Google Cloud Platform provides powerful tools and services. Why should you pay attention to one of the leading cloud service providers? More and more companies are moving to the cloud to help create software applications and manage data, and Google Cloud Platform is one of the many platforms available for cloud computing, an industry that is poised to break $159 billion in market value by 2020.
There are four basic options for creating applications on Google’s infrastructure:
- Google Compute Engine
- Google App Engine
- Google Kubernetes Engine
- Google Cloud Functions
What You Need to Know About Google Compute Engine
Google Compute engine lets you create instances. These instances are virtual machines with their own set of hardware and software. Basically, your personal instance, or VM, is a virtualized environment that sits on top of the very real partitioned environment on servers in a Google data center.
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS). As such, you’ll be able to control networking, firewalls, disk storage and a lot of granular aspects of how, when, where and why your application works.
The Essentials of Google App Engine
Google App Engine is a platform as a service (PaaS). You don’t have to worry about the infrastructure—this is taken care for you. Your project will scale as necessary according to your needs. Simply vendor your APIs, add custom code, load it into the app engine and voilá! You’ve got yourself a working Google Cloud application.
Simply set up billing, add some developers, put in a dash of code and you’ve got the gist of the full project arc for App Engine.
Google Kubernetes Engine: The Absolute Basics
Google Kubernetes Engine lets you create containerized applications with the open source Kubernetes. Containerized application management is just another way of talking about a kind of specialized VM management.
With containerized apps, you don’t need a full VM to launch distributed software applications. In other words, it’s a way to boost memory and efficiency by having multiple containers sitting on top of a single VM instance. It’s a relatively new way of developing applications.
Google Cloud Functions
Serverless applications aren’t without their dedicated service, either. For all your serverless application needs, Google Cloud Functions has got you covered.
Getting Started With Your First Project
Setting up your first project within Google Cloud Platform can be done with relative ease.
First, you’ll want to get an account with Google Cloud Platform if you haven’t already. This can be done in a few easy steps:
- Sign up with a Gmail account.
- Agree to the terms of service.
- Sign up for the free trial (one year of free membership and $300 credit toward your account).
- Enter your credit card information.
After you’ve completed those steps, you’ll be prompted to an in-browser tutorial. Don’t skip this. It’s an easy way to get oriented to the platform right off the bat. Follow the tutorial so you can get a feel for how the developer console is organized.
Creating Your First Project
Now it’s time to create your first project, add team members and enable billing. This is fairly straightforward, but it’s important to get acquainted with these pages, dashboards and controls early on.
To create a project, simply click on “create a new project,” then follow the prompts. Every Google Cloud Platform project needs a unique title so make sure you supply one or accept a generated one. Then scroll down to IAM policies. You’ll want to make sure you have the right privileges in place.
After you’ve gone through a few of the tutorials and created your first project, open up the hamburger menu in the upper left corner. When you expand the menu you’ll see a long list of services. App Engine, Compute Engine and Kubernetes should all be visible.
Conclusion
There are four major options when deciding to employ Google Cloud Platform: Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, the Kubernetes Engine and Google Cloud Functions. All are great options for starting your first cloud project.
Google Cloud Platform is a service that gives you access to cloud client libraries and enterprise-grade hardware. As more and more companies move to the cloud, and more and more data is produced, it’s important to start investigating which cloud solution is right for you.
With the Google Cloud Platform, you have many options, from building atop an infrastructure, a platform or building and managing containerized applications. What you choose to employ is completely up to you.
