This second chapter will focus on Google Cloud Platform fundamentals. We will describe all the core layers of Google Cloud, how they relate to each other, and their core components. We will find out the benefits of each Google Cloud layer and learn when to use them. We are going to cover the following main topics:
- Why Google Cloud Platform?
- Choosing the right cloud solution
- An overview of the core services offered by Google Cloud
- Management interfaces and command-line tools
Google and Google Cloud are well-known and established parts of the leading company Alphabet. You must have used Google’s products such as Gmail, YouTube, or the Google search engine at some point in time. But have you ever used Google Cloud Platform? You might be asking yourself the following questions:
- Why should I try it out?
- What is in it for me?
- Why should I learn another cloud when I have already learned the other ones?
- Is it worth investing the time in learning it?
We asked ourselves these questions as well, not only before studying for the certification but to also think about whether or not it is worth spending the time to be a Google Cloud expert.
Google 1 billion users experience
We mentioned Gmail, YouTube, and the Google search engine, Google Chrome, as some of the products that Google invented and that are used daily around the world. You might ask yourself why.
Google as a technological company faced tremendous growth and many challenges along the road. During this growth, Google engineers and Google products evolved, fixed many problems never tackled by anyone else, and constantly improved their products.
In 2004, Google invented the MapReduce programming model, which was inspired by Apache MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) filesystem. The Bigtable NoSQL database in 2006 inspired Apache HBase and Cassandra, as some of the best-known open source projects that were modeled after Bigtable. The Borg cluster controller in 2015, with the Omega scheduler, was announced in 2016, which became the open source project well known as Kubernetes.
To learn more about Google Cloud and its contribution to open source projects, you can visit the following link: https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud.
Monday, April 7, 2008, was the day when Google announced the preview release of Google App Engine, and this date is considered the beginning of Google Cloud. App Engine was a tool used to easily run their web applications on Google-grade infrastructure. Service became generally available in November 2011.