It also provide sustained-use discounts, which begins after a particular instance is used for more than 25% of a month.

2.The Cloud Debugger of the Google Cloud Platform gives developers the option to assess and debug code in production where the developers can set a watchpoint on a line of code, and any time a server request hits that line of code, they will get all of the variables and parameters of that code.

3.This phenomenon help the users can quickly figure out the cause of a performance bottleneck with the help of Google’s Stackdriver Trace, which is a tracing system that collects latency data from your applications and displays it in the Google Cloud Platform Console and fix it.

4.The Google Cloud Platform offers two hosting options: App Engine, their Platform-as-a-Service and Compute Engine as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

The Cloud Platform also offers managed VM environments which includes auto-management of App Engine, with the flexibility of Compute Engine VMs.The users can also add third-party frameworks and libraries to their applications with the help of the managed VM environment.

5.There are two unique tools for big data processing and analysis on Google Cloud Platform. First, BigQuery allows users to run SQL-like queries on terabytes of data along with loading your data in bulk directly from your Google Cloud Storage.

The second tool is Google Cloud Dataflow which helps you to create, monitor, and glean insights from a data processing pipeline.

6.Testing and sending patches are maintained regularly by Google, but it also sets all virtual machines to live migrate away from maintenance. Migration of your running instance is done automatically by the Compute Engine. This process will impact guest performance to some extent but the instance remains online throughout the migration process. There are many factors on which the guest performance impact and duration depends on, but it is expected that most applications and workloads are not noticeable.

7.Cloud Platform HTTP Load Balancing was announced by Google in the month of June, which was used to balance the traffic of multiple compute instances across different geographic regions.The path between your users and your instances are optimized with the help of network proximity and backend capacity information which Google uses, and improves latency by connecting users to the closest Cloud Platform location. For example, if your instances in a region are under heavy load or become unreachable due to some region, HTTP load balancing directs new requests to your available instances in a nearby region intelligently.

​

​​

​