The Basics of Google Cloud Platform :
Products and services on the Google Cloud Platform, Qwiklabs info to practice hands-on Google Cloud
Google Cloud created innovative products and services that help business owners run and grow their businesses using cloud technology. On Google Cloud, developers can deploy and run applications faster and with ease.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Google Drive and G Suite. These products are built using cloud technology. It is easier to use because it’s built using cloud technology. It will give an overview to you that cloud technology helps us to make it easier.
Cloud-based solutions have taken the place of hardware-based solutions, which were not handling the entire process of scaling globally in the best way possible. Cloud-based tools can be accessed from any location, at any time, and with any device or operating system. Building applications for developers, for example, is simplified.
As a business owner, for accessibility, you can increase the productivity of your employees by utilizing cloud computing. Cloud computing provides users with unparalleled access to resources (data, applications, services, and so on) for work-related tasks while on the go.
In this article, I won’t talk about Google Drive and G Suite. I want to share with you my experience learning to use the Google Cloud platform with Qwiklabs.
Qwiklabs is a platform that lets you practice hands-on with real infrastructure through quests A quest in qwiklabs consists of 5–7 labs and each lab has a timer. I usually find Google’s guidance easy to follow. Some quests have a challenge lab at the end to demonstrate the skill, then you will get a badge to show the quest completed. You should find your solution in this challenge lab.
When I started learning about Google Cloud, I didn’t know what cloud computing technology was, or what the Google Cloud platform was. I also had no clue what for, and why a business owner or developer should consider using this platform. There were many questions in my mind. It might be you are too, so I’ll give you the high-level overview now.
Let’s start with defining Cloud Computing? This is a new trending technology. There are big companies that offer cloud computing services, such as Amazon with AWS, Google with Google Cloud, Microsoft with Azure, and Alibaba with Alibaba Cloud.
Cloud computing technology is the delivery of computing services over the Internet including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence. Cloud technology helps you to do your job faster and easier. There is no human intervention for using the resources (everything is self-service). You can access resources from anywhere in the world. You can get the resources rapidly. You only pay whatever you do and get the resources.
How can you use and interact with Google Cloud?
You can use either one of the Web Console, Google Command Line Interface (Cloud Shell), or Client Libraries (Google API). and Cloud Mobile App
Now that you know how to interact with Google Cloud, let’s discuss a few available services, including:
- Compute
- Serverless Services
- Cloud Storage (object storage)
- Databases
- Networking services
- Big Data
- AI and Machine Learning services
- Operations, CI/CD,Tools
Compute Services
GCP Compute services offer products such as Compute Engine that you can use to create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure, Google Kubernetes Engine to run containers on a managed platform or Cloud run.
“Cloud Run is a managed compute platform that enables you to run containers that are invocable via requests or events. Cloud Run is serverless: it abstracts away all infrastructure management, so you can focus on what matters most — building great applications”.(Google Cloud Documentation)
Serverless Services
For serverless, Google provides, App Engine to deploy applications on a managed platform or Cloud Functions to run event-based serverless code,
Object Storage and Databases
Most applications are only useful with data, so you must know how to store and manage that data. You’ll most likely want to store some media files, backups, or other file-like objects. Object Storage is almost similar to a file located on your computer but different. A file you store on Google cloud storage is an object that has an URL link and a globally unique name. You can create policies to manage access to the data. You also configure the location of your data, using multi-regional, regional, or zonal storage.
Next to Google Cloud Storage, there are alternative options to store and manage data on Google Cloud, including Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Firestore, and Google BigTable.
Networking Services
Google provides some products such as VPC Network, Network Services, Hybrid Connectivity, Network Security, Network Intelligence, and Network service Tiers.
The network services on Google Cloud help to make that easier, by providing a global network, load balancers, and DNS
Big Data
Data is very important for any business. Google Cloud provides solutions for fully managed, huge amounts, and faster data processing. That is google’s innovative technology to maintain the data for you.
You can also consider using serverless data services on Google Cloud. You can use serverless services for data analysis, batch and streaming data processing, and asynchronous messaging. The products that provide these services are Cloud DataFlow, Cloud Data BigTable, BigQuery, and Cloud Pub/Sub, and so on.
AI and Machine Learning
Do you realize the google products that you see and use every day such as Google Photos, YouTube, Google Search, and Google assistant include machine learning? Machine learning is one of the branches of Artificial Intelligence technology. The machine trains as a human brain work to learn. As a developer, you’ll most likely use TensorFlow, the open-source program to create machine learning programs. Additionally, Google Cloud provides Machine Learning APIs and AI platforms.
There are some Machine Learning APIs:
Speech-to-Text. Accurately convert speech into text using an API powered by Google’s AI technologies.
Cloud Natural Language API. Derive insights from unstructured text using Google machine learning.
(credit image: Google Cloud blog)
“Use AI Platform to train your machine learning models at scale, to host your trained model in the cloud, and to use your model to make predictions about new data”(Introduction AI Platform). Some examples are AI Platform for data labeling, Notebooks, Pipelines, Jobs, Models
Operations, CI/CD, Tools
After this short introduction to Google Cloud, I want to tell you more about hands-on learning with Qwiklabs. It is a very interactive and easy way to learn and understand how to use Google Cloud using real infrastructure, not a simulation. I feel very thankful to Google Cloud for creating this. It’s amazing.
Please see the picture below. If you finish a quest in Qwiklabs, you can earn badges.
My achievement in the certification of Specialization Architecting With Google Kubernetes Engine. Here I explore the fundamentals of Infrastructure GCP and how to use Kubernetes Engine for Foundations, Workload, and Production.
My experience to achieve The Specialization Architecting with Google Compute Engine here. I know about Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals and Google Cloud Infrastructure (Foundation, Services, Scaling, and Automation)
Summary
In this short article I provided you with a high-level view of cloud computing in general, and Google Cloud specifically. I also introduced you to Qwiklabs, which is a great way to get more hands-on experience with Google Cloud. I really liked learning with Qwiklabs, and I’m sure you will too!
Additional References:
Google Cloud Documentation
