Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure that provides a set of modular cloud-based services. These services include computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning.

GCP Services

• Data Storage (Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Memorystore, Cloud Filestore)
• Messaging Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub)
• Compute (App Engine, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Functions)
• Data Processing (Big Data).

Data Storage

• Disk storage:
  • Persistent Disk: disk storage that is attached to a virtual machine instance;
  • Filestore: network attached storage (NAS) that can be mounted on virtual machine instances;
• Cloud storage: BLOBs (Binary Large Objects);
• NoSQL:
  • Firestore;
  • Datastore;
• Relational:
  • SQL;
  • Spanner: relational database service with global consistency and horizontal scalability; 99.999% availability;
• Memory storage:
  • Memorystore;
  • Redis.

Pub/Sub

• Implementation of the Pub/Sub pattern;
• Pub/Sub is a fully-managed messaging service that allows you to send and receive messages between independent applications;
• Publishers send messages to a topic;
• Subscribers receive messages from a subscription.

Compute

• Compute Engine: virtual machines;
  • Different configurations (nr. of CPUs, RAM, etc.);
  • Regular (start/stop controlled by the user) or preemptible (short-lived, low-cost, can be terminated at any time by Google);
  • Groups of virtual machines can be created using instance groups for load balancing and auto-scaling;
• Cloud Functions: serverless computing;
• Containers:
  • Kubernetes Engine: managed Kubernetes cluster;
  • Cloud Run: serverless computing for containers;
• App Engine: serverless computing for web applications;

Event-driven serverless computing

• Execution of code in response to events, in multiple languages, with auto-scaling;
• The cost only depends on the number of executions and the execution time;
• Cloud Functions: serverless computing;
• The server is only active during the execution of the code (no idle time);
• Scalability is automatic, based on the number of executions;
  • Scaling is horizontal (more instances) and vertical (more resources per instance);
  • This is possible because the code is stateless (no session, no local storage).

Data Processing (Big Data)

• Artificial Intelligence:

  • Vision: image recognition;
  • Translate: text translation;

• Data Analytics:

  • BigTable: NoSQL database;
  • BigQuery: SQL database;
  • DataProc: Hadoop and Spark clusters;
  • Genomics: genomic data processing.

Web Console

The Google Cloud Platform Console is a web-based user interface that allows you to manage resources for your Google Cloud Platform projects.

Accounts and Projects

• Any user with a Google account can access the GCP console;
• A user can have multiple projects;
• The projects exist in an organization;
• A user can have multiple billing accounts;
• One project has one billing account, but one billing account can be used by multiple projects.

Budgets

• A billing account can zero or more budgets;
• A budget emits a notification when the budget is exceeded;
• A notification does not stop the billing, it just notifies the user.

Access Control

• Based on RBAC (Role-Based Access Control);
• A project can have multiple members, that can represent a user, a group or a service account;
  • A service account is used to provide programmatic access to the GCP resources - managed in the IAM & Admin section.
  • Service accounts have an email and one or more key pairs (public and private keys), generated by the GCP;
  • The application uses the private key to authenticate with the GCP, and access the resources defined in the service account permissions/roles.